The Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Podcast
The Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Podcast
The changing location of work and how it influences workplace wellbeing
In this podcast Dr Helen Fitzhugh of the Evolve team speaks with Prof Alan Felstead, Emeritus Professor of the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research Methods and Data (WISERD) at Cardiff University. Alan offers insight into the changing location of work (remote, hybrid and more) and job quality. He draws on personal stories and almost 40 years of research in this area, as well as recently published research from the Skills and Employment Survey: a nationally representative sample surveys of individuals in employment aged 20-60 years old.
You can find the How Good is my Job quiz here:
How Good Is Your Job | Take the Quiz
Read Alan's work at:
https://wiserd.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/8.-Is-the-Office-Dying.pdf
Is job quality better or worse? Insights from quiz data collected before and after the pandemic
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:28:02
Helen Fitzhugh
Welcome to the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing podcast. This podcast is part of a toolkit of free, evidence informed workplace wellbeing resources provided by the Workplace Wellbeing Research team at the University of East Anglia in the UK. You can find the resources on www.EvolveWorkplaceWellbeing.org
00:00:28:04 - 00:00:52:10
Helen Fitzhugh
Hi, I'm Dr Helen Fitzhugh of the Workplace Wellbeing Research team at the University of East Anglia. In today's podcast, I'm speaking with Professor Alan Felstead, Emeritus Professor at Wales Institute of Social Economic Research and Data, or WISERD for short, at Cardiff University. Alan's research is focused on the world of work, and he'll be talking to us today about the changing location of work.
00:00:52:11 - 00:00:53:24
Helen Fitzhugh
Welcome Alan, it's lovely to have you.
00:00:54:01 - 00:00:55:00
Alan Felstead
Nice to be here.
00:00:55:02 - 00:01:03:16
Helen Fitzhugh
Thank you. Okay. Could you start off by telling us a little bit about your career journey and how your work relates to workplace wellbeing?
00:01:03:18 - 00:01:18:08
Alan Felstead
Well, I've kind of worked in this area for a long time. The world of work is my kind of broad area of work, and I've for my sins been working in that area for probably almost 40 years. Not quite. You can't see me on this podcast. If you do see a photo of me, please think that I look young!
00:01:18:08 - 00:01:35:12
Alan Felstead
It would be very nice if you did that. But. So I've been working in this area for a long time, and I use a load, a range of methodologies. Quantitative, so surveys, and also qualitative work. As I say, I'm not a one trick pony. Hopefully I'm not. Anyway. And my area is the world of work.
00:01:35:12 - 00:01:56:02
Alan Felstead
And one of the big themes, in that is job quality, and how that impacts wellbeing. And I would argue, actually, job quality is is a key determinant of wellbeing, how people feel, there are various elements to job quality, which I'm sure we'll get into, including, the location of work, which is one of my interests.
00:01:56:04 - 00:02:08:04
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah, absolutely. And you’ve also, been part of the How Good is my Job? quiz online as well haven’t you? Something that people can look up, if they want to go online and take part in that quiz.
00:02:08:06 - 00:02:26:21
Alan Felstead
Absolutely. Well, I mean, yeah, I didn't know you were going to ask that question. So thank you very much. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say about the Howgoodismyjob.com quiz I'll repeat that again. Howgoodismyjob.com - a bit like We buy any car.com . We've not got the same kind of jingle, but we're working on it.
00:02:26:23 - 00:02:53:16
Alan Felstead
But the good thing about that is it, it popularizes or tries to popularize, survey work. Survey work, which I do over many years is very expensive to carry out. And it's, it's, it's periodic, so it's not that frequent because it's very expensive to carry out. And even when we do relatively large sample sizes, we're talking 3 or 4000.
00:02:53:18 - 00:03:23:11
Alan Felstead
The good thing about the how good is my job.com quiz is it allows us to take a subset, a small subset of those questions that we ask regularly about job quality to a much wider group of people, and to popularize it in a quiz. So the idea is that people can take part in this fun quiz. We're trying to be fun for a short length of time, takes a maximum of five minutes, and it allows them to compare themselves with, other jobs, similar jobs to theirs and the national average.
