Almost exactly two-and-a-half years ago an experiment was imposed on almost a third of the Irish workforce as schools, offices, shops, restaurants and pubs closed overnight, and we were all warned against making unnecessary journeys and told not to stray more than 2km from our front doors.

What happened in the early days of the pandemic was a heady cocktail of chaos and fear. “You’re on mute. You’re on MUTE. YOU’RE ON MUTE” became one of the catchphrases of the time, along with wash your hands, remember social distancing and all the rest.

While working from home was challenging, the challenges were dwarfed by those facing people who could not work from home as the global pandemic swept over us in waves. Complaining about having to work from a child’s bedroom or from a kitchen table was ridiculous when so many people were still on the front lines in hospitals or retail, or as a paramedic or a guard. While the challenges faced by those who fell seriously ill with Covid or lost loved ones were greater still.

As time went on, people grew used to working from home and a great many started to appreciated the benefits in terms of life balance and their finances.

And the financial savings have been massive. Someone who has been able to avoid two passes of the M50 tolls each working day since the start of the pandemic in March of 2020 has saved themselves well over €2,000 already. And that is just one small things and there are many more ways working from home has cut costs.

In a normal year, the average motorist will drive 16,000km. If we put the average price of fuel at €1.80 a litre (we know it is much higher than that now but for much of the last two-and-a-half years it was much lower), then driving the average family car, which does 12.4km per litre, our average driver would have spent — in normal times — about €3,230 on fuel since March 2020.

If that average driver travelled just 10km to work and then 10km home, they would have covered 4,600km commuting each year, which is 11,500km since working from home became normal. That means that someone who has not had to do that commute has saved themselves €1,670 on that one cost alone. We are not even going to consider the environmental benefits, which are also pretty substantial.

Many people commute without cars and the costs vary depending on where you live and where you work, but €140 would not be an outlandish sum to spend meaning savings of well over €3,000.

Remote workers have also saved money on food. Lunches bought in delis and Spars or Centras five days a week would easily cost office workers €35 which, spread over the cost of two-and-a-half years allowing for a generous six weeks of holidays annually, would come to €4,025.

That money is no longer being spent.

People do still have to eat lunch, but leftovers and sandwiches eaten in the home cost a lot less than €4,025. A block of cheese and a large sliced pan will set you back a fiver. That will easily cover lunch for three days and if you have leftovers on the other two working days then the total weekly spend because you are working from home comes in at no more than a fiver or €600 since March 2020, meaning savings of around €3,000. And better food too.

Consumption of takeaway coffees has also fallen with people able to work from home avoided going into their offices on about 570 occasions since the crisis began. If a takeaway cup of coffee costs €3 and you have just one cup each working day, then the amount of money you have not spent on the little treat since the start of the pandemic €1,710.

To be fair, we will add the cost of coffee at home. If you have a Nespresso machine and have two shots of coffee each day it will cost 80 cent, which works out at €460 a year, but you are still €1,250 up and way more than that if you use coffee grounds or instant.

There is a flip side and that is electricity and gas usage. That has soared in recent months thanks to the cost of living crisis, but even if we allow for an additional €1,200 spent on heating and lighting your home and boiling the kettle when you otherwise might not have done so, the total savings from the working from home experiment still comes in at about €5,000 since the start of the crisis. And we haven’t even got started on the quality of life piece yet.

‘If 99 per cent of people never want to go back full-time, it’s impossible to put that genie back in the bottle’

Chris Herd set up a company called Firstbase, which facilitates businesses looking to widen their remote working capabilities, in early 2019. As timings go, it could scarcely have been better given what was coming down the tracks. But while the pandemic turbocharged a dramatic shake-up of our work environment, Herd says things were moving in that direction anyway and “much faster than many people realise”.

He points out that in the US the numbers working remotely increased by 400 per cent in the 10 years up to 2018 by which time three million Americans were not office bound. By his calculations, in 2030 anywhere between 30 million and 80 million Americans will have some form of remote or hybrid working life. The trend will be replicated in this part of the world too.

