Mark Dixon: ‘Banning working from home is idiotic’

Mark Dixon, the billionaire founder of IWG and architect of the Regus empire, has dismissed calls to ban working from home as “idiotic”, arguing that the future of productivity lies in better management, not compulsory office attendance.

Speaking to The Times, Dixon responded to remarks by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who recently declared that people are not more productive at home and pledged to scrap the practice if his party ever came to power. For Dixon, such thinking belongs to another era. “The idea that the only place you can work is in an office is idiotic,” he said. Advocates of five days a week in the office, he added, are “naive” and “Luddites”.

As chief executive and largest shareholder of IWG, the £2.2bn group behind the Regus and Spaces brands, Dixon is hardly neutral. The company promotes hybrid working as a core proposition and operates more than 4,400 locations across 122 countries. Yet his view is informed by scale and data as much as ideology. “Work can be done absolutely anywhere today,” he said. “The whole notion of offices has completely changed.”

The interview took place at Spaces Liverpool Street in the City, a recently refurbished location where corporate suits and start-up hoodies share communal tables. Dixon, 66, is softly spoken rather than bombastic, but unequivocal in his beliefs. “The key problem with work and productivity is how you manage people,” he said. “It’s not whether they’re at home or in an office.”

His approach is to manage outputs rather than presence. For his roughly 1,000 head-office staff, part of a global workforce of around 9,000, the emphasis is on delivery rather than surveillance. As for the oft-cited “water cooler moments” supposedly lost in remote working, Dixon believes they must be deliberately curated rather than left to chance. “You’ve got to schedule creative periods,” he said. “You can’t just rely on random encounters.”

Dixon’s own career has been anything but conventional. Born in Essex to a car mechanic, he began his entrepreneurial life selling topsoil to neighbours at the age of 12. After leaving school at 16 and travelling the world, he launched a sandwich delivery business in the 1980s before selling his bakery venture for £800,000. That capital financed his move to Brussels in 1989, where he spotted businesspeople conducting meetings in cafés, and identified a market for flexible office space. The first Regus centre opened later that year.

Expansion followed rapidly through Latin America, China and the United States. Regus listed in London in 2000 but narrowly avoided collapse during the dotcom crash. More recently, IWG has outlasted high-profile rival WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 after a spectacular fall from a $47bn valuation.

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

On UK politics, Dixon was less restrained. He questioned whether successive governments have truly prioritised business competitiveness, arguing that long-term economic success depends on fostering strong companies and industries.

Now based in Monaco, Dixon retains a 27 per cent stake in IWG. Asked about succession, he acknowledged the inevitability of change. “The challenge for any chief executive-founder is succession,” he said. “This is a young man’s business.” He insisted he has no ego-driven attachment to the role, only to the company’s success.

For the time being, however, he remains focused on growth, and on demonstrating that hybrid working can deliver results. The day before our conversation, he had taken his team to a nearby pub after a long meeting. “We got quite a lot done in two pints,” he said with a smile. “It was very productive.”