Talk:The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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Being of Generation Z — ''just'' — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort. And her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience: she is 25, self-employed with a Bloomberg column and a podcast. | Being of Generation Z — ''just'' — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort. And her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience: she is 25, self-employed with a Bloomberg column and a podcast. | ||
But that makes her an outlier, not an archetype: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination, so | But that makes her an outlier, not an archetype: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination at all, let alone aged 25, so she barely represents the [[lived experience]] of even her immediate cohort — affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals — let alone the young people of rural China or even metropolitan Istanbul. | ||
Still, she tells us not to snigger: TikTok Girl is ''right''.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref> | |||
She starts with some potted anthropology — | She starts with some potted anthropology — agrarian societies worked during daylight hours and gave up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution — and it took Henry Ford (not ''usually'' a Gen Z pin-up, but still) to recognise he would get more out of his workers by paying more and asking less. | ||
So was born the nine-to-five, | So was born the nine-to-five, Scanlon argues, and the industrial world has, arbitrarily, stuck with it ever since. But the nature of how we now are — networked, digital, online — and what we now do — we’ve pivoted from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]]. | ||
Let’s take | Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an average agrarian day in the fields, or who, exactly, stuck with the eight-hour work day, since it definitely wasn’t the financial services industry or their professional advisors<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 let’s be clear: an eight-hour day in an air-conditioned office with a commute each side of it is ''no great trial''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working from home. | ||
But are there other reasons to think things have changed? Scanlon argues that, unlike production line jobs, services jobs can be delivered remotely. | |||
{{Quote| | {{Quote| | ||
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:—''Anon''.}} | :—''Anon''.}} | ||
In a | In a sense it is true: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] has proved it. But this is like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. Is the ''best'' way of delivering services to have staff sequester themselves in their box rooms and interact solely through the medium of Slack, Zoom and Teams? | ||
In that it constrains communication to formal, metered, monitored push channels, this should at least not be taken for granted. See last week’s piece on the org chart. | |||
Is there something different, then, about Generation Z? ''Yes'': | |||
{{quote| | {{quote| | ||
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.}} | 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.}} | ||
This is something that could only come from the Generation Z. | |||
Why don’t we change, then? Scanlon attributes this to intransigence, and a little bit, to embittered generations who themselves went through the meatgrinder, and don’t see why the next generation shouldn’t too. | |||
Boomers expect everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not ''smart'' work, is a kind of religion. | |||
{{quote| | |||
“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. ... [but] to be unable to envision a future different from the present is pea-brained.”}} | |||
And that seems to be it: beyond saying we shouldn’t mock younger generations (I’m not sure why not: they seem happy enough to mock older ones) and we shouldn’t close our minds to new ways of working, which is certainly true, but those new ways of working really need to be different. | |||
None of Scanlon’s reasons are new. Circadian rhythms have been out of whack since threshers collapsed in a heap in front of the fire in the seventeenth century. Max Weber’s “iron cage” of hierarchy, rules, and process has been with us since, well when Weber noticed it, in 1904. | |||
=== Jemima Kelly’s argument === | === Jemima Kelly’s argument === |