He cautions against looking at the first wave of remote working for indications of what the future might look like noting that the working experiment many have lived through has been “the worst possible version” of the concept. “People were in lockdowns and they were locked in their tiny flats or they weren’t able to travel and see their family or their kids were homeschooled. So there was a lot of things which made it incredibly difficult.”

Despite the difficulties, it has caught on in a big way. “If you look at the data, almost no company has gone back to the office full-time and almost no company intends to go back to the office full-time.”

He regularly speaks to companies all over the world and says certain trends have become almost universal with more than 90 per cent of people saying they never want to go back to an office full-time and about 50 per cent saying they don’t really want to return to the office at all with fewer than 10 per cent keen on going back five days a week.

His numbers are borne out by our own Twitter poll of more than 500 people, which suggests that the numbers who want to work forever at home on 23 per cent with 72 per cent picking a mix of home and office work, and only 5 per cent preferring to return to an office full time.

According to Herd, it is “worth splitting remote work during a pandemic, and remote work in normal times, and the quality of life that comes from that. I now have more flexibility to work when I’m most productive if that’s at six in the morning, and maybe it’s 8pm at night, I can carve out some time in the day to do things, which means that I’m more productive when I should be doing work. Not everybody is going to be online nine to five, and nor should companies want them to be. If someone is most productive at other times why would I as an organisation want to block that I want to maximise productivity.”

He says in many organisations the amount of time a person spends in an office is “just the way bad managers track performance. Did you see sit in your office chair for eight hours? Well, ergo, you were productive. And I think it lets those bad managers off the hook, because they actually don’t know how productive somebody is. When I look at offices, I think they became these adult kids club, like distraction factories, where it’s incredibly difficult to focus and do deep focused work.”

He says there is “value in being together physically” but says he does not believe that value is to be found by putting people together for eight or nine hours a day five days a week.

While in-person collaboration might be better “it’s not 50 per cent better, it’s not 20 per cent, maybe it’s somewhere between zero and 10. Everyone has friends that live in different parts of the world and when we meet up in person, it’s the same as it’s always been. And I think that’s probably true across business as well, we come together, we build shared context, we go apart, we do the work that needs to get done, and then we come back together, and the relationship is maintained.”

He also downplays the social aspect. “Is it a good thing that our closest personal relationships are forged at work where if that business fails, the relationship ends? He says it is “foolishness” to believe relationships forged in the workplace are generally “life changing” and forever.

He reckons that over the last two-and-a-half years many people have realised is that they “do not want a better future work” they want is a better future of living. And how can I leverage a new way of working to produce a higher quality of life for millions of people? How can I decentralise opportunity? How can I make work not great for just one demographic, which is people that look like us? And how can I make it great for everyone? How can I make it great for single parents? How can I make it great for people that have health conditions or impairments that found it incredibly hard to work in offices.”

He suggests that many who want to go back to an office full-time are “older, they’re whiter, they’re richer and they’re maler.”

He says remote working means people are “no longer handcuffed to a [city] because that’s where the high paying jobs are. That has led to people having a relatively low disposable income because their cost of living is so high. There’s a big experiment going on but I think it’s really about changing the situation where work was designed for the collective to work, now being designed for the individual and then being able to do what makes them happiest and allowing them do their best work.”

As to what happens next he believes the toothpaste can’t go back in the tube. “Once we invented the car we didn’t go back to the horse and cart, and I think remote work is a replay of ecommerce versus physical stores. I look at the High street today, I look at the success of Amazon and places like that. The reasons that ecommerce crushed physical stores is the same reason virtual remote companies crush physical companies. It’s about access to talent. It’s about productivity. And it’s about simplicity, what is my personal preference.”

He says while some companies and managers may seek a return to full-time office work “if 99 per cent of people never want to go back full-time, it’s impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.”

What people around Ireland thought of working from home during the pandemic

We asked Twitter users to outline their experience of remote working. Here’s a small snapshot of what came back.

