Why I Love Going to Work

From commuting to long working lunches to having real meetings with my team, the pandemic has made me realise how much I love my job – and how much I love the office.

I love going to work. Nine months ago this would have been an entirely bland statement. But these days it sounds like contrarianism. In a world where everyone has decided they want to work from home for four days a week forever, I don’t. I want to go into the office at least three days a week. And I want to do it because I really enjoy it.

Like most people, I did the early lockdown at home. I’m lucky enough to live in a good-sized house in the middle of nowhere. There’s no shortage of space. No arguments over sharing spare rooms or overhearing crackly, staticky Zoom calls. No neighbours. Still, I had a pretty representative WFH experience. Sitting in my shorts, admiring the best UK tan I’ve ever had. The kids and cats occasionally bouncing into my Zoom calls. Lunch with my family. It was fine.

But it didn’t feel like work – and, after a few weeks, I started craving the office. I missed it like a drug. As I looked out from my desk across the gorgeous picture postcard fields and woods of the Sussex High Weald, I found myself fantasising about trains into Charing Cross, hastily grabbed sandwiches at Pret, the walk along the Embankment in the diesel-tanged air. Five pound pints after work.

So, why is this? First of all, I love the contrast. I suspect that deep down, I’m a 1960s man. Work is work; home is home. Inevitably, smartphones have blurred this a bit. But I’m still pretty good at keeping the two separate. In the pre-pandemic world, if I’m honest, my home office was where I went to pretend to work - I really went there to hide from my young kids and shop online for things like vintage sports cars. It was basically a man cave with a bit of professional window dressing.

Next up, I actually like the commute. Now, I know a lot of people hate commuting and even describe it as life destroying. Pfft. If you hate your commute, you’re doing it wrong. When we moved out of London, I thought and bought strategically. We have a house on the far edge of the commuter belt so I always get a seat. I spend the journey reading the Times or FT or Economist for an hour (on paper, naturally, because we’re still in my 60s Mad Men fantasy here).

In fact, it’s not just me. In a famous 2001 study of commuting undertaken in the San Francisco Bay area, respondents said their ideal commute would be between 15 and 20 minutes; only one percent wanted no commute at all. Most people like some distance between work and home. The average British commute is just under an hour. For me, this is an ideal length of time to read, drink a coffee, mentally prepare for the day or decompress afterwards.

The rolling hills of East Sussex and Kent make for lousy reception and mean that I can’t be glued to my phone. Let’s hope 5G doesn’t change this. It’s me time and I love it.

I returned to work in July, as early as I possibly could. I haven’t forced anyone else to come back. And yet half my office staff have. Why? Because there’s a real camaraderie you only get from being together, even in a socially distanced room. You can’t replicate that on Zoom. Where a Zoom meeting leaves me irritable, headachy and grouchy, a real-life meeting has me energised and ready to conquer the world.

If I may wax sentimental for a moment, I sort of love my team too. It’s a hard truth for this cynic to admit, but all that stuff about teams I used to pooh-pooh... There’s something to it. Particularly when life is tough. When times are good, you’re (hopefully) working together towards a goal that’s greater than yourselves but it’s the sharing of adversity that really knits you together.

I even love the stuff that many people hate. I love wearing a suit or at least a nice shirt. Again, it’s because work is a thing. I put on a suit and I feel smart and businesslike. I feel better in meetings. I feel more professional managing my staff. If you want to work in sweatpants and flip flops, fine - I’m not judging. But I want to look like I could walk into an office like Don Draper.

We took some pretty big risks to reopen. By which I mean financial risks. When you’re spending tens of thousands of pounds kitting out your premises with glass screens and social distancing compliant seating, there is always the risk that, well.. the government will arbitrarily and pointlessly decide to send everyone home at 10pm (or to put London into Tier 2 as a monolithic block regardless of whether this makes any sense at all).

Even so, reopening has been pretty good. The venue looks incredible. The food is far tastier. And the cabaret is sexier and saucier. We have upped our game on every front. The first night of cabaret at our Embankment venue was fantastic. These days, I usually speak for a few seconds before the performance starts. Why? It’s not just because I have a big ego (although I do). It’s because I genuinely love my customers. Knowing that people are having a good time is hugely important. Let me entertain you.

We’ve been lucky so far as Friday and Saturday nights have been pretty much booked out. This is because we’re one of the few places you can still go for entertainment in the West End, because we’re food and cabaret.

If I may be allowed a gripe here, the broadsheets seem to overlook us as a venue because they don’t see cabaret as “proper” West End entertainment. The tabloids, by contrast, give us a lot more love. The public – right across the board – seem to agree with the red tops. I can’t count the number of people who’ve thanked me recently. I even had a gay couple tell me that I’d saved their marriage a few weeks ago. No, honestly, there’s something in my eye…

This has also made me realise how much we need entertainment. And how angry I am at the government for flippantly damaging so many businesses with its useless, poorly thought-through plans. There are so many brilliant venues in the West End and I desperately hope they survive. They’re run by great people who care far more about this country than the government.

But I’m an optimist. So hopefully we’re looking at a Biden victory in November, and Johnson’s wretched premiership comes to an end shortly afterwards. I can see the West End starting to come back to life but we must be both more competent and more pragmatic (this really shouldn’t be hard). I suspect the virus is going to be with us for years – but that we will learn to live to it.

But this is not really about the pandemic – it’s about the joy of work. Much as the UK workforce says it loves working from home, I think most of us will go back. Maybe, on average, we’ll do one day a week from home. Sure, plenty of jobs can be done from home, but they can be done better from offices for reasons ranging from the creativity of groups to the social side of things and mental health to naked self advancement.

Besides, I think that once many people get back, they’ll discover just how much they’ve missed the office. There’s a reason we’ve been working like this for over a century – and it’s not because mean companies force us to. We should all be looking forward to going back to work.