New normal

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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 — might be “pivoting” back from the unexpected marvel of compulsory remote working — which let’s not forget, they were bounced into, to get out of a COVID jam — to their more usual stentorian disposition, in which they insist their staff must present at the office where they can be properly over-watched, audited, monitored, measured and assessed for periodic thinning.

But surely, the new normal is precisely the thing for which our friends in human resources have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. It is only the logical conclusion of the generational push, in the name of cost reduction, to deprecate the experience of office work for the employee.

The ship has sailed

Simply put, office working in 2020 is nothing like it was in 1990. If you want to talk sagely about the “going back to the old normal”, well sorry, chump: that ship has long since sailed.

Over thirty years, employers have systematically dismantled almost all the peripheral value office life gives workers. They have treated them as regrettable externalities that should not, except by accident, accrue to the worker. Things a junior clerk might have expected in 1990 like an office, privacy, travel and entertainment budget, an assistant, an internal mail service, a typing pool, proofreaders — all of these have gone. Even the hardware the firm brought in to replace it has been taken away again: now the workers must bring their own.

They were withdrawn piecemeal in a generational, insidious, erosion of the paltry joys office life once offered. Meanwhile, like frogs in a warming pot, respected professionals turned themselves battery hens. Now, suddenly, the battery hens have had a taste of la dolce vita — albeit spread across their own dining-room table — and many of them aren’t going to want to give that up.

Take, for example, office space. The young clerk had first to share her office, then give it up it for a cubicle, then an un-barricaded desk in a row. Nowadays she has a soft commitment that, as long as at least the projected number of coworkers are sick or on holiday, there should be a spare terminal she can log into, but she must wipe clean and sanitise it in compliance with the clear desk policy, before leaving for the day. And these workers are the lucky ones: they haven’t — yet — been jettisoned in favour of the proverbial school-leaver from Bucharest.

They have instead, in the meantime, steadfastly kept up their own end of the bargain, unalloyed.

Home working as the next logical step

In many ways, “bring your own premises” is really just the logical next step. This is probably where the COO wanted to take things anyway. In any case, COVID has let the genie out of the bottle: just as we found BYOD an unexpected blessing BYOOP offers us so much more: we trade a sterilised rectangle of desk-space for our office however we like it. We can have an oak-panelled study, portraits of departed pets and whale music in the background if we fancy it, and no chief operating officer need care a row of buttons.

And since we have seen that possibility, and not just seen it but proven effortlessly, over a sustained period, that it makes us more productive — I mean, who would have thought? — is it any wonder that the thought of slogging, on our own dollar back into a drab central location only to sit at telescreens like Tomorrow People and participate in exactly the same Skype calls that we could do from home, only with a larger screen, better coffee and a guitar handy for those lengthy mutable spells — really doesn’t appeal?