Grey Tracksuit Bottoms Aren’t the Problem.

Trust Is.

Boohoo has called time on working from home. But behind the headlines about grey tracksuit bottoms sits a much bigger question: what does a five-day office mandate tell employees about trust, flexibility and the kind of workplace we are building?

Boohoo chief executive Dan Finley has reportedly told the fashion group's 1,500 head-office employees that they are expected back in the workplace five days a week.

His reasoning is not entirely without merit.

Fashion is tactile. Products need to be seen, worn and discussed. Trends are happening outside the four walls of our homes. Younger employees can benefit enormously from overhearing conversations, watching experienced colleagues work, building relationships and learning the things that simply aren't written in an onboarding document.

There is a conversation worth having about what we lose when we never share a physical workplace.

But then came the line that caught the headlines.

Employees, Finley suggested, shouldn't be "sat in bed wearing grey tracksuit bottoms" while working.

And perhaps that is where this stops being simply a conversation about where people work and becomes a conversation about how we view the people doing the work.

Working from home is not the same as not working

There is something uncomfortable about the imagery.

The lazy employee.

Laptop balanced somewhere near the duvet.

Tracksuit bottoms on.

Barely working.

It plays into a narrative that many employees thought we'd moved beyond: that productivity is something an employer can see.

That commitment looks like a commute.

That professionalism is demonstrated by physical presence.

And that flexibility is somehow the opposite of ambition.

For some people, of course, working from home isn't particularly productive. Some thrive around colleagues. Some need separation between home and work. Some learn significantly better by being physically alongside their team.

But others do their best work differently.

And UK working patterns have fundamentally changed.

Office for National Statistics figures showed that 28% of working adults in Great Britain were hybrid working between January and March 2025. Among full-time workers, that rose to 34%.

Hybrid working isn't an obscure pandemic hangover anymore. It has become part of Britain's working infrastructure.

And importantly, flexibility isn't simply about convenience.

Sometimes it is what makes remaining in employment possible.

Think about the person behind the policy

This is where the conversation matters particularly to us at MOCO Coaching.

Because we work in the space between life changing and work continuing.

Imagine an employee returning after maternity leave.

For months, they have been responsible for keeping a tiny human alive. Their identity, body, relationships, routines and priorities may all have shifted. Childcare needs to be coordinated. Sleep may still be unpredictable.

Now add five days of commuting because presence has become the measure of participation.

Imagine the employee returning after months of cancer treatment.

They are well enough to work. They want to work.

But energy doesn't necessarily return at exactly the same moment their fit note ends.

Imagine someone grieving the death of their child, partner or parent.

They may desperately want the structure, familiarity and identity that work gives them.

But there may also be mornings when getting through the front door feels like an achievement.

Imagine the unpaid carer.

Government research published in 2026 found that 5.4 million people in the UK provided unpaid care in 2023–24. In England and Wales, 1.3 million working-age unpaid carers were already outside paid employment in 2021.

For these people, flexibility isn't necessarily a lifestyle perk.

It can be the difference between staying and leaving.

Between progressing and stepping backwards.

Between being able to work and being unable to work at all.

And employees are already voting with their feet

Research from the CIPD makes this particularly difficult to ignore.

Its 2025 research found that around 1.1 million UK employees said they had left a job in the previous year because of a lack of flexibility.

More than half of employees surveyed - 53% - said they felt pressure to spend more time in the workplace.

Meanwhile, 91% of employers offered some form of flexible working, and 61% believed offering flexibility when advertising jobs was important for attracting staff and tackling labour or skills shortages.

So this isn't simply an ideological argument about whether Zoom is better than a meeting room.

There are commercial consequences too.

Talent attraction.

Retention.

Absence.

Engagement.

Progression.

Diversity.

And whether talented people experiencing complicated periods in their lives remain economically active at all.

The CIPD puts it well:

“There’s no one-size-fits-all model.”

Perhaps that should be the sentence sitting above every debate about returning to the office.

Because Boohoo isn't completely wrong

And this is important.

It would be easy to turn this into another simplistic argument in the opposite direction.

Five days in the office = outdated.

Remote working = progressive.

Reality is more complicated.

There are genuine benefits to being together.

We learn from one another.

Junior employees hear conversations they wouldn't necessarily be invited to on Teams.

Ideas emerge over coffee.

Relationships develop.

Managers can sometimes identify struggling employees more easily.

Culture can be harder to create when everybody experiences an organisation through a laptop screen.

For a fashion business specifically, Finley's argument that employees need to experience products, trends, customers and the city around them deserves consideration.

The problem isn't necessarily asking people to come into an office.

The question is whether five days, for everybody, regardless of circumstances, is really the answer.

Because good leadership isn't about pretending that every employee needs exactly the same thing.

Flexibility does not mean lowering expectations

This distinction matters enormously.

Flexibility should never mean:

"Do whatever you like."

It can mean:

"We are clear about what we expect from you, but we trust you enough to have a conversation about how you deliver it."

Those are very different cultures.

An organisation can expect excellence while offering flexibility.

It can demand accountability while recognising caring responsibilities.

It can encourage collaboration while supporting somebody through bereavement.

It can bring teams together without assuming that somebody working from their kitchen table is inherently less committed than somebody sitting under fluorescent lights in an office.

And perhaps most importantly, flexibility can change over time.

An employee might need more support for three months following bereavement.

A new parent may need a phased return.

Someone coming back after serious illness might gradually rebuild their working week.

A carer's circumstances can change overnight.

This is precisely why blanket policies can struggle with something human beings are extraordinarily good at being:

complicated.

The transition is where organisations often lose people

At MOCO Coaching, we talk constantly about transitions because this is the point organisations can underestimate.

Returning to work isn't a date in a diary.

You don't finish maternity leave on Sunday and become your old professional self again at 9am Monday.

You don't complete medical treatment and immediately recover your previous energy.

You don't attend a funeral and finish grieving when compassionate leave expires.

You don't become an unpaid carer and neatly compartmentalise that responsibility between 6pm and 8am.

People carry their lives through the office doors with them.

The question for employers isn't whether those lives should affect work.

They already do.

The question is whether organisations create enough space, support and intelligent flexibility for employees to navigate those transitions successfully.

That is where coaching can be transformational.

Not because a coach removes the difficult circumstances.

But because they provide a confidential space for an employee to work out:

Who am I at work now?

What do I need?

How do I communicate that?

How do I rebuild confidence?

How do I manage competing responsibilities?

How do I move forward without pretending nothing has changed?

And crucially, organisations don't have to lower their expectations to support that process.

Often, supporting the transition is exactly what enables somebody to perform again.

Maybe the question isn't “office or home?”

Perhaps we've spent too much time debating location.

The more interesting questions are:

Do our employees feel trusted?

Do managers understand the people they lead?

Can somebody experience a major life event without feeling their career has quietly stalled?

Can parents, carers and people managing health conditions still see a future inside our organisation?

Are we measuring performance — or presence?

And when an employee's life changes dramatically, do we simply tell them when they are expected back?

Or do we help them find their way back?

Because the future of work shouldn't be built around grey tracksuit bottoms versus office clothes.

It should be built around something far more ambitious:

Creating workplaces where people can experience real life, navigate change and still do exceptional work.

That is the conversation we should be having.

MOCO Coaching supports employees and organisations through the moments when life changes but work continues — including parental leave, bereavement, medical leave and caring responsibilities. Because returning to work shouldn't simply mean going back. It should mean being supported to move forward.