Almost all the desks at Ecotricity’s headquarters in Stroud are empty. Pot plants, cards and personal photos are the only signs of the hundreds of employees at the green-energy firm who used to file in and out of the building in the Cotswold town every day.
Like most office-based employers, the firm’s founder, Dale Vince, sent virtually all of his 700-strong workforce home at the start of the lockdown in March. Now he is considering how to bring some of them back in anticipation of government guidance for reopening non-essential businesses.
He admits that the Gloucestershire company is unlikely to return to the days of routine face-to-face meetings and rows of staff chatting across computers. “I don’t want to rush back into ‘business as usual’. Some of our functions have worked really well during the lockdown,” he says in his glass-plated office.
“I’m hoping we will be able to sell two of our three offices in Stroud. We will then space ourselves out in this one and a new one over the road. We’ll operate a cycle of working from home and from the office, where we will arguably end up with half as much space.”
Halving the number of people in the office at any one time will allow staff to keep their distance and avoid sitting opposite each other. “We will be giving everyone more space,” he says.
Vince, who spent 10 years as a new-age traveller before launching the UK’s first green electricity company, believes that now is the right time to plan the reopening of workplaces. However, he acknowledges that his workers will face a degree of risk when they return. “If we are going to exist in lockdown, we are going to have to take some risks,” he says. “The reality is that the virus hasn’t gone away and there’s no vaccine, but we’re going to live in the gap in between.”
Staff who are worried or have vulnerabilities will be under no pressure to go back to their desks. “We will not be forcing anyone to come in and take a risk they are not comfortable with,” he says.
Vince, 58, has also been thinking about how to restart his other diverse interests, including a wind turbine factory, a kitchen making vegan school meals and the country’s only vegan football club, Forest Green Rovers.
“Football is probably the least of the issues because games played behind closed doors are very controllable,” he says. “Putting people back into office spaces, back on the roads, back into town – that’s much harder to control.”
Ecotricity has seen its turnover fall by about 20% as commercial power consumption has dropped, but Vince insists all his workers, including the 50 employees furloughed on 100% of their wages, have nothing to worry about. “They will definitely come back to jobs,” he says.
There are some positive lessons to be learned from the country’s mass home-working experiment, with traffic down and emissions reduced. But Vince acknowledges that people still need offices: “People don’t want to work from home all the time – it is too isolating. We can get the best of both worlds by cycling from one to the other.”
