New normal
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We hear a lot about what is and what isn't the new normal and how institutional employers night be pivoting back from the marvel of uniform remote working, to get them out if a covid jam, to a more stentorian insistence that employees, whom they have grown to distrust and even resent — to suffer, as some kind of interim but necessary evil until they can configure the right chatbots — need to come back in where they can by properly watched, audited, measured and periodically thinned.
This covid crisis is all very well, and we'll done, but really isn't it time we got ourselves back to the old normal?
But the new normal is exactly the thing for which HR dogmatists have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. Over that time they have exhausted all the value they could from their side of the bargain, leaving their employees with none. In thirty years the status of the knowledge worker, as we are now called (it used to be a profession) has moved from professor to battery hen. This has been insidious, gradual erosion of the respect and affordances paid to professionals - office space, privacy, business cards, a car park, a discretionary travel and entertainment budget, secretarial assistance to manage it, even IT hardware (“bring your own device” anyone?). Almost all of this in the service of uniting cause: cost reduction.
In many ways “bring your own office premises” was no more than the logical next step, but in any case, covid has let the genie out of the bottle: just as we found byod a blessing in many ways (though some sybsidisa night have been nice) byoop offers us so much more: we can fit it our office to out own specification , have an oak paneled study if we fancy it, and no chief operating officer in the firm need care a row of buttons about it.
Now we have seen that possibility, is it any wonder that the thought of spending hours a day commuting (at our own expense) back and forth into an office where we can expect to sit like battery hens at thin client telecreens and participate in exactly the same Skype video calls that we can do perfectly well from the comfort of our own book-lined dems, only with a larger screen, better coffee and and electric guitar handy for those lengthy spells where operations give their monthly budget update to the management opco
The bargain is a two way street: I employ my intellectual capital in furtherance of your commercial aims: you afford me consideration —partly, but not entirely in the form of money — to do that.
HR generalists are long on gasbagging about the lessons of behavioural psychology, but short on putting them into practice.