The future of office work

Office anthropology™ The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ →Go uptown intro sa Resources and Navigation The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungle Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Essays

In its abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature Burgess Shale — a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity.

It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers.

COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one change manager was ready for it or, for that matter, needed. The world just changed. No strategies were presented, no consultants engaged, no business continuity plans invoked: there was no time. Around the world businesses great and small, coped. (It rather begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, change managers and BCM programmes do, but that is another story.)

We adapted. We learned: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!

As the lockdowns rolled off, there was no great snap back to the previous regime. Thought-leaders took to LinkedIn to grapple with What It All Means For The Future Of Work. Broadly, they fell into two camps: “everything has changed,” and “nothing has”.

“Everything has changed”

The first said, “this time is different. There is no going back”.

The scales have fallen, we are no longer in the ’60s and though we can now leave our homes without being arrested, we shouldn’t have to any more. A diverse, dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters requires flexibility. Since we now know business can manage it — right? — there is no reason it shouldn’t.

You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.

“Ditch the jim-jams and get back to work”

The second said, “get back into the the office, punks”.

The Man — for it was mostly The Man saying it — teetered for a while, between, “I’m not having these good-for-naught meatsacks in their pyjamas on my dime” and the more squirrelly, “hang on: if these clowns work at home we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our technology spend so let’s not rush this”. Sometimes these two impulses merged, and businesses ditched office space and ordered everyone back to work.

TikTok Girl and the future of office work

The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around an unlikely, tearful graduate whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”, confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again.

“I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, crazy.”

As the formidable thought-leadership we expect from “the marketplace for ideas” went through its machinations, there was predictable mockery from some quarters and spirited defence from others.

The arguments on both sides have been pretty flimsy.

For the future of office work depends not on what we would like to happen nor, really what The Man would like to happen — but on how the complex system we inhabit behaves.

That, in turn, depends on human incentives and the behaviour of different components in the system. These will only play out over a long period of time.

Behavioural incentives are subtle. They have a habit of confounding expectations that things will quickly, and permanently, be different in a way we all find easier and better.

We have seen the sudden, delightful difference COVID wrought upon the system by forcing it to stop dead in its tracks. The system — we — somehow improvised a brand-new mode of operation that suited the hard, artificial, temporary constraints the system was under. We made it work.

This is not necessarily permanent. Now those constraints have eased, we should expect to see the system revert to how it used to behave, however perversely, unless there are selfish, opportunistic and persistent reasons for it to behave in another way which is even more perverse.

That is the question: what has, really, fundamentally changed to the commercial world because of COVID? What is there about what we do now that wasn’t possible — or at least thinkable — before?

It isn’t COVID any more

To be sure, working from home during COVID was, for a certain type of middle-aged white-collar worker, a revelation. People like the JC. During lockdown we reacquainted ourselves with the local ’hood — that neighbours’ WhatsApp group still going strong, amirite? — clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, trampled down our green spaces, avoided the tube and still, by most measures, our productivity rose.

But. COVID was a weird, sui generis time:

First, there was nothing else to do, bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work.

Second, all the usual work distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes that humanise the experience of being penned up for eight hours a day — were abruptly cut off. Since we were each isolated in our own private hell — or heaven, as the case may be — there were no “watercooler moments”, no sotto voce carping about the boss, no frank exchanges about last night’s Celebrity Love Island — we just got on with what we were meant to be doing.

Third, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just us who was disoriented. Middle management was discombobulated too. The work-creation machine struggled to find people whose time it could waste: everyone was out of sight, out of mind. For a time, the calendar was blissfully bereft of opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, MIS dashboards and line manager one-to-ones. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things.

Now, the bureaucratic industrial complex got its act together soon enough, but it took a while to get back to peak entropy. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid — you don’t have to pick up — and even when they finally got the weekly workstream catchup back up online it was a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom.

Lastly, there was no competitive advantage. Everyone was in the same boat. How it would have played out, had Goldman been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote? Who would have done better? There was no control group. Maybe being in the office would have been even more productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can choose their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we do. We will see.

Just because things worked during lockdown, it doesn’t mean they work best that way, nor that the changes COVID wrought are secular or permanent. The productivity bump faded as lockdown ground on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease off on the gas grew.

Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight.

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

Stewart Brand had the insight to envision the onward progress of a complex system through the interaction of revolving concentric layers of significance, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. Brand’s “pace layering” metaphor describes many kinds of complex system, but is especially well-suited to human ones like markets and workplaces.

The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that, “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (If the geology moves unexpectedly, everything else moves pronto!)

The interacting adjacent pace layers regulate and stabilise the system: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny, new and potentially destabilising and so command our attention; slow layers store deep system knowledge, steady the ship and stop the system failing and so should command our respect. In a human system the layers also reflect embedded practices, learning, ways of working, and individual positions in the hierarchy. The pace layers describe existing “power structures”.

