I have had to go into the Melbourne CBD on a few occasions recently. The most efficient way for me to get there is by train. In the past, I would have had to get to the station carpark by 8 am at the latest, in order to get a park. (It’s a fair walk to the station.)

These days, it’s a veritable piece of cake: any day of the week, at any time of the day, it’s possible to get a park. On Mondays and Fridays, it only takes a few steps from the car to get to the platform and wait for the train.

(It’s just as well that the vote-Hoovering idea of Josh Frydenberg to enlarge and build multi-storey carparks at Melbourne’s train stations was spiked by the Labor government. At this rate, those paved paradises would simply be gathering dead leaves and dust.)

The overwhelmingly dominant reason for this changed state of affairs is the surge in the incidence of working from home (WFH). It’s clearly quite a thing in our precinct. With the availability of affordable technology as well as different workplace cultures, vast numbers of workers are sitting in front of their home computers, particularly on Mondays and Fridays.

Of course, not all these workers are diligently sitting in front of their computers all day doing their required work, making necessary calls and attending endless Zoom meetings. Let’s face it, it’s not that hard to skive off for part of the day – chores, coffee, a bit of a walk, a gym session, pick up the kids, put on dinner – anything but work.

So what does the research on WFH tell us? For relatively low-level tasks in which the employer can measure a worker’s output, it can be fine. There is less time wasted by the commute and as long as it’s possible and inexpensive to assess what a worker has achieved during the working week, it has something going for it – at least for a while.

It is interesting to note that prior to the pandemic, the incidence of WFH was very low, around 2 per cent. This proportion had not budged in many years notwithstanding the advent of facilitative and affordable technology. The almost universal expectation was that workers would front up at the workplace.

Of course, very many jobs do require a physical presence, in part because of the need for the provider of the service to be co-located with the receiver. The Productivity Commission has estimated that around two-thirds of occupations require a worker’s physical presence.

(This is an important point because it explains an understandable rise in resentment by some workers if their contemporaries are able to mooch around at home ‘working’, while they are under pressure at the coalface. Most health care professionals can’t work remotely, for instance. Baristas and hairdressers are other examples.)

As a result of the unjustified restrictions imposed during the Covid period – think here extended lockdowns, restricted travel and the like – the WFH dial was significantly adjusted almost overnight. Anyone who could work from home was doing it for the country, for their fellow citizens. No need to dress for work – just hang around in those comfy PJs all day. How good does it get?

(I do love that Covid-inspired advertisement – not sure what for – in which there is a senior woman attending a Zoom meeting.   The other attendees all call out: is that Ben from Accounts? as he hovers in the background. Our esteemed Speccie editor would have got a chuckle out of that.)

In fact, some workers have actually ended up dudding themselves by working from home. They have put in longer hours, so output went up, although productivity declined. Workers were also much less likely to receive any feedback, positive or negative, from their supervisors when working from home.

The real problems with WFH tend not to show up in the short term. It’s only over time when workers need to join teams, work collaboratively and indeed travel in order to progress that the real costs emerge. I’m sure most Speccie readers can’t conceive of their careers without almost constant interaction with colleagues as well as the joy of team-based camaraderie. It’s not really possible to build up connections with work colleagues on the computer screen.

Do you really think people are going to get fast-tracked or promoted if no one ever lays eyes on them? And let’s face it, work is not just about picking up the weekly paycheck.

The tragedy is that the WFH bug has been caught by lots of people in clear contrast with the relative lack of infectivity of Covid. It is now seen as an entitlement, an attitude supported by the tight labour market. Employers have been at their wit’s end about how to encourage workers to return to the office, realising that their power to insist on this outcome is in fact quite limited in many cases.

I heard of one case where a senior worker in a financial services firm bought a house two and half hours from the Melbourne CBD during the pandemic. He now insists on working entirely from home. He has a water-tight contract and he performs his tasks well enough. There is actually very little the employer can do to force him to attend the office.

It’s even worse in the public sector where Labor governments have effectively ceded control of work arrangements to the unions. All the recent public sector enterprise agreements include provision for almost unlimited WFH, with clauses indicating that refusal to allow this should be very rare.

It’s hard to see how working from home has done anything to productivity. Over the same period in which it is has flourished, productivity has actually gone backwards. It’s not productivity growth that has slowed; productivity has actually fallen.

As for all those businesses in the CBD that were reliant on a daily steady flow of worker-customers, it’s still very grim. A walk through the Melbourne CBD at lunchtime would allow repeated swinging of cats without fear of hitting anyone.

Commercial CBD real estate has also been hit for six. In the meantime, there are now fewer residents per dwelling as people seek Zoom rooms and the like to accommodate working from home. Forget an extra person or couple in the share house.

In other words, the implications of the trend to WFH go well beyond the impact on the individual worker and the employer. It looks like a brave new world but with many downsides.

And let’s face it, if you are working from Balwyn or Bondi, you could be working from Bangalore. Just think about it.