The future of office work

Office anthropology™ The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ →Go Premium 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

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The after effects of the COVID crisis will reverberate long after the last “krep your distance and wash your hands” notice has faded from the public space. weather or not you agree that it was a black swan, it has presented a unique opportunity to observe what happens in a time of sudden fracturing change.

Pace layers: things revert to how they were.

Recalling Stewart Brand’s idea of pace layering: working in a communal office is not a matter of fashion, commerce, infrastructure, nor governance but, we think, fairly deep culture and possibly biology. For the changes wrought by the pandemic to take permanently they must solve not just the problems of life in an epidemic, but some problems we didn't know we have about the way we communally work right now. For that, snap judgments — especially ones motivated by personal preferences of lazy employees talking their own book (who would not prefer to work in their pyjamas at the kitchen table, all else being equal?) — will meet be determinative. Only time will tell, as a generation steps through the working life cycle — 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