How fashion changes the world: slowly

So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight, however good it seems. It must persist until the commercial layer, and those who wield influence there, have embraced it. The shift in the commercial layer must, in turn, persist even longer to influence the infrastructural and governance layers it sits on.

To take a germane example: the personal computer revolution — think IBM 386, Apple IIe, Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 — started as a fad. As it persisted, it picked up commercial momentum. The infrastructure began to respond to the demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic (bless you, Global Crossing!) — created more capacity. More computers shipped. They developed in sophistication. Macintosh. Windows. They were in turn able to handle more complicated applications. Computers networked. This in turn provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage and to lay more cable: this positive feedback loop was a strong system effect. It has been running for decades. It is still running. We are somewhat at its mercy.

Twenty years later that infrastructure allowed services industries to make their extraordinary instant pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that system effect not been running for twenty years, the COVID experience may have been very different. (Such are the impossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way).

A word about pyjamas

Throughout this article I have mischievously described remote workers “at the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, “eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie, on the sofa while dialled into the stakeholder weekly check-in call” and generally insinuating that they might be, well, phoning it in.

This may provoke indignance. It is meant to.

It is just wrong for you to imply that remote workers all take it easy. Some have personal circumstances beyond their control. Some choose to work from home. Some just work better that way. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen-fifties. We are not living in a Mad Men episode. Wake up and smell the coffee, JC. We have the capabilities to work away from the downtown office, so why the hell shouldn’t we? You are perpetuating grossly unfair stereotypes.

Now, every word of this is true.

But it doesn’t matter. For many office workers, deep in their blackest hearts, do think remote work is a soft option. It might irrational, unfair, or wrong — but they do. They might not often say it out loud, but this is what they think.

This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to justify their own worth and belittle others’. An easy way to do this is by visible effort.

And what a good proportion of the people in a system think conditions how the system, over the long run, behaves.

COVID and the adjacent possible

We often hear, therefore, the argument put that COVID was the “black swan” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed.

No one could credit that everyone could work remotely. The required investment, the necessary planning, the contingency planning, the difficult business case: the barriers to taking the necessary risk, with inarticulable benefits, were too high.

It took an Act of God to push us across the threshold: once we moved through that door the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.

But this is to assume that cultural layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too, and that some veil has, until now concealed from us this better way of working.

After all, the tools to implement remote working are hardly new. Nor is “remote working” any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: “offshoring” subsidiary and administrative tasks is a foundational dogma of modern management, as the JC frequently complains. “Bring your own office” was really just its final logical step. So, if it really were an effective universal way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?

Humans have worked together in communal spaces for hundreds of years. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution. But it is not like our communal office model was settled at a stroke in 1760 and never subsequently changed. It has iterated, adapted, updated and evolved. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, partitions and cubicles, the typewriter, postal services, telex, fax machines, computer networks, email and the internet.

Human collaboration models are constantly adapting, always tending to local maxima. Like the rare successful legal technology implementations, we just don’t notice them because they don’t feel, for long, like innovations. They feel like furniture.

COVID provided, for a brief moment, the biological imperative to be distant, overriding all other considerations. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by effortlessly coping. Commerce carried on, in rude health. But COVID has stopped now.

But we have been networked for decades. Is the fact that we still congregated, until COVID, just a matter of habit? Are our cultural and biological impulses to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? Has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new local maximum?

If this is a permanent shift remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — and do it better than modern communal working does. It might do that if it solves new problems, or presents new opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic showed us.

But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only non-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life. We can only judge that over forty years: not four.

And middle-agers — with accumulated wealth, nice houses, home offices and expensive pyjamas, who have largely exhausted practical avenues for career advancement — are not the ones to judge. They will soon be long gone.

Energetic, hungry youngsters, who don’t yet have home offices and nice PJs, for whom success is yet a potential not an actual, who are hungry to learn, change the world, advance, get preferment and take over the wheel from the comfy fifty-somethings — they will shape working culture over the next twenty years. Are they likely to do that working from home?

Cultural stereotypes about presence and commitment

There is a deeply ingrained cultural conviction that commitment is a cardinal virtue. All other things being equal, people who are committed are people who show up.

Common metaphors for commitment, or the lack of it, equate effort and energy with presence:

“He really put a shift in on this”.
“She has a real presence”.
“Stay close on this one”.
“Keep on top of it”.
“Stay engaged during the final stages of the project.”

And we associate half-heartedness with distance:

“He phoned it in”.
“The Arsenal just didn’t show up in the second half”.
“It was an unengaging performance”.
“She went missing in action”.
“He was AWOL when we needed him”.
“She seemed a bit distant in the meeting today”.
“Are you with us?”
“Sorry, I was miles away".

