New normal

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Legal eagles in their eyrie, yesterday. In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

In these neurotic, bossy times we hear a lot about what is, or isn’t, the “new normal” and how employers — especially big institutional ones like banks and asset managers — might be “pivoting” back from the unexpected marvel of compulsory remote working — which let’s not forget, they were bounced into, to get them out of a COVID jam — to their more usual stentorian disposition, in which they insist employees must come to the office where they can be properly over-watched, audited, monitored, measured and assessed for periodic thinning.

For the service line overlords have grown to increasingly distrust the staff in service delivery who make things go. They see them as a necessary but interim evil — one that they are stuck with until someone can figure out how to deploy the appropriate chatbots to ensure continuity and excellence in service delivery.

But surely, the new normal is precisely the thing for which HR dogmatists have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. It is simply the logical conclusion of a push, in the name of cost reduction, that has dramatically changed the terms of engagement in office life.

Simply put, office working circa 2020 is nothing like office working in 1990. If folks want to talk about the going back to the old normal, that ship has long since sailed.

Over that time, employers have systematically dismantled the peripheral values that the office provides to workers, as if they are externalities that do not, except by accident, accrue to the worker. It has been an insidious, gradual erosion — a slowly boiling pot that has transformed 1990’s respected professional to 2020’s battery hen. Things a freshly minted clerk might have expected in 1990 — an office, privacy, discretionary travel and entertainment budget, an assistant to manage it, an internal mail service, typing pool, proofreaders — all have gone. Even the hardware the firm brought in to replace all of that has been taken away again: “bring your own device” anyone?

As for that office space: the young clerk had first to share her office, then give it up it for a cubicle with a headset, then a just an un-barricaded dedicated desk, and nowadays has little more than a soft commitment that, all being well, there should be a spare terminal at a bank of desks that you can log into, assuming enough people are sick or on holiday, and you wipe it clean and sanitise it pursuant to the clewar desk policy before you leave for the day. If there’s no room you can always log in on your own mobile — assuming you re happy to provide that. As the cleaning bots emerge, there is no trace of humanity. Almost all of this in the service of uniting cause: cost reduction.

Employees, in the meantime, have kept up their end of the bargain unalloyed.

In many ways “bring your own office premises” was no more than the logical next step, but in any case, COVID has let the genie out of the bottle: just as we found BYOD a blessing in many ways (though some subsidy for the cost we bore on our employers’ behalves might have been nice) BYOOP offers us so much more: we can fit it our office to our own specification, have an oak-panelled study if we fancy it, and no chief operating officer in the firm need care a row of buttons about it.

Now we have seen that possibility, is it any wonder that the thought of spending hours a day commuting (at our own expense) back and forth into an office where we can expect to sit like battery hens at thin client telescreens and participate in exactly the same Skype video calls that we can do perfectly well from the comfort of our own book-lined dens, only with a larger screen, better coffee and electric guitar handy for those lengthy spells where operations give their monthly budget update to the management opco

The bargain is a two-way street: I employ my intellectual capital in furtherance of your commercial aims: you afford me consideration —partly, but not entirely in the form of money — to do that.

HR generalists are long on gasbagging about the lessons of behavioural psychology, but short on putting them into practice.