‘Forbidding working from home is stupid’

Mark Dixon, the billionaire founder of IWG and Regus empire builder, has dismissed calls to ban working from home as “stupid”, saying the future of productivity lies in better management, not compulsory office travel.

Speaking to The Times, Dixon responded to the words of the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, who recently announced that people do not produce much at home and promised to stop this practice if his party ever comes to power. For Dixon, such thinking belongs to another era. “The idea that the only place you can work in the office is stupid,” he said. Five-day-a-week lawyers in the office, he added, are “absurd” and “Luddites”.

As chief executive and largest shareholder of IWG, the £2.2bn group behind the Regus and Spaces brands, Dixon is not neutral. The company promotes hybrid performance as a core proposition and operates in more than 4,400 locations in 122 countries. Yet his opinion is based on scale and data as much as opinion. “Work can be done anywhere today,” he said. “The whole perception of offices has completely changed.”

The interview took place at Spaces Liverpool Street in the City, a newly renovated space where corporate suits and startup hoodies share communal tables. Dixon, 66, is soft-spoken instead of booming, but unequivocal in his beliefs. “The biggest problem with work and production is how you treat people,” he said. It is not whether they are at home or in the office.

His method is to manage the output instead of the presence. For his roughly 1,000 head office staff, part of a global workforce of nearly 9,000, the emphasis is on delivery rather than observation. As for the often-cited “water-cooler moments” lost in remote working, Dixon believes they must be chosen deliberately rather than left to chance. “You have to schedule creative moments,” he said. “You can’t rely on random encounters.”

Dixon’s career has not been ordinary. Born in Essex to a car mechanic, he started his business life selling topsoil to neighbors at the age of 12. After leaving school at 16 and traveling the world, he started a sandwich delivery business in the 1980s before selling his bakery business for £800,000. That capital financed his move to Brussels in 1989, where he saw businessmen holding meetings in restaurants, and identified a flexible office space market. The first Regus center opened later that year.

Expansion followed quickly in Latin America, China and the United States. Regus was listed in London in 2000 but narrowly avoided collapse during the dotcom crash. More recently, IWG has released top rival WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 after a dramatic drop in valuation of $47bn.

Despite continued speculation about a switch to its US listing, Dixon said the move is not imminent. Although almost half of IWG’s business is American, he cautioned that scale is important before any transatlantic switch. “It’s important to be big there; you don’t want to be a dog,” he said, suggesting that annual revenue would need to exceed £1bn before the company could justify the effort.

In UK politics, Dixon was a little reserved. He questioned whether successive governments had really prioritized business competitiveness, saying long-term economic success depended on promoting strong companies and industries.

Now based in Monaco, Dixon retained a 27 percent stake in IWG. Asked about the sequence, he admitted that change is inevitable. “The challenge for any CEO founder is succession,” he said. “This is a young man’s business.” He emphasized that he is not interested in his role, but the success of the company.

For now, though, he’s still focused on growth, and proving that hybrid operations can deliver results. The day before our interview, he had taken his team to a nearby bar after a long meeting. “We’ve done a lot with two pints,” he said with a smile. “It was very productive.”