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 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