Talk:The future of office work

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.

Working in your jim-jams

I have, throughout this piece mischievously referred to home workers in their jim-jams, eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie on the sofa whilst dialed into a conference call and generally insinuating that remote workers might be, well, phoning it in. (That is, literally, the origin of the expression, “phoning it in”.)

This provokes outrage among some,l. I freely admit it is intended to.

“It is just wrong for you to imply that people who work from home necessarily take it easy. Some people have family commitments and personal circumstances being their control which mean they have to work from home. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen fifties. We are not living in a some episode of Mad Men. Smell the coffee, JC. Some people, frankly, just choose to work from home. They work better that way. We have the tools and capabilities, so why the hell shouldn’t they? They can be just as effective as the most grinding tube-jockey. It is grossly unfair of you to generalise.”

Now every word of this is true. But not one grasps the point, which is that this can all be true while a significant portion of home workers do take the Mickey , but more to the point, many office jockeys, deep in their blackest heart, will harbour this conviction. Punters actually do think this. It might not be fair, but they do. People are human: they justify themselves, like any pattern-matching generaliser, they make generalisations. Such as all other things being equal the more committed people turn up. (This is literally what it means to say, “I don't know what happened there. The Aresenal just didn’t turn up”.)

These metaphors tell us something deep about our cultural values. “He put a shift in”. “She really stood up.” “They represented.” “She went missing in action.” “he was awol”. “she seemed distant and uninvolved.” “She had real presence.” “This is all a bit remote”.