Mark Dixon, the billionaire founder of IWG and architect of the Regus empire, has dismissed calls to ban working from home as “idiotic” and argued that the future of productivity lies in better management rather than mandatory office attendance.
Speaking to the Times, Dixon responded to comments from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who recently declared that people were not being more productive at home and vowed to abolish the practice if his party ever came to power. For Dixon, this thinking belongs to a different era. “The idea that the only place you can work is an office is idiotic,” he said. Proponents of five days a week in the office are “naive” and “Luddites,” he added.
As chairman and largest shareholder of IWG, the £2.2bn group behind the Regus and Spaces brands, Dixon is far from neutral. The company promotes hybrid working as a core offering and operates more than 4,400 locations in 122 countries. But his perspective is shaped as much by scale and data as by ideology. “Today you can work absolutely anywhere,” he said. “The whole idea of offices has completely changed.”
The interview took place at Spaces Liverpool Street in the City, a recently renovated space where corporate suits and start-up hoodies share communal tables. Dixon, 66, speaks softly rather than bombastically, but his convictions are clear. “The main problem with work and productivity is how you treat people,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether they are at home or in the office.”
His approach is to manage outputs rather than presence. For its roughly 1,000 headquarters employees, part of a global workforce of around 9,000, the focus is on delivery rather than supervision. As for the oft-cited “water cooler moments” that are said to be lost in remote work, Dixon believes they need to be consciously curated and not left to chance. “You have to plan for creative phases,” he said. “You can’t just rely on chance encounters.”
Dixon’s own career was anything but conventional. He was born in Essex, the son of a car mechanic, and began his entrepreneurial life at the age of 12 selling topsoil to neighbors. After leaving school at 16 and traveling the world, he set up a sandwich delivery business in the 1980s before selling his bakery business for £800,000. This capital financed his move to Brussels in 1989, where he discovered business people holding meetings in cafes and identified a market for flexible office space. The first Regus center opened later that year.
Expansion occurred rapidly through Latin America, China and the United States. Regus went public in London in 2000 but narrowly avoided collapse during the dot-com crash. More recently, IWG has overtaken high-profile rival WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 after a spectacular $47 billion decline.
Despite ongoing speculation about a listing move to the US, Dixon said such a move was not imminent. Although about half of IWG’s business is American, he warned that size is critical ahead of a transatlantic move. “It’s important to be big there; you don’t want to be a minnow,” he said, pointing out that annual profits would have to be more than £1bn before the company could justify the outlay.
When it came to British politics, Dixon was less reserved. He questioned whether successive governments had truly prioritized business competitiveness, arguing that long-term economic success depends on supporting strong companies and industries.
Dixon is now based in Monaco and retains a 27 percent stake in IWG. When asked about succession, he acknowledged that change was inevitable. “The challenge for every CEO and founder is succession,” he said. “This is a young man’s business.” He insisted he had no selfish attachment to the role, only to the company’s success.
For now, however, he remains focused on growth and showing that hybrid working can deliver results. The day before our interview, he had gone to a nearby pub after a long meeting with his team. “We got quite a bit done in two pints,” he said with a smile. “It was very productive.”
