The future of office work: Difference between revisions

COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one [[change manager]] was ready or needed. The world just ''changed''. No strategies needed presenting, not consultants were engaged, no [[business continuity plan]]s were invoked. There was not time. Around the world businesses great and small, ''coped''. It begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, [[change manager]]s and [[BCM]] programmes do, but that is another story.

For ''never'', not even in a time of war, has even ''one'' nation’s citizenry been quarantined indefinitely for months on end, let alone ''all'' of them. We quickly adapted, and quickly learned: working from home is pretty cool! [[Pyjamas]]! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!

As the immediate lockdowns ended, there was no great snap back to the previous regime. Many stayed at home, at least for part of the week. Some thought this was a good idea, others did not.

[[Thought leader|Thought-leaders]] took to [[LinkedIn]] to grapple with ''What It All Means For The Future Of Work'' and fell broadly into two camps: “''everything'' has changed,” and “''nothing'' has”.

===== Everything has changed =====

===== Ditch the jim-jams =====

Well: [[The Man]] teetered for a while, between, “I’m not having these good-for-naught [[Meatware|meatsack]]s 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.  

The debate chuntered on. Recently, it coagulating around poor “TikTok Girl”, a tearful grad confiding to her TikTok account<ref>https://www.tiktok.com/@brielleybelly123/video/7291443944347405614</ref> the exhausting experience of having to commute, work an eight-hour day and then commute home again.  

Notable among TikTok Girl’s supporters was {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|Kyla Scanlon}}, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million [[followers]] of her own frenetic TikToks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]], blogs and so on.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref>

For context on the 9-to-5, Scanlon gives us a potted history of industrial relations, starting with agrarian societies who worked “only” daylight hours (sounds fun, right?), until forced to give this up by “Big Machine” during the late industrial revolution.  

Scanlon credits Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — for realising he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a century ago, was born the nine-to-five.  

Scanlon thinks things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why, but declares it is now time they did. The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]],” instead of making old-fashioned widgets in factories — means it is “time to progress again”.  

Let’s park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an agrarian day out in the fields, whether one can sensibly equate factory production lines with a modern offices, or ''who'' it is that is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour day, since it wasn’t any service industry the JC has ever been involved in<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.

Look: an eight-hour day in an office, even with a commute at each end, across the great sweep of human endurance, ''is not that much to ask''. <ref>By the way, TikTok Girl herself mainly complains about the commute: she seems to accept the working day isn’t so bad. But — perhaps against her intention, she is a lightning rod for this bigger question.</ref>

Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there. The nature of work — ''what'' we do, ''how'' we do it, and ''who'' does it — has changed out of all recognition. Until quite recently, “white collar” professional occupations, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work.<ref>Thus, the {{plainlink|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-6-3_Rule|3-6-3 rule}}: borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6, on the tee at 3pm.</ref>  

 

 

But the questions still remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''?

In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] proved it. But this is a bit like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. Work in modern professional services is inherently collaborative. Is the ''best'' way of collaborating to have your people sequester themselves in their box rooms, interacting solely through the media of Slack, Zoom and Teams?  

Is there something different, then, about Generation Z that makes them more suited to this different rhythm? “''Yes'',” says Scanlon:  

Look, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. “Unprecedented challenges?” If Kyla Scanlon is allowed to dispense history lessons, then we should be able to as well.

There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and while Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. Meanwhile across the western world the cold war jacked up political tension such that the nuclear arms race was out-of-control, people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning.  

The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt, the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called ''Never Mind The Bollocks'', there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, famine in Africa, while Eastern Europe slowly went to pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes.

The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, Dutch Elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and listen to Phil Collins and Level 42, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked —  and there was ''no internet''.}}

Things were ''shit'' in the decades before you were born, kids.

Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly sided with Team TikTok Girl, too.

Good questions, but again: is this time different? Few people ''glorify'' the daily grind. We have configured the way we work — the grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping and box ticking. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of ''form'' as the highest art, the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the beast. If you don’t find it edifying — and on [[David Graeber]]’s account of it, why would you? — the answer is to ''find something else to do''.

This, too, may be our fault for giving them false expectations. But here is the thing. If the [[high modernist]] ideals of our consultant overlords were true, and the highest plane to which we could aspire was the flawless pursuit of abstract [[form|''form'']]: checking boxes, following policies, giving approvals, pushing buttons — then, and only then, ''remote working would be perfect''. For bureaucrats need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to ''prevent'' unplanned interactions.

 

And remember, full-scale remote working is the [[reductio ad absurdum]] of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out.  If this were really how business worked best overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the scope for bumptious worker-drones to have bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. This would be some kind of Gilliamesque autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while the overwatched by loving telecreens.

In any other universe, getting together in a central office has great appeals which outweigh the attractions of staying at home.

{{quote|

We need to work out how to get the balance right between the Zoomer-style coddling and the Boomer-style stiff upper lip — that’s tricky.}}

Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable [[Nietzsche]], but ''[[military school of life|die Kriegsschule das Leben]]'' is no more than counsel to seek out [[antifragility]].  In that spirit, if the choice is between coddling and stiff upper lip, it ''is'' easy: stiff upper lip, every time.

Third, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just ''us'' who was disoriented. Middle management was too. The busy-bodies and bureaucrats struggled to find people whose time they could waste: out of sight, out of mind. For a time, the calendar was blissfully bereft of [[opco]]s, [[Steering committee|steerco]]s, [[stakeholder]] check-ins, [[Management information and statistics|MIS]] dashboards and [[Line manager|line manager one-to-ones]]. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. To be sure the bureaucratic industrial complex got its act together soon enough, but the work-creation schemes took a while to get back to peak entropy. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid — you can decline to answer ths call — and even when the weekly workstream catchup finally got back up online ''it was a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom''.

Now, every word of this is true.  

But it is to miss the point, which is this: whether they are right to or not, many office workers, deep in their blackest heart, ''do'' think remote work is a soft option. They might not say this in public, but they do. It might not be rational or fair, but they do. This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to ''justify'' their own contribution against others’ — to ''elevate'' and ''aggrandise'' it. A really easy way to do this is by comparing ''visible effort''. There is, in western culture a deeply ingrained conviction in the virtue of commitment and, all other things being equal, ''committed people show up''.

Our [[metaphor]]s denoting commitment, or the lack of it, tell us about our common cultural values. By and large they, equate effort and energy with ''physical contact'' and ''presence'':  

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

Clearly, ''some'' things are better. all other things being equal, 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.

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, and certainly can’t throw them as far 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''.

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 back to the office —