I am sure that the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds picked up many useful skills in his previous job in local government, but does he really know more about how to run a business than the people who run one of the world’s most successful companies?
Apparently, yes. Asked on LBC where his comments about encouraging remote working fitted in with Amazon’s decision to order its staff back to work five days a week in the office he said:
If I was talking to a business like that I would say that every piece of evidence that has ever been collated suggests that flexibility, when agreed between employer and employee, is good for productivity and is good for staff resilience. You get to retain your staff for longer, you get more out of them.
But is that what the evidence really says? As on so many issues, if you want to look for evidence on working for home (WFH) which matches your pre-conceived ideas it is generally possible to find it. Those
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