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.
Be careful what you wish for
But is not the new normal precisely the thing for which chief operating officers the world over have been wishing, carelessly, for thirty years? Is it not the logical conclusion of management’s generation-long push, in the name of cost reduction, to deprecate the office-working experience? For the “new normal” was here long before the bats went crazy in Wuhan. If you want to talk sagely about the “going back to the old normal”, well sorry, chump: that ship has long since sailed.
Over that time employers have systematically dismantled many “peripheral benefits” of office life, treating them as regrettable externalities that should not avoidably accrue to their staff. That is, where they can be persuaded not to dispense with professional staff at all. The temptation to outsource meaningful work altogether to an itinerant, gig-working school-leaver from Bucharest is one that many middle managers cannot resist.
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 — these fripperies have gone. The graduate clerk once had her own office — it might have been a coffin-sized, mouse-infested internal filing cupboard, but it was at least, marginally private. Then she had to share it, 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 somewhere in the department she can log into, as long as she wipes it down and removes her belongings it in compliance with the clear desk policy, before leaving for the day. As long as she brings something to log in with: even the hardware brought in to replace those erstwhile assistants has been taken away because it’s too expensive: the BlackBerry has gone: now she must bring their own. Tea, coffee — even paper cups have disappeared from kitchens; chocolate biscuits have disappeared from meeting rooms which, themselves, are slowly vanishing as we compress our working spaces.
The office has, long since, lost its appeal. Like frogs in a warming pot, we have tolerated the piecemeal withdrawal of emoluments: thousands of cuts in a long-term doctrinaire erosion of paltry joys. But the professions changed over that period: they were transformed into fungible, replaceable items of capital. In this way are personnel becoming plant.
Now all this would be fine for work that really could be operationalised: the history of technology, since the plough, has been the separation of simple tasks better done by a machine from complex ones that can only be done by the meatware. But, as we have argued elsewhere, for professional work, that separation is far easier said than done. As long as it has not been done — and it hasn’t — you run significant tail risk pulling your punches with staff whose expertise you might really need without warning at some point down the track.
For the employment contract is a two-sided affair, and the consideration the employee asks for her “work product” is more than mere money — a subtlety that eludes those whose abiding focus is in the cost, and not the value, of the firm’s resources. Besides money, professional employment bestows status, facility, and eminence — what Daniel Pink would summarise as “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”. It is hard to see any of these in a disinfected formica desk and a keyboard, or a permanent diet of Skype-conducted opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins and semi-annual compliance attestations.
Home working as the next logical step
In many ways, “bring your own premises” is really just the logical next step. We may have been going there 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 keep photos of our 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 can’t do a thing about it, even if he does.
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 and participate in exactly the same Skype calls that we could do from home, only with a crappier screen, worse coffee and no guitar for those lengthy mutable spells — really doesn’t appeal?