Yes, this is a heuristic; yes, it is unsupported by data; yes, it leads to gross mis-valuations of those who work remotely — but it exists, and it runs deep. It sits in a cultural pace layer, below even the infrastructural layer. It may not be causal, but nor did it arise by accident: it reflects a common historical experience. The perception may shift, but only slowly, and only if the historical experience no longer holds.

The lack of a causal link between presence and effort just makes the association harder to break: in the same way the many piss-takers and half-hearts who do “turn up” every day don’t create an association between presence and disengagement, nor will a notable minority who are more effective from home, or work harder, or with more practical commitment, break the opposite perception. They will be considered exceptions: they will be credited for their extraordinary commitment in spite of they fact that they work from home, not because of it. Only if most remote workers demonstrate more practical commitment might that perception shift.

Being shocked into looking round corners

To be sure, there is a tension between this societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and see what could be different — the “adjacent possible”. Now we know that the business can operate indefinitely without anyone showing up at the office, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise.

Clearly, some things are better. Not having to take the tube is better. We can agree with TikTok Girl about that. But equally, not everything is. Our zoom avatar is a not-always-on, two-dimensional approximation of what we really are. It satisfies the formal model of what it is to work, but largely fails the informal one.

Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart

“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State

There are two ways of viewing a firm: vertically — via its org chart, which depicts the firm as a kind of root system whose ley-lines radiate out from the top centre, and laterally, by starting from any node on the network, and tracking where, when and how often that node interacts with the others.

The first is the firm’s formal structure — how it might look in a portrait, framed, and at rest — the second is its informal structure — how it looks when in action. The first is static; the second dynamic.

The formal structure is the view from the executive suite. Sedate; cool; analytical, but essentially inert.

But the workplace looks very different up close, from the worker’s perspective. There, we see, and react to, what is in front of us: we help out, we keep eyes peeled, we go beyond our remit, we ignore or truncate obviously inappropriate procedures, and take a view on marginally relevant policies. These are informal actions: well meant, fundamentally benign, constructive to the organisation but they are totally invisible to central management. We deal with them because we can see them, and the CEO can’t. Where we contravene established rules we do so with good intentions — it is inevitable that some rules are out of date, misconceived, badly framed or ineffective. This is why employees are better than machines. Employees can take a view.

These interventions are necessarily ad hoc. They depend on us being there, in the right place, able to act — seeing what’s going on. This informal, buzzy, analogue communication channel needs to be wide open. It is the same channel of the mythical watercooler moments, sudden flashes of inspiration, or the engineer’s quick thinking improvised patch that averts a potential disaster the CEO will, now, never find out about — or that accidentally discovers penicillin, Velcro, post-it notes, Teflon, vulcanising rubber or potato crisps.

Now it is not to say that these serendipities can’t happen in a remote environment, but just that it makes them necessarily harder.

Bullshit jobs

Counterpointing this is business manager’s subconscious suspicion that much of what staff do from day to day is essentially meaningless.

Few, other than the late David Graeber, say it out loud, but the implication of an offshoring, outsourcing, and downskilling strategy is that current employees, in the office, are not worth what they cost.

But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.

Still there is that tension between the accountants — who see the opportunity to shrink the downtown footprint — and the HR folk who basically do not trust staff any further than they can throw them, which is nowhere near as far away as their own box-rooms and kitchen tables.

We expect this tension to resolve in favour of HR, for the simple reason that something that really can be done remotely is probably so formalistic that it ought not need to be done at all.

Songs of innocence and experience

It is tempting to blame the siren call of the office on “the usual grumblings of old age”, or “pea-brains” who “can’t envision a future different than the present”.

But over the long term, by which cultural shifts measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. Any system effect that draws people back into physical offices will be prompted by the people entering the system, not those leaving it. If won’t be grumpy boomers driving this, but young people wanting jobs.

Oh what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

— William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, from Songs of Innocence (1789)

We are not fixed in time and space. We are each on our own private life journey. At the start, we sing only songs of innocence: we have little to offer but energy, effort and time. But then we learn. We practice. We get better. We grow. We experience. We get old.

By degrees, our relative value shifts from energy and time to wisdom and judgment.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

— William Blake, “London”, from Songs of Experience (1794)

By the end, we sing only songs of experience. We who, short years ago, were scrappy, stroppy, hungry upstarts — are now worldly-wise, world-weary and valued not for our energy but our experience. We have little to prove: what advancement we stood to gain happened, or didn’t, but either way the ship sailed. We have little further need for elbows: those who had them, used them and by now are long since out of sight. If someone will pay us a decent wage to work from home, happy days.