00:03:23:13 - 00:03:46:19
Alan Felstead
And in that way, we engage a much wider population than we can do using surveys or, the number of people we can reach, dare I say it, through podcasts like these? Oh, or seminars or conferences, which we do. We can reach many people. And so far, the figure at the moment is 150,000 people have taken part.
00:03:46:21 - 00:03:48:04
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah.
00:03:48:06 - 00:04:15:10
Alan Felstead
So yeah, you you allowed me to kind of trumpet that particular feature of my work. But I, I'm very proud of that particular feature because I do think it takes academic work, popularizes it and, and more mainstreams it and makes it something that's engaging, exciting and actually useful for both employers (employers can use it). And again, HRs managers listening to this might want to look at it, in terms of engaging.
00:04:15:13 - 00:04:37:21
Alan Felstead
They're taking the questions maybe for the surveys they might carry out themselves. And it's also been used by trade unions in terms of drumming up interest in joining a trade union. And also, dare I say, we have used the data, to paint picked particular pictures of occupational groups, which is always difficult because we often don't have the sample size.
00:04:37:23 - 00:04:52:15
Alan Felstead
But, you know, with 150,000. Yeah, we have a lot of cells, we have a lot of sample. We don't have many, as many questions as we do on regular surveys, but we have a lot of people giving us a lot of detail about the jobs they do.
00:04:52:19 - 00:05:15:21
Helen Fitzhugh
That's lovely to hear about, and I'm really glad we've given you the opportunity to talk about it, because it's that sense of, how research can really influence and be in contact with real life practice. And I think that's a good example of it. So I couldn't let it pass without mentioning that as well. But you said also that, you know, you've been working in this area for for almost 40 years.
00:05:16:02 - 00:05:22:01
Helen Fitzhugh
So tell me a little bit about why you're so passionate about job quality and the location of work.
00:05:22:03 - 00:05:45:04
Alan Felstead
Well, I think the location of work particularly I'm interested in and it it's born out of a realization that homeworking is something that, has been going on for many, many years. In fact, for centuries. This was brought home to me, when I was young, a lot younger than I am now, with my granddad taking deliveries of massive rolls of leather.
00:05:45:06 - 00:06:04:21
Alan Felstead
These rolls of leather would arrive at his home, delivered by an employer, a boot and shoe manufacturer in Leicester. These big rolls of leather were taken up to his his spare bedroom, front room, it was actually I remember it's small, small box room. I think we'd call them nowadays. That he converted into a small workshop.
00:06:04:23 - 00:06:32:23
Alan Felstead
So on a special bench, he had these amazingly sharp tools. He had patterns on the wall. I don't mean wallpaper patterns, I mean patterns to cut out the, the the uppers on shoes. And he would then carefully cut out the, parts of shoes using patterns and using these incredibly sharp knives. And then every week, the employer would come and collect the cut out patterns for shoe making.
00:06:33:00 - 00:06:52:07
Alan Felstead
So that's one thing. And it just it was a very, very vivid memory of mine, of an industrial homeworker we'd call them, somebody in manufacturing, doing work at home, what's called in the clothing and boot, shoe traders: out work. That's what it was called. Home work was called out work, literally. It was work that was outside the factory.
00:06:52:08 - 00:07:19:02
Alan Felstead
It's called out work. Also my mother in law, she had she was a post machinist. Now a post machinist, machinist, is somebody who has a machine on a post. The machine is on a post because it is used to, stitch the, uppers, the upper leather uppers onto the soles of shoes. So my granddad and my mother in law weren't working for the same employer, but they were doing different parts of the same manufacturing process.
00:07:19:04 - 00:07:44:13
Alan Felstead
And she had this post machine in the middle of her living room and and the important thing of this. So I did then do research on homeworking in the late 1990s. I wrote on that, but it was homeworking not in the way we'd consider it today. Yeah, in 2025, but it was certainly going on in the late 1990s and has been going on for centuries before.
