WFH is liberating not limiting

I have spent 10 years working from home, enjoying some time with clients in their offices, but mainly at my desk in our loft. By moving to Sussex when my children were small I created an automatic barrier to working in London as without help, it was impossible to be at my desk by 9am, look after three children, keep on top of the house, walk the dogs, do the shopping, even with a very hands-on husband, he was mainly out of the house from 6am.

So I chose to step back from full-time London based-work to focus on the children and was extremely lucky to be able keep my hand in with consulting roles which I could do part-time. With the pandemic, I was already a veteran home worker, with flexible hours already programmed in, so the only difference for me was that I no longer felt I had to apologise for working from home.

Fast forward to now, late 2023, and we are well into the flow of setting up Beyondable (mainly from home) and I feel very comfortable with a hybrid set up and very uncomfortable about discussions in the media around the drive to return many to working from the office. WFH has liberated many, many people. It has allowed an unconventional route to the workplace to become normalised and allowed many people to start to step back into a job without having to make huge changes in their life set-up. WFH is one of the key ingredient to getting a lost workforce back on board, it’s certainly been liberating for me.