Six weeks into the UK’s first pandemic lockdown, employees at the British engineering group Dyson received an email from chief executive Roland Krueger. The UK campus, a sprawling complex in rural Wiltshire, had “reopened”, said the May 15, 2020 email. The government had announced five days earlier that people who were unable to work from home could return to the workplace. Staff at Dyson Technology Ltd, best known for its innovative vacuum cleaners and air filters, would be organised into A and B teams and expected to return to the Malmesbury office the following Monday. But schools and non-essential shops were still shut, and businesses that could were working remotely. The virus was still rampant; on the day the email was sent, 1,337 people testing positive for Covid-19 were on ventilators in UK hospitals. The decision was reversed less than 24 hours later following uproar by staff, and homeworking was allowed to carry on as before.
Yet this early clash marked the opening of a cultural divide at the company: between the top executives who took a granite-hard approach to in-person staffing as lockdowns lifted, and a group of employees who balked at the ever-stricter measures Dyson took to ensure attendance at its UK headquarters. Interviews with 27 employees who have now left the company paint a picture of how senior staff at the UK campus upheld uncompromising restrictions in the months after the corporate world reopened.
Staff were subjected to rigorous monitoring and warned of professional consequences if they failed to attend in person. Some former employees say flexible working requests were overwhelmingly declined, and some describe feeling pressured to leave children and dependants with care provisions provided by the company so they could still come into work. Dyson says having people working together physically is core to their philosophy, as espoused by the company’s iconoclastic founder, Sir James Dyson. “[We work] collaboratively, side by side, making discoveries though experiments and sparking ideas off each other,” he tells the Financial Times in a statement. “You simply can’t do this kind of work from home.”
The company invited the FT to its campus in August to interview employees and witness how interconnected its teams are: marketing, for example, works in lock-step with sales, engineering and other functions. The company says this kind of organization allows them to better solve problems, collaborate and support customers.
The expectation to attend work in person should not have been a surprise to employees, says one person familiar with the business. “That’s the type of company we are, we want them all back . . . the philosophy of the company is what people [who join] buy into.”
The situation at Dyson is a dramatic example of the sorts of disputes that are still playing out across workplaces in the UK and beyond, as employers and workers hold differing perspectives of what the post-Covid workplace will look like. Some companies have accepted hybrid working as the new normal. At others, managers have attempted to bring employees back, sometimes with incentives and increasingly by disciplinary measures. Even Google, which has a three-day office policy, has unveiled plans to include attendance rates in performance reviews.
But at Dyson, the more than two dozen former employees say the ever more rigid attempts to force workers to attend in-person changed the culture of a company recognized worldwide as a beacon of engineering excellence and a flagship of British industry. Dyson, they say, became for a time a business where managers were pitted against workers, and employees felt hemmed in and controlled. Four people who ultimately walked away independently characterized the atmosphere at the time as one of “fear”.
The Dyson way
In the early weeks of the pandemic, hundreds of staff at the Dyson campus came to the office while other British workers were still under orders to stay home. Their mission was to design and manufacture ventilators on its site for emergency rooms across the country, working with masks and other protection measures, under a government-sanctioned program that Dyson funded itself. The ventilator episode reinforced Sir James Dyson’s views and those of other decision makers in the company that it was not only possible to safely operate in person, but essential for the kind of work they needed to do. “The ventilator was an extraordinary achievement but entirely typical of the way Dyson works,” the founder says.
So when, on November 2, 2020, the business secretary declared that it was “vital that scientists and engineers working in R&D continue to come together in labs and workplaces across the country”, Dyson promptly updated staff in an email. Those working in research design and development, operations or quality were told “you should work on campus”. Staff could only work from home in “exceptional cases”, it added. Much of the rest of the country, however, was preparing for the second national lockdown, which began on November 5.
Some former staff whose jobs at Dyson did not involve being in the labs spoke of the frustration at being asked to come into the office when they felt able to continue working from home. Dyson says that at the time, three-quarters of Dyson employees were still working from home. For those whose role required them to attend, Dyson deployed safe working measures that went significantly beyond government guidelines, the company says.
As vaccines began being rolled out, the company let employees know what was expected of them. On June 16, 2021, an email to staff from the company’s chief legal officer, Martin Bowen, said the company in the UK was “asking all Dyson people to spend the majority of their [working] time on campus”.
When the government reintroduced working-from-home guidance in December that year, as the new Omicron variant spread, Dyson leadership continued to insist many of its UK staff went on working in the office. “All Dyson offices will remain open as normal,” an email sent to staff on December 9, 2021 stated. The list of those teams who were expected to work in the office “as normal” was extensive and included commercial, research, development, estates, security and IT.
Dyson says: “As a global technology company there are certain ways that we work to ensure research and development processes, creativity and collaboration are encouraged, and confidentiality is maintained. This is the Dyson way. We brought people into the workplace in line with government guidance on the subject and when that guidance indicated that certain staff should work at home, we sent them home. Dyson, at all stages, behaved responsibly and did the right thing.”
Attendance allowance
As the pandemic subsided, what had begun as a concerted effort to ensure workers returned to the office morphed into what some who subsequently left described as a culture obsessed with monitoring staff attendance. Attendance and absence levels were logged on spreadsheets and reviewed weekly by senior directors on Friday afternoons. Several former Dyson managers said they would be notified by HR if a member of their team had failed to come into the office. They said they were given template emails to send to their more junior colleagues, reminding them of their obligation to be in the office, which the former managers describe as “aggressive” and “condescending”. One former member of the company’s HR team says they felt they were being asked to send a message to staff about the potential consequences of non-attendance.
“There was a real pressure on the HR team to threaten people that if they didn’t come to the office, there could be disciplinary action,” they say. “We really felt that.” Dyson says this is a mischaracterization of “sensible and reasonable” internal communications designed to keep employees apprised of working conditions that changed often in the post-lockdown months. Staff reviewed employment data, it says, to “ensure working practices always remained safe and appropriate”.
Nevertheless, for employees already living through a deeply anxious period, the tone of these policies had a marked effect. The FT has spoken to four former employees who went off on a formal period of sick leave and cited work stress as the main contributor to their worsened mental state. One younger employee who later left described having regular panic attacks and taking themselves to the office bathroom to “settle down”. Another, a manager, describes the stress of pressuring their team to come into the office. “I didn’t agree with any of it,” they say. “I had to check like a school teacher who was coming in when, and force…”
Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