00:07:44:15 - 00:08:08:22
Alan Felstead
And I think this is something that's often forgotten in the literature that homeworking has changed its form hugely. And I used to say it had mutated when we often talked about mutations in the Covid pandemic, but actually as a form of work, it has mutated in the sense what it means now is not what it meant 30, 40 years ago, 30, 40 years ago.
00:08:08:22 - 00:08:33:02
Alan Felstead
You'd have thought of my mother in law, my granddad, and a whole host of other, industries. Nowadays it is, of course, thought of as office work. And that's because of the, the fact that homeworking, a hybrid working, has become kind of very, very common. And I daresay many people listening to this podcast might indeed be working at home when they're listening to this podcast.
00:08:33:02 - 00:08:49:14
Alan Felstead
Or maybe on the way back from from the office, in the car indeed. So. So my kind of passion in this area has is is a long one and long standing and goes back to those industrial form of home workers, which are very different to the home workers we think of today.
00:08:49:16 - 00:09:05:01
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah, that's really interesting. And also, I know that you're very careful about the words you used when you talk about working at home. So, you know, you care deeply about that. So tell us a little bit about why words are important in this context.
00:09:05:03 - 00:09:35:15
Alan Felstead
Right. Well I think why words are important is that the thing with homeworking is it's, I think is conceptually distinctive in that as a form of work, it's the only form of work where work and home take place in the same place, in the same physical place, mostly we've gone out to work and we come back home, and there's often a commute in between those two spaces, but they are separate spaces and they are kept separate.
00:09:35:17 - 00:10:05:23
Alan Felstead
That's not the case for homeworking, because it happens within the boundaries of the home. It's conceptually distinctive. The issue I have, and my greatest bugbear is people often talk about working from home and journalists and even academics who probably should know better, in my opinion, use the term working from home when if you think about the word from as a very different connotation to the word at, the word from means I'm using probably I'm working from home.
00:10:05:23 - 00:10:28:13
Alan Felstead
So I'm using my home as a base. Now for some people, so for example, you think about mobile plumbers, decorators, a whole host of people like that, they actually will work from home. They probably often work in other people's homes, but they don't work at home. Whereas many people listening to this podcast are probably working at home, not actually using their home as a base.
00:10:28:15 - 00:10:46:08
Alan Felstead
So I think it's a very important to make that distinction between at and from, because for me, the importance is the conflation of those two spaces is greatest when we're working at home, when we're working from home, we might be working some of the time at home, but actually other times outside of the home.
00:10:46:10 - 00:10:48:01
Helen Fitzhugh
So you still got that separation.
00:10:48:01 - 00:11:15:18
Alan Felstead
You've still got the separation. Exactly. So you're working from home and you, but you're working somewhere else. It's the separation that's important. And that's why the word ‘at’, I think, conjures up that, that co-location of activities in a single space, which is distinctive. And the industrial revolution separated those two from many people, not all, because there are through centuries people have worked at home, but for many people there was a separation of those two things.
00:11:15:20 - 00:11:36:17
Alan Felstead
And we're witnessing now those co-locations of those two previously separate, activities, social activities, and therefore the difficulties that people face having to conjure with a balance, working in the same space as carrying out kind of domestic activities.
00:11:36:19 - 00:11:54:02
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah absolutely. I think you've found out a little bit more about this lately in, the Skills and Employment Survey. That's a survey that's happened a number of times. And you've led that for it for a few years now. Could you tell us a little bit about that and what you found.
00:11:54:04 - 00:12:23:09
Alan Felstead
For a number of years since 2001. And since 2001, there have been five, surveys in the Skills in Employment Survey. There's been a total of eight in the, in the series itself. But we only started asking questions about location of work in, 2001. And we've asked the same questions, since that time, we asked questions that allow us to look at this, co-location and allow us to identify those who are homeworkers.
00:12:23:11 - 00:12:46:19
Alan Felstead
By home workers, I mean those who work almost exclusively at home. We can't say exclusively, exclusively using our data, but we can get a good sense of it's almost exclusive. So why? Why do I say that? We asked questions about people where people mainly work and the options are the number of options. One is at home. So if they say works mainly at home, well that's useful.
