Bring your own premises
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The reductio ad absurdam — sorry, my mistake: I mean logical conclusion — of middle management’s generational headlong stampede towards outsourcing all those messy externalities that are a by-product of needing human beings to carry out your business objectives.
There was a time where employment in the professions afforded status in society, and one had the accoutrements to match: an office with a mahogany desk, an Elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the corner, a minute secretary, an executive model Dictaphone, and so on.
As management dogma has systematically eroded these privileges in the name of cost reduction, the poor professional has been denuded of her status. Increasingly, she has been expected to supply her own accoutrements: do-it-yourself typing; bring your own device — and the same time that once commodious office became communal, then lost its door, then its walls, diminished to a dedicated space on along a row in a floor, then become a conditionally guaranteed space at some terminal somewhere in the building, provided ebnough people are out sick or on holiday and she could find a spare telescreen. While these progressions undoubtedly looked magnificent on that PowerPoint presentation to the steerco, we suspect that something important might have been obscured by in the winking row of uniform green RAG status signals on the workstream update dashboard. But — the prgamatist’s prayer, and all that.
Nonetheless, out of nowhere, Coronavirus bounced us all into a step further: you don’t get an office at all, but have to supply your own. As as aside, pity the poor, perma-prepared cub scouts from the business continuity management team — who have been waiting for literally decades for just such a catastrophe to spring into action and finally reveal their worth, but whom coronavirus largely snookered. Just when you need it, that sprawling warehouse near Luton Airport was no more suitable for operations than the premises in EC4!
Instead, employees were sent home. By and large, and to their great surprise, they found this an agreeable development. Suddenly the privacy, the space, the peace & quiet, the Elephant’s foot and the mahogany desk were back from nowhere.
The question now: is there any going back?