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 life for the employee.

There is a deal here, that is to say. The employment contract is a two sided affair. It is more than just work product delivered in one direction and money delivered in the other. Systematically, The Man has been pulling punches on his side of the bargain.

The ship has sailed

Simply put, the “new normal” was well and truly here long before the bats went crazy in Wuhan. It is a done deal. 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. There will be no return.

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

These emoluments were withdrawn piecemeal in a generational, insidious, erosion of paltry joys. Like frogs in a warming pot, respected professionals morphed, over 30 years, into battery hens.

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. And we won't even talk about the money.

Employees have, in the meantime, steadfastly kept up their own end of the bargain, unalloyed. Expanded, even: they are expected to be available at any time, in any place, on their own device and at their own expense.

But suddenly, the battery hens have had a taste of la dolce vita — albeit spread across their own dining-room table — and many of them won’t want to give that up. Out of the blue an apple has, for once, fallen on our side of the fence.

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 own office, as grandiose or grubby as we like. We can have photos of departed pets, printouts of those faxed Larson cartoons and whale music in the background if we want, and the chief operating officer need not 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 happier and more productive — I mean, who would have thought? — is it any wonder the thought of slogging, on our own dollar, back into a drab central location to sit at a telescreen like one of the Tomorrow People, participating 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?

See also

• Coronavirus