Talk:The future of office work

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.

Working in your jim-jams

throughout this piece I have, mischievously, referred to remote staff working “from the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, or “eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie, on the sofa while dialled into the stakeholder weekly check-in call” and generally insinuating that remote workers might be, well, phoning it in.

This may provoke indignance. I freely admit it is meant to.

“It is just wrong for you to imply that remote workers all take it easy. Some have personal circumstances beyond their control. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen-fifties. We are not living in a Mad Men episode. Some people choose to work from home. They work better that way. Wake up and smell the coffee, JC. We have the tools and capabilities to work away from the downtown office, so why the hell shouldn’t we use them? You are perpetuating grossly unfair stereotypes.”

Now, every word of this is true.

But it is to miss the point, which is this: whether they are right to or not, many office workers, deep in their blackest heart, do think remote work is a soft option. They might not say this in public, but they do. It might not be rational or fair, but they do. This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to justify their own contribution against others’ — to elevate and aggrandise it. A really easy way to do this is by comparing visible effort. There is, in western culture a deeply ingrained conviction in the virtue of commitment and, all other things being equal, committed people show up.

Our metaphors denoting commitment, or the lack of it, tell us about our common cultural values. By and large they, equate effort and energy with physical contact and presence:

“He really put a shift in on this”.
“She has a real presence”.
“Stay close on this one”.
“Keep on top of it”.
“Stay engaged during the final stages of the project.”

And we associate half-heartedness with distance:

“He phoned it in”.
“The Arsenal just didn’t show up in the second half”.
“It was an unengaging performance”.
“She went missing in action”.
“He was AWOL when we needed him”.
“She seemed a bit distant in the meeting today”.
“Sorry, I was miles away".

Yes, this is a heuristic; yes, it is unsupported by data; yes, it leads to gross mis-valuations of those who work remotely — but it exists, and it runs deep. It sits in a cultural pace layer, below even the infrