New normal

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In our 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 disposition of outright distrust, in which staff must present themselves at on premises, where they can be properly over-watched, audited, monitored, measured and assessed for periodic thinning.

Tech start-up hysteria notwithstanding, the institutional disposition has thus settled: calm the hell down, everyone. We’ve got this. There’s nothing to see: this is not a new normal. Old normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Do not adjust your mindset.

Au contraire. For the new normal is precisely the thing for which our friends in human resources have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. It is the logical conclusion of management’s generational push, in the name of cost reduction, to deprecate the office experience for the employee.

For the employment contract is a two-sided affair. The employee delivers a work product, but her consideration is a more subtle and nuanced thing than mere money. It is the status, facility, and eminence that a professional occupation bestows. It is a sense of progression. There is a deal, that is to say, and institutions have been reneging on it for thirty years.

Over that time employers have systematically dismantled most of the peripheral benefits of office life, treating them as regrettable externalities that should not avoidably accrue to their staff. So, 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These emoluments were withdrawn piecemeal in a long-term doctrinaire erosion of paltry joys. Like frogs in a warming pot, workers tolerated those thousand cuts as each one came and went. Over that period they were transformed from respected professionals 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 she is one of the lucky ones: here role hasn’t — yet — been reassigned to a school-leaver from Bucharest.

Yet in the meantime, she has steadfastly kept up her own end of the bargain, unalloyed. Expanded, even: she must now be available at any time, in any place, on her own device and at her own expense.

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.

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 BYOP 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.

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

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

• Bring your own premises
• Coronavirus