00:12:46:19 - 00:13:14:09
Alan Felstead
That's incredibly useful to know. We then ask another question do you work anywhere else now? Of course, a lot of people work at home, but also work in the office as well. So we use that question to pick up those who, hybrid workers. So they work at home, but also in the office that we pick up hybrid workers, those who work mainly at home, but also and also report the only work at home in the last week, we designate as home workers.
00:13:14:09 - 00:13:39:04
Alan Felstead
So we got a good sense that they are people that actually only work at home versus those that work on a hybrid basis. So using those two questions, we can kind of plot how things have changed over the last 20 years, 20 plus years, and we find some, not surprisingly, that's been a a big increase in the numbers home working and the numbers working, hybrid working.
00:13:39:06 - 00:14:09:24
Alan Felstead
So homeworking rose from 3% in 2001 to 13% in 2024. So an increase of, you know, 10% while, hybrid working rose from 5% to 21%. So as a totality, we have about 34%, a third of the workforce who are actually using the home to some extent as a place of work, and that's a massive change. And it's a huge change over the last, 20 years.
00:14:09:24 - 00:14:29:08
Alan Felstead
And it's also a change that pre-dates the pandemic because people often think it's the pandemic. It's the pandemic. It's the pandemic. Well, yes, that has accelerated things, but it's not… It was going on before the pandemic. This change has been going on long before the pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated a long running change.
00:14:29:10 - 00:14:49:09
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah, absolutely. And it's really, really interesting figures. Like you say, it's a massive change. And and I agree absolutely is. But also there's a lot of people who aren't working at all at home. And I think sometimes when we've talked about journalism earlier, you know, that idea that actually everyone's moved to some kind of hybrid role, that's not the case, is it?
00:14:49:11 - 00:14:56:09
Helen Fitzhugh
It's really different across sectors and across, you know, what you might actually be doing and the tools you might be working with.
00:14:56:11 - 00:15:22:24
Alan Felstead
Absolutely. I mean, that's absolutely true. So there's a big change, but it's a big change for some people. But not all people. There are many people who can't work at home. Will never be able to work at home. That's absolutely true. The other thing we show in the recent data is that the people that are working at home, the 34%, if you look at them, who are they, who's benefiting most, it tends to be those in the higher occupational groups.
00:15:23:01 - 00:15:41:06
Alan Felstead
Not those in the lower occupational groups. Again, because of the jobs, are not amenable to working at home. So again, dare I say a lot of people on this call, I'm sorry, but you're in the higher occupational groups. Almost certainly had experience of maybe even doing it yourself. Working at home, working on a hybrid basis.
00:15:41:10 - 00:15:55:21
Alan Felstead
I could almost bet almost everybody on this podcast falls into that category. But you also find that those, those 34% tend to be among the higher paid, relatively, so they're among the better off.
00:15:55:23 - 00:15:56:21
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah.
00:15:56:23 - 00:16:19:18
Alan Felstead
It's something that's benefited the better off, not the worst off. So that's another thing I think is important to bear in mind with this great interest in working at home, that compared to the past, my granddad, and, and by, my mother in law, who were not highly paid, this is now kind of a like, kind of a refuge of the higher paid and more privileged.
00:16:19:20 - 00:16:43:22
Alan Felstead
And it goes further than that in terms of the other aspect I'm interested in is, okay, we know we've got greater certainty about the fact that work is being done in the home. So it's moving back into the home, kind of, you might say, but where in the home is it happening? Are people able to carve out these spaces that look like offices but aren't, in the home?
00:16:44:01 - 00:17:06:12
Alan Felstead
To what extent they're able to carve out a home office? And I don't know whether many of you might have seen you probably have TV adverts by Sharps, the furniture makers and Hammonds, the furniture makers. Keep your eyes peeled. They're adverts for furniture in bedrooms and, living rooms and so forth. But if you look carefully, they're also promoting home offices.
00:17:06:14 - 00:17:07:01
Helen Fitzhugh
Okay.
