Talk:The future of office work

shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?}}

Good questions, but again: is this time different? Who really glorifies the daily grind? We have configured the way we work — our grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping, box ticking and ticket-clipping. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the deal.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be their parents’ fault — we of Generation X — our fault for giving unrealistic expectations.

But here’s the thing. If the highest plane to which we could aspire really was the flawless pursuit of abstract form then, and only then, remote working would be perfect. Form-fillers need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to prevent unplanned interactions. But we — and, I dare say, Generation Z too — hold on to the hope that professional work is something more than that.

After all, full-scale remote working is the reductio ad absurdum of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out. If this really were how business worked best, overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the risk of bumptious worker-drones like you and me having destructive bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. It would be some wonderful, Brazil-style autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while being overwatched by loving telescreens.

If depression and anxiety is skyrocketing among teenagers and young adults — I have no reason to disagree — then will letting them fester in isolation really help? Isn’t community and interpersonal interaction just what they need?

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.