Difficult. I struggled to switch off when there was no separation of office and home life. It’s also difficult to motivate and develop junior staff who aren’t picking up knowledge and experience from what’s going on around them on the office floor. Elaine Maguire O’Connor

Extremely productive. Cost me a fortune in heating and electricity though. Elena Vaughan

Love it! Gave us opportunity to buy house out of Dublin. Don’t need to worry about getting home in time for creche pick up. Finally able to get a dog. More time working and less commuting! This list goes on. Sinéad Byrne

Epic Paranoia. How to read people on zoom? Impossible. Micro-interactions are vital to communicate. Awful. Alicia Davies

Amazing — allowed me to stay close to my newborn daughter whilst being able to do exactly what I would be doing in the office. Outside of that it gave me a better work/life balance. The ability to work from anywhere is hard to contend with. Dylan Redmond

Really positive, the work/life balance is so much better, I’m more productive, and it’s saving so much money in terms of travel, etc, especially when the cost of living is only going up. Kieron Pierson

Pure luxury. Removing all commuting and business travel means I have far more personal time and am engaged in more local voluntary activities. I have the space and facilities for a home office, without this I could get the same benefits in a local “hub”. Les Mahon

Sustainable, productive and enjoyable. Feel I have a life again that isn’t all centred around commuting for work. Hybrid is the way forward. Emer O’Flaherty

Social life is big reason I love my job. Really missed the craic when WFH, and felt disconnected from work. Loving the balance of a 60/40 home/office life now. Vicki Notaro Carlyle

Productive but lonely, and missed the in personal connections of colleagues. Also a lot harder to switch off from work mode. Áine Rynne

Dreadful. No room for proper set up so spent 2 years sitting on the bed with laptop on my legs. Can only get mobile broadband and had to sign up with a second provider to ensure constant coverage as one or other was always unreliable. Lorraine Brennan

Much better work life balance. I appreciate it all the more now that I have to attend the office 2 days a week. It's a much calmer, quieter space to work. I can concentrate on my work better and I’m not as tired when I finish work in the evening as it's a shorter day. Annemarie Doherty

Love it! No more commute and no more 5.30am starts! When my previous employer said we had to go back to the office I left for a job that is 100% remote and will never go back! Best thing ever. Deirdre Coates

Impossible to build new connections over video-link and very difficult to keep the energy going in existing relationships. Very lonely and isolating. The normal synergies and ad hoc ideas that would generate from simply being located near people gone entirely. Michelle Staunton Nolan

I wish, wish, wish. Not option for myself (health) or husband (Garda).

While the world changed fir some ... For some the commute, childcare juggle and school drop off continues as it was. Sharon O’Connor

Greatly missed real people engagement in business, the subtleties and nuances from in person conversations, the enjoyment of interactions leading to know and the unknowns. Redmond O’Leary

I’m lucky enough to live close to my office, so commuting isn’t an issue. Personally didn’t like the sensation of being trapped in my own home. If I had a shomera or spare room it might have been easier to make a physical break, but didn’t like having ‘office’ ever present. Olga Keogh

It’s been life changing in its benefits and so long overdue ... turns out Covid-19 wasn’t so ill a wind that it didn’t blow some good ... Fionnuala 1McDermott

No commuting, more time at home, more time to be out in the woods with the dog, got more work done and no enforced social interaction. Cathy Kelly

After the initial chaos of having everyone at home and juggling childcare and a full time job I now find it amazing. More time with my family and no wasting 2 hours commuting. Kym Cantwell

It has given me back so much ‘dead’ commuting time that I now spend with my family or on myself. I’m (slightly) less cranky and have made much stronger connections with my local community including getting involved in local groups. Head space so much better. Aidan Hogan

Absolutely love it! A lot of ppl got off to bad start due to lockdown restrictions/homeschooling combo. Better work life balance ... reduced commute, better for the environment. A dedicated space outside of living/bedroom space is essential ... need to close that door at end of day! Olivia King