00:17:07:05 - 00:17:43:11
Alan Felstead
You look at the, the Sharps adverts. They're looking at home offices. So there's a market manufacturers are cottoning onto the the boom in home offices. Yeah. Further than that, moreover, there is also a movement to, making the shed an office. A shed is also an office. And you will see, newspaper headlines and even adverts promoting the uses of sheds as offices because sheds can be put up with no planning permission nowadays, they can be heated, lighted, lighting, they're quite sophisticated and very plush, venues.
00:17:43:11 - 00:17:57:24
Alan Felstead
And the garden is a space where you can, if you've got a garden of course, you could put a home office and there's a movement that is called ‘Shoffices’. So a play on the idea of a shed, an office. So there's an increase in Shoffices..
00:17:58:00 - 00:17:58:06
Helen Fitzhugh
I haven’t heard that word!
00:17:58:06 - 00:18:03:00
Alan Felstead
Look carefully on newspaper headlines. You will see some shoffices.
00:18:03:00 - 00:18:04:06
Helen Fitzhugh
Okay.
00:18:04:08 - 00:18:27:07
Alan Felstead
But anyway. So, but but I'm, I'm interested in that kind of. Can people then recreate, an office environment? Within the home. And many people can. And again, if you look at who can and who can't, you tend to find what a surprise. It's those who are more resourced, better resourced, living in better houses, bigger houses.
00:18:27:08 - 00:18:53:20
Alan Felstead
Yeah. Are able to carve out spaces. Don't have children. You know, again, we can of course understand why. But and I think this is a lesson I would say for HR managers. It's, it's I'm, I'm sure many on the podcast might be managing people who are hybrid workers, homeworkers indeed as well. And it's knowing a bit about their home life and their home circumstance.
00:18:53:22 - 00:19:16:11
Alan Felstead
As good managers, I'm sure good managers do, but it's important that managers do know a little bit more. Probably, not to be intrusive, but it will make a difference to performance. If you're kind of on the sofa trying to kind of do emails, or in the kitchen while you're making the tea, as opposed to an office where you can have, a bit of peace and quiet.
00:19:16:15 - 00:19:39:06
Alan Felstead
There might be more disturbances for those of your workers who are having to… don't have the space, and have maybe children as well, to cater for at the same time. So it's I think HR managers need a greater understanding of that, the home life. Because if people are working in the home, the home life is going to spill over to some extent into the work life.
00:19:39:06 - 00:19:45:19
Alan Felstead
So there needs to be a greater understanding of that. And, recognition of the difficulties some people might face.
00:19:45:21 - 00:20:17:14
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah. During the pandemic, I think, someone we were working with was working off a, an ironing board, the laptop on an ironing board. So, yeah, I think there's lots of different examples. We've all heard of them. Is that, is that the best ergonomic use of space? Maybe the ironing board was because it got it, you know, it was adjustable for height, which is more than most desk are, but, I mean, it sort of leads me into the idea of, you know, if you've got any more examples of where people are working and kind of the implications of that.
00:20:17:16 - 00:20:46:23
Alan Felstead
Well, the implications as well, or, I mean, the some of the implications are for, you know, the word productivity is often mentioned in political discourse and is often talked about and there is evidence to suggest that those who have home offices are probably not unsurprisingly, the data suggests, more productive because they can shut out of it, can shut out the the household noise, and be more productive as a result because they are less likely to be interrupted, because they could literally shut the door.
00:20:47:03 - 00:21:07:21
Alan Felstead
But not everybody has that. That's the problem. Not everybody has that ability to carve out those spaces, and it does tend to be those who are better off. So the the results of the skills and employment survey suggests two things. One, those who are more resourced and better off are most likely or more likely to be working home, have the ability to work home.
00:21:07:21 - 00:21:30:05
Alan Felstead
So that affecting them, the more privileged in the labor market and when they do work at home again, among those groups, it's the most privileged that seem to be able to get access to the better working conditions, effectively able to kind of shut off the the household disturbances much more and therefore be more productive. So I think, again, get back to the message for, managers.
