JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Yes, I'm a WFH hypocrite but I've earned the right to throw stones at entitled civil servants

Published: 20:05, 13 August 2026 | Updated: 20:05, 13 August 2026 As I write this, I am dressed for the beach. On seeing the blue skies from the kitchen window at 7am, I decided to wear a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops to the office. This office is a mere ten paces from the kitchen. It’s remarkably convenient. When I need a screen break, I sometimes pick up one of the guitars I keep in there. Other times, when the sun is out, I repair to the garden with a cup of mint tea. Next door’s cat often comes to say hello. You probably wonder how I cope with the grind. I miss the morning commute like a dog misses fleas. The same is true of the queues at Caffe Nero, munching overpriced pasta salads with a wooden fork at my desk and the wretched half hour gap between downing tools in Glasgow city centre and flopping on the sofa at home. Nowadays that gap is around 20 seconds. A study from the Resolution Foundation suggested this week that people who work from home are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness. ‘Lonely’ is not a word I’d use to describe my present working conditions. I’d plump for ‘peaceful’ or ‘uninterrupted’. And I’d enthuse about my ‘controlled environment’. Oh, the sheer luxury of regulating room temperature and noise levels here in my own private office sanctuary without seeking the blessing of work colleagues. It is a wonderful freedom. At long last I’m in charge. But there is a price to be paid for the arrangements which suit a chap of a certain age as admirably as they do and, in my case, I fear that price may amount to hypocrisy. You see, my position is there are far too many people in our land leading working lives which bear much too close a resemblance to my own. A study from the Resolution Foundation suggested this week that people who work from home are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness By January there was an attendance rate of 12.2 per cent among core staff at the Scottish Government's Victoria Quay in Edinburgh I suggest they should get off their lazy behinds and show up in their real office. I think they need to sharpen up their ideas on the meaning of work, on the discipline of attendance and the organisational and production benefits of teams engaged in the same task being under one roof rather than scattered to the winds. I also think I’m fine at home in my shorts and flip-flops, thanks. I’d go as far as to say that some of them should be shamed back to work. Indeed, I intend to do a bit of this here a little later on. Town centres are dying because, post-Covid, they are losing the business of workers who consider it an employment right to do their job from home. Don’t point the finger at me, though. I should get a pass. What I am arguing may appear the very definition of double standards – that people should do as I say and not as I do. But bear with me. At least hear the case for the defence. I spent more than 30 years working in newspaper offices and can only work at home today because of what I learned during these decades – and crucially, where I learned it. I discovered how to work under pressure, how to communicate with senior colleagues, how to navigate office politics and how to be a team player. I came to understand why co-workers operate in close proximity even in an age of telephones and, later, emails, later still, video calls. They get the job done more efficiently. There is a sense of shared purpose – a bond forged through striving to achieve results together. But it goes deeper than efficiency. An office teaches you skills you could never learn at home – skills which, in my submission, are increasingly absent among younger workers. Office life teaches you how to read a room. It teaches you diplomacy – and to recognise the times when it is best to shut up and listen and the other times when it is important that you have something to say. It is in the office environment that we learn, hopefully early in our career journeys, how to take criticism and to know the difference between the kind that is constructive (in my experience, it almost always was) and the kind that is vindictive. Back in the early days, busy people with deadlines to meet and 25 other staff to manage took the time to explain how my work might be improved. There might have been a certain frankness in their tone, but their intentions were entirely free from malice. Face-to-face conversations help us see that. Remove that element and workplace communication curdles. A blunt email from a manager doesn’t read like helpful advice when you are sitting alone in a silent flat. It reads more like a prelude to the P45. Hiding away at home, younger generations are losing the sense of proportion, the professional resilience required to survive in a serious career. No less importantly, they are losing years of unofficial mentoring. For the most part, it is not through the rollockings from bosses that we learn how to get better at our jobs. It is from watching people who are already highly skilled in them – absorbing and adopting their methods. I would be nowhere in my trade without the years spent listening in to senior colleagues conducting telephone interviews two seats away in the newsroom. I would be nowhere, too, if it had ever crossed my mind during my career’s formative years to insist on working from home. I hesitate to say I would have been shown the door immediately. The editor’s laughter would have to subside first. Compare and contrast with the 9,000 Scottish Government civil servants who last October were asked to try to make sure that at least 40 per cent of their contracted hours were spent in the office – which, after all, is their place of employment. The figures for staff complying with the directive were so embarrassingly low that the Scottish Government stopped publishing them after four months. By January there was an attendance rate of 12.2 per cent among core staff at Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. By last month we were being told that the hybrid working policy was a contributory factor in declining staff morale. Farcically, some workers miffed at the notion of having to drag themselves out of their homes and into their offices denounced the directive as an ‘attack on human rights’. The sense of entitlement of this disparate crew – entirely funded by the taxpayer – is simply jaw-dropping. One cannot help thinking that, if they had spent any reasonable time in offices before concluding they deserved to be spared the obligation to show up in them, they would moderate their hysteria. The other jaw-dropping thing, you may yet decide, is my hypocrisy. Well, I acknowledge that the home office I throw stones from is, metaphorically at least, a glass house. But I am entering my career’s late autumn and through almost all of it thus far I have reported for duty at the appointed hour and place five days a week. I have done my bit, weathered countless workplace challenges and poured untold sums of my hard-earned into the city centre sandwich economy. Call me a hypocrite if you must. Perhaps I’ve earned the right to be one.