London – empty on a Friday?

Workers in London have been slower to return to the office than those in other global cities, a report released this week by the thinktank Centre for Cities has found.

London was at the bottom of the six cities in which the thinktank questioned both employees and employers (the others being Paris, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Toronto).  In London and Toronto, workers spend an average of 2.7 days a week in the office, with Paris topping the pile at 3.5 days a week (lots of nice cafés in Paris aren’t there).  London has seen a rise over the last year of half a day a week, with the average worker visiting The Big Smoke for 2.2 days a week a year ago.

Using the ever-popular and almost compulsory comparison these days, workers on average were in the office for 4 days a week prior to the Covid pandemic in all of the cities surveyed, except for Singapore, which has seen its rate remain unchanged at just over 3 days a week.  All of these figures were based on those working a five-day week.

Drilling down into the results in London, most workers are shunning a trip to the office on Friday, with the city being the emptiest on those days.  Our capital was also the only city of the six where younger workers came in to the office more often than their senior colleagues, the report found. People in their 20s are in the office three days a week, on average, while those over 35 go in for two-and-a-half days.

“In London, a quarter of workers come into the office just one or two days – that’s the most of any city,” said Rob Johnson, an analyst at the thinktank and the author of the report. “So you’ve got quite a lot of workers who are quite tenuously linked to their offices. London’s offices on a Friday are the emptiest of all the cities and we see the sharpest drop from the midweek average. And London’s midweek average is relatively low.”

You might not be surprised to read that travel costs are more of a barrier to office working in London than in any other city, the report said.  It recommended that Transport for London should resume and extend its off-peak Fridays policy to reduce travel costs.  An annual season ticket from Reading to Paddington for example is £5,600 a year, with Cambridge to Liverpool Street costing just under £7,000 a year.   And that’s before you might want to get on a tube train.

Workers’ attitudes suggest very few simply do not like being in the office, and companies with budgets for “perks” or office revamps to entice workers back might find their money better spent on subsidising commutes instead, the report said.  Furthermore, fewer than one in 10 London workers would look for a new job if attendance mandates rose, the survey found.

As a result, Centre for Cities suggested that business leaders should lead by example. “More senior staff coming into the office could improve decision-making, productivity and the development of younger colleagues,” it said.  “London’s most popular number of mandated days has shifted from two to three days over the past year, and almost all employers in the London city centre have some sort of mandate,” Johnson said. “But in the international context, London has the lowest mandates of all cities looked at.”