This is not the cohort trying to force anyone back to the office. Why would we? That would mean we had to come back. too. Who amongst Generation X wants that? Lockdown rocked.

But there is a group who wants that.

Remember the dynamic at the front end of the labour curve, where new generations enter it: a graduate’s main point of differentiation from her peers is energy: expertise and skill comes later. Organisations need to find people with energy. Graduates seeking jobs, and those with jobs seeking advancement, want to show it.

And, culturally, how do we symbolise energy and effort?

We turn up.

So as the seasons turn, and existing graduates grow into subject matter experts, existing subject matter experts move on and yet new generations, with boundless energy, enter the workforce, it is not hard to see the system effect at work. We of the COVID generation will eventually collect our belongings. Those with the personal circumstances, experience and relationship capital to justify it, will continue to work remotely, as they always did.

And the rest will tend to go to the office —

Until the next pandemic.

See also

• Org chart
• Work-to-rule
• Bring your own premises

References

The after-effects of the COVID pandemic will reverberate long after the last “keep your distance and wash your hands” notice has faded from the public space. Whether or not you agree that that Coronavirus was a black swan — the arguments for and against that proposition are tiresome — the sudden, utter dislocation gave us a rare chance to see what would happen in a time of sudden nationwide, fracturing change. Not even in a time of war has every citizen been restricted to quarters for a period of months. We learned some new things: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments! It lead

Pace layers: things revert to how they were.

Recalling Stewart Brand’s idea of pace layering: working together physically, in communal office, does not, we think, subsist in the “fashion” layer, nor commerce, infrastructure, or governance: rather, it is deeply embedded in the “culture” layer — possibly even at the top end of “biology”. For the changes wrought by the pandemic to become permanent, now the infrastructural and governance requirement for staying away from the office have gone, they must be matters not just of personal preference, or fashion, but they must also continue to optimise the “problems” of each successive layer. It might do, even if it is no longer solving not problems presented by a pandemic, if it solves other problems we didn’t know we had until the revelation of working from home illustrated them, and proved itself a better way of handling them. For that, snap judgments, motivated by the personal preferences of employees (look: who wouldn’t prefer to work in their pyjamas at the kitchen table, all else being equal?) won’t be the end of the matter. The suit and tie has still hung on, despite a twenty-year onslaught: there is a lot less common sense propelling that.

Only time will tell, as a generation steps through the working life cycle — but we can only judge that over forty years: not four.

We fifty-somethings, having by now acquired reasonable wealth and exhausted most of our practical avenues for career development or life change, are hardly the ones to judge. We are happy enough to swim lengths, clicking in and out remotely and connecting the paycheque as long as someone else is gormless enough to pay it to us. The merits of working downtown against the den in the attic. New entrants who are still hungry to learn, progress, take responsibility and relieve bored fifty-somethings of their executive responsibilities will shape culture over the next twenty years. We will be long gone.

Being shocked into looking round corners

On the other hand there is attention between our societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and examine the contents of doors in the adjacent possible. Now we know that businesses can operate remotely for extended periods, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise. Likewise, and entire aging generation of technophobes were forced to go online. This may mean that the usual impassioned please about post offices and Bank branches needing to remain open because elderly people don't understand the internet will die more quickly than they might otherwise have done.

Bullshit jobs

Counterpointing this is the implicit fact that most businesses suspect that much of what their employees do from day to day is essentially meaningless. This is a buried, subconscious instinct — no one (other than the late David Graeber) says it out loud or even thinks it (it carries the recursive risk that it may be true of one’s own job, so is best left unsaid and, ideally, unthought) — but it propels much of the modernist dogma of contemporary management: offshore in comma outsourcing, downskilling all must be predicated on the theory that what employees do isn't quite as hard as they like to make it out to be).

But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.

At the moment, the connection is only with facetime and presenteeism: “attendo, ergo sum” — all beset around with cuddly but dubious ideas such as “the importance of watercooler moments” and “the spark of spontaneous creativity that only arises through unexpected physical interactions in the office”. But you will spend a long time embedded in the legal department of an multinational bank before witnessing serendipitous sparks of ingenuity. The risk is that this winsome commitment to physical serendipity commutes to cynical suspicion that what these people do, in or out of the office, doesn't add up to a great deal.

Form and substance

So we see impassioned please from Bank administrators for their employees to return to the office at least three days a week. And it is fascinating to see how formalized they are about this. Rather than assessing value added, increased productivity, or rate of generation of serendipitous spontaneous creative sparks, we here Citibank proposing to deny bonuses to staff who do not turn up at least three days a week.

About that serendipitous opportunity

Working from home — the logical final step in the modernist programme of systematically digitising human capital, reducing the prestigious, professional, ineffable to the quotidian, standardised and algorithmic —

See also

• Bring your own premises