The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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[[The Man]] — for it was mostly [[The Man]] saying it — 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 Man]] — for it was mostly [[The Man]] saying it — 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. | ||
==== TikTok Girl and the future of work ==== | ==== TikTok Girl and the future of work ==== | ||
The debate chuntered on, recently coagulated around the unlikely figure of a tearful grad whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”,<ref>https://www.tiktok.com/@brielleybelly123/video/7291443944347405614</ref> confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again. | |||
{{quote| | {{quote| | ||
“I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, ''crazy''.”}} | “I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, ''crazy''.”}} | ||
Cue predictable mockery from some quarters | Cue predictable mockery from some quarters and spirited defence from others, as the formidable [[Thought leader|thought-leadership]] we expect from “the marketplace for ideas” <ref>I.e., [[LinkedIn]] and [[Twitter]].</ref> went through its machinations. In truth, the arguments either way were pretty flimsy, which prompted the JC to hold forth. | ||
How “the future of work” plays out depends not on what we think will happen, or would like to happen and nor, really what [[The Man]] thinks or would like to think will happen, but on emergent properties of the operation of a [[complex system]] having certain behavioural incentives. Behavioural incentives are typically subtle. They have a habit of confounding expectations — especially when you expect things to quickly, and permanently, be ''different''. | |||
We have seen sudden, delightful difference while the whole complex system was, exceptionally, obliged to stop dead in its tracks and then jury rig a brand-new mode of operation to suit a set of hard, artificial and temporary constraints. Now those constraints have eased, we should not be surprised to see the system start to revert to how it used to behave. | |||
==== It isn’t COVID any more ==== | ==== It isn’t COVID any more ==== | ||