Like many an office novelty, agile working is becoming a corporate mantra. It has been on trend for at least 20 years and rather more commonplace since the arrival of the mobile phone and broadband.

It seems like a win-win: employers measure employees’ output without sweating the time taken for a long lunch; employees gain a newfound autonomy that is unprecedented in postwar business practice. In some ways, it nostalgically mirrors student work styles: do it in your time, at your chosen place or indeed in your pyjamas.

Agile working is increasingly popular. According to a recent UK Labour Force Survey, nearly 10m people work remotely some or all of the time, and a study in February 2016 by Lancaster University found that about half of all employers planned to adopt agile or flexible working by 2017. But it may also be the case that agile working has hit a tipping point.