When Sting, the great corporate guru, sang in 1985, “if you love someone, set them free”, he was of course prefiguring the biggest change to working conditions since industrialisation: working from home.
The pandemic, which some tech visionaries said accelerated the trend for remote working by a decade, actually sent people’s lives back pre-industrialisation. Life and work could blend at the agrarian family homestead, possibly with a giddily purchased cockapoo and a relocation to Devon.
But the point of Sting’s analysis was that once you’ve set someone free, they come back. They miss you too much. Once the threat of Covid waned, the office workers of the world were meant to remember all they loved about the commute, cubicle and community. We would all, as
