Talk:The future of office work

@kylascan

Notable among TikTok Girl’s supporters was 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 of her own followers on her frenetic TikToks, podcasts, tweets and blogs. She took to her blog.

For context on the 9-to-5, Scanlon gave 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. It was Henry Ford — not your classic Gen Z pin-up, but hey — who realised he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a century ago, the nine-to-five was born.

Scanlon asserted that things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why she thought that. She declared it was now time they did. The nature of how we now are — networked, digital and online — and what we now do — delivering services like “B2B SaaS,” instead of making old-fashioned widgets in factories — meant 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 compare factory production lines with modern offices, or just who is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour day, since it hasn’t been any service industry the JC has ever been involved in — but as we do, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.

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.

In any case, Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there.

Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.

But the nature of work — what we do, how we do it, and who does it — has changed out of all recognition — in forty years. “White collar” occupations, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work. In the 1980s this remote professional enclave exploded into a military-industrial complex, in which the traditional professions were joined by a slew of new ones — audit, accountancy, engineering, marketing, branding, human resources, design, architecture, technology, management and operations and a brand new category of labour emerged: the business administrator. It was its own complex system of work, with its own evolving criteria, customs, conventions and modes of operation. It continues to evolve: lockdown was only its latest stress-test.

But Kyla Scanlon’s question still remains: Can we change? What? And how?

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

—Anon.

In a sense, Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. 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 sequester your staff in their private box rooms, letting them interact solely through Slack, Zoom and Teams? Or is there something different about Generation Z that makes it more suited to this different rhythm?

“Yes,” says Scanlon:

“Gen Z grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.”

Scanlon says, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to, as we put these “unprecedented challenges” into a bit of perspective. Were there really no equivalent challenges faced by young workers in the sixties, seventies and eighties?

Such civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights as there were, the boomers won them. No-one had even thought of trans rights.

South Africa was apartheid, Berlin partitioned — the whole of Europe was partitioned, come to think of it — and there were international wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and multiple military coups d’état in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

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, across the western world a “Cold War” jacked up an out-of-control nuclear arms race, 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 and until the 1980s: 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 that was frying Australasians, the woodlands of northern Europe were devastated by Dutch Elm disease, fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns fell across large tracts of Europe and Japan, and there was a near miss in the US at 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. Not worse, but not better either.

@jemimajoanna

Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly — who prides herself on “sarc and snark” — sided with TikTok Girl, too.

Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why

shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?

Good questions, but again: is this time different? Who really glorifies the daily grind? We have configured the way we work — our grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping, box ticking and ticket-clipping. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the deal.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be their parents’ fault — we of Generation X — our fault for giving unrealistic expectations.

But here’s the thing. If the highest plane to which we could aspire really was the flawless pursuit of abstract form then, and only then, remote working would be perfect. Form-fillers need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to prevent unplanned interactions. But we — and, I dare say, Generation Z too — hold on to the hope that professional work is something more than that.

After all, full-scale remote working is the reductio ad absurdum of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out. If this really were how business worked best, overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the risk of bumptious worker-drones like you and me having destructive bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. It would be some wonderful, Brazil-style autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while being overwatched by loving telescreens.

If depression and anxiety is skyrocketing among teenagers and young adults — I have no reason to disagree — then will letting them fester in isolation really help? Isn’t community and interpersonal interaction just what they need?

Summary

COVID has given us a vision of an adjacent possibility: a diffused, networked virtual working world where we no longer need to slog into a centralised “in person” office space. Is this the future of work, or an aberration?

Commentators fall into two camps: yes, this time it's different, and we should embrace our online world, and no, things ought to revert to their precovid mean, and if they don't, we should make them.

The former view, often advanced by millennials, linkedin thought leaders, and run of the mill futurologists, gets more play.

It found its articulation recently in a forlorn post from TikTok girl, a tearful generation Zer struggling with the strictures of a commute. Defenders leapt to her cause, not really paying it a great deal of attention, but reading into it a wider charge of complacency among corporate leaders in not recognising legitimate complaints: the daily grind is not for for purpose. In fact TikTok girl was only really complaining about her commute — but still.

We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.

In our view having overstated TikTok girl’s argument, her defenders tend to overstate their case. Actually, modern line in an office isn't too bad. Comparatively, Generation X have it pretty good.

And nor is it embittered gen Xers who want to compel everyone back into the office. Far from it. Most of them loved lockdown, and are among the strongest refuseniks.

Was lockdown a dry run for an alternative future, or a weird, sui generis aberration where usual rules were briefly interrupted, before the system began to reorganise around them? The benefits of lockdown to the organisation began to fade, even while employees hung onto their personal upsides of home working.

We should not be surprised that established staff prefer working from home. That is not the question that businesses have to answer. That is, is preferring the on-world to the off-world in the firm’s best interest?

We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error.

Final points

formal versus informal: remote working is at its best for work-to-rule people. applying policies, following rules, where interaction is not needed or even necessarily desirable.

but these are the people who are most at risk of technological redundancy: those are the jobs that really can, and should, be carried out by machine.