00:21:30:05 - 00:21:41:09
Alan Felstead
It's it's a recognition of not everyone can do that. Yeah. And a recognition of therefore to cut them a bit of slack to some extent if they're in that particular situation.
00:21:41:11 - 00:21:49:03
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah. And there's a, you know, there's a very strong equality diversity and inclusion implication there isn't there to take into account.
00:21:49:05 - 00:22:09:08
Alan Felstead
Absolutely. But the the interesting thing, when you look at the data in terms of access to home offices, at first look it looks as though it's gendered. So the, the, the men are more likely to be working in home offices than women. Women are more likely to be working on the kitchen table, on the sofa, the dining room.
00:22:09:10 - 00:22:24:24
Alan Felstead
Know, having to make do. Yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that when you scratch the surface. So in the data, when we've kind of looked at the data, what seems to make a difference is not gender per say. It's actually the contribution you make to the household income.
00:22:25:01 - 00:22:25:16
Helen Fitzhugh
Right.
00:22:25:19 - 00:22:49:11
Alan Felstead
And that that when that's factored in that's the strongest factor. So it's not gender per se, it’s contribution to household income. And unfortunately men are still better paid the women. And that's probably one of the drivers for that. But one thing we don't know enough about is about the household dynamics. You know, what about the power dynamics within the household?
00:22:49:15 - 00:23:10:18
Alan Felstead
What difference does that make to the allocation of space within the house? Yeah. So just as a gap is the gap in our knowledge, basically, but the kind of, if you look at the statistics at first, that first look, you think it's a gender story. It's not quite a gender story because we've got underlying that, the, the, income income inequality.
00:23:10:20 - 00:23:19:16
Alan Felstead
Yeah. So, so maybe as, as income becomes more equal between the sexes, we'll see that. We'll see that change.
00:23:19:18 - 00:23:35:02
Helen Fitzhugh
It fascinates me from the point of view of reproducing a hierarchy you might find in a conventional office space into the home, you know, you're afforded more space, you've got a nicer window, you know, things like that. Really interesting that that's being translated into a home space.
00:23:35:04 - 00:23:53:14
Alan Felstead
Yeah. Exactly. Well, yeah. So that, that that's one thing, we don't know about whether they've got a nice window or not. Are we, we don't know. The other thing we don't know from our data is is, you know, what kind of equipment people are working with, you know, is it ergonomically designed well or not?
00:23:53:16 - 00:24:21:00
Alan Felstead
We do know from research that those working in inappropriate places. So in the kitchen, on the dining room table, suffer greater muscular difficulties? There's definitely evidence of that. So it does have consequences for their physical, and probably also emotional and mental wellbeing. So we do know that, so managers also need to know that I think, yeah.
00:24:21:01 - 00:24:33:21
Alan Felstead
Again, where they're working out duty of care for their workers if they're working at home. So again, this where you're working is important for that duty of care aspect as well as well as the performance aspect that we talked about earlier.
00:24:33:23 - 00:24:48:03
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah. And that starts taking us into this idea of what will happen. What are the challenges for doing this kind of working at home long term? You know what? What are the things going into the future we should really be being aware of?
00:24:48:05 - 00:25:05:10
Alan Felstead
Well, I think it's it's here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. I often say that I tend to say that during pantomime season, but I'll say it. I'll say it now. Even. The genie is out of the bottle. Many people, there are many new people are working at home for the first time because of the pandemic.
00:25:05:15 - 00:25:31:05
Alan Felstead
There are high profile examples of employers insisting their workers come back to the office. But actually, the evidence suggests that that's a trickle. It's not an avalanche of people going back. They're very loud, it hits the headlines. But even when you look at those, calling for their workers, go back the office, it tends to be not wholly back to the office, but on a kind of partly back to the office situation.
00:25:31:05 - 00:25:55:07
Alan Felstead
So, you know, hybrid is the way forward. Basically the best of both worlds, I think, would be the way forward so that homeworkers aren't kind of isolated. They're connected, particularly onboard, onboarding newcomers as well is incredibly important. Those who are new to the organization, it's very difficult for them to be exclusively work at home. They do need others around them.
