Talk:The future of office work

Summary

COVID has given us a vision of an adjacent possibility: a diffused, networked virtual working world where we no longer need to slog into a centralised “in person” office space. Is this the future of work, or an aberration?

Commentators fall into two camps: yes, this time it's different, and we should embrace our online world, and no, things ought to revert to their precovid mean, and if they don't, we should make them.

The former view, often advanced by millennials, linkedin thought leaders, and run of the mill futurologists, gets more play.

It found its articulation recently in a forlorn post from TikTok girl, a tearful generation Zer struggling with the strictures of a commute. Defenders leapt to her cause, not really paying it a great deal of attention, but reading into it a wider charge of complacency among corporate leaders in not recognising legitimate complaints: the daily grind is not for for purpose. In fact TikTok girl was only really complaining about her commute — but still.

We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.

In our view having overstated TikTok girl’s argument, her defenders tend to overstate their case. Actually, modern line in an office isn't too bad. Comparatively, Generation X have it pretty good.

And nor is it embittered gen Xers who want to compel everyone back into the office. Far from it. Most of them loved lockdown, and are among the strongest refuseniks.

Was lockdown a dry run for an alternative future, or a weird, sui generis aberration where usual rules were briefly interrupted, before the system began to reorganise around them? The benefits of lockdown to the organisation began to fade, even while employees hung onto their personal upsides of home working.

We should not be surprised that established staff prefer working from home. That is not the question that businesses have to answer. That is, is preferring the on-world to the off-world in the firm’s best interest?

We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error.

Final points

formal versus informal: remote working is at its best for work-to-rule people. applying policies, following rules, where interaction is not needed or even necessarily desirable.

but these are the people who are most at risk of technological redundancy: those are the jobs that really can, and should, be carried out by machine.

Songs of innocence and experience

It is tempting to blame the call back to the office on the older generation. Jemima Kelly blames “the usual grumblings of old age”. Kyla Scanlon derides “pea-brains” who “can’t envision a future different than the present”.

But, over the long term by which this cultural shift will be measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. If a system effect will draw people back into offices it will come from the bottom. Not, that is, from grumpy boomers, nor management, but from people wanting your job.

Oh what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

— William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, from Songs of Innocence (1789)

We are not fixed in time and space. Each of us is on a private life journey. At the start, we sing a song of innocence: we have little to offer but energy, effort and longevity. But then we learn. We practice. We get better. We get experience. By degrees, our relative value shifts from energy and time to wisdom and judgment.

We get old.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

— William Blake, “London”, from Songs of Experience (1794)

By the end, we sing songs of experience. The boomers have almost gone now. Generation X — short years ago a bunch of scrappy, stroppy, hungry upstarts — are now worldly-wise, world-weary and valued not for energy but experience. They have little left to prove: what advancement they stood to gain happened, or didn’t, but the ship has sailed. They have little further need for their elbows. (Those with the sharpest elbows are already out of sight). If someone will pay them a decent wage to work from home, then happy days. These are not the cohort trying to force anyone back to the office. Why would they?

Remember the dynamic at the front end of the labour curve, where new generations enter it: the main point of difference between graduates is energy. Graft. Expertise and skill comes later. Now, organisations need to find people with energy. Equally, graduates seeking jobs, and those with jobs seeking advancement, will want to demonstrate it.

And, culturally, how do we symbolise energy and effort? We turn up.

So as the seasons turn, and existing graduates grow into subject matter experts, existing subject matter experts move on and yet new generations, with boundless energy, enter the workforce, it is not hard to see the system effect at work. We of the COVID generation will eventually leave the workforce. Those with the personal circumstances, experience and relationship capital to justify it, will continue to work remotely, as they always did. And the rest will tend back to the office.

Until the next pandemic.