Lord Alan Sugar has become the latest high-profile business leader to attack remote working, insisting that young people “just want to sit at home” and need to get their “bums back into the office.”
Speaking to the BBC, the 77-year-old entrepreneur and star of The Apprentice said workplace culture had suffered in the years since hybrid and flexible policies were introduced during the pandemic.
“I’m a great advocate of getting them back to work,” Sugar said. “The only way an apprentice is going to learn is from his colleagues. It’s small things, like interaction with your more mature colleagues, that will tell you how to do this, how to do that. That is lacking in this work-from-home, Zoom culture.”
Sugar, whose property group Amsprop owns a large portfolio of central London office buildings, said he recognised that some roles could be exceptions. “Software writers who get up at three o’clock in the morning with some kind of brainstorm,” he noted, might be better off at home, as well as people with disabilities.
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