00:25:55:09 - 00:26:17:12
Alan Felstead
And so they do need hybrid workers coming in to, so they can learn the tricks of the trade, the old timers. It's much easier for them because they know who to go to, what to do, how things work. But for newcomers, it's much more difficult. So another lesson for, employers is that the newcomers need to be treated much more differently.
00:26:17:14 - 00:26:30:16
Alan Felstead
They need that you have a duty of care towards them in terms of getting them, embedding them within the organization. And again, that's probably why hybrid working is the way forward. Yeah. I really do think that's the way forward. And the evidence suggests that.
00:26:30:18 - 00:26:37:23
Helen Fitzhugh
And that's been racking up since the days of calling it telecommuting and things like that, hasn’t it? It's not just new evidence.
00:26:38:00 - 00:27:00:02
Alan Felstead
Yeah. Well, I exactly. And you mentioned another word, telecommuting. I must admit, that's one of my pet hates, as well. Sorry about that, Helen. But anyway, why I don't like that? I don't like that. Because there's a sense in which it's technologically determined, and I don't. These things aren't technologically determined. It's helped. It's facilitated, but it's not technologically determined.
00:27:00:04 - 00:27:08:06
Alan Felstead
It's certainly facilitated, no doubt about that. But it's not technologically determined. So I'm kind of…
00:27:08:08 - 00:27:10:13
Helen Fitzhugh
Well we’ve moved on from it. No one's talking about it anymore.
00:27:10:15 - 00:27:28:03
Alan Felstead
It’s an old… I mean, people still, it is still in the literature tele. Really? Well, the word tele means kind of remote, I mean, and again, that's a different thing. Remote can be doesn't have to be in the office, at at home. This is why the ‘at’ home thing is so important for me, because it's that conflation of two.
00:27:28:03 - 00:27:38:19
Alan Felstead
The two worlds. Rather than tele can mean in a coffee shop, in a library, you know, in a whole variety of spaces, which isn't the home or isn't the office, but somewhere it's a third space.
00:27:39:00 - 00:27:56:04
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah. So it has. Yeah. Other, other characteristics as well. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I think we've covered quite a lot of ground Alan. But if the listener only takes one simple message from what we've talked about today, what would you want that to be?
00:27:56:06 - 00:28:21:08
Alan Felstead
I think the simple message is for your managers to, to be very aware that people, when they're working at home are working. Obviously, they're working in their own home environment, and it's a greater awareness of those stresses and strains that face, those working at home that are kind of there, day in, day out, because they're working in the same, same space as actually, their home.
00:28:21:10 - 00:28:40:24
Alan Felstead
So, greater awareness of the difficulties they face in particular, and, again not to be intrusive, but it's the fact of a greater understanding of how they might be best managed and the fact that, you know, that they might be working from, the corner of a sofa. Often you can't see on a screen where people are working.
00:28:40:24 - 00:29:00:16
Alan Felstead
And that's the other thing I when you look at screens, people can disguise screens. You can have all these filters on. So you don't necessarily even, kind of, you don't necessarily know where people are working because their, their, their space. Sometimes people disguise where they're working. Yeah. With with their filters on their teams interface.
00:29:00:16 - 00:29:04:24
Alan Felstead
So it's greater awareness of knowing what's behind the screen.
00:29:05:01 - 00:29:24:24
Helen Fitzhugh
Yeah. And fulfilling that duty of care as an employer in that situation. Yeah. Okay. Lovely. Well, thank you very much for speaking with us today. And, I know that you have a report that we can link to in the blurb for this podcast. So if anyone wants to explore Alan's work more, please do go and have a look at that.
00:29:24:24 - 00:29:30:22
Helen Fitzhugh
But for today, I just want to say thank you very much for contributing to our podcast. It's been lovely to speak with you.
00:29:30:24 - 00:29:34:06
Alan Felstead
Thank you very much.
00:29:34:08 - 00:29:45:04
Helen Fitzhugh
Please do visit www.EvolveWorkplaceWellbeing.org. We look forward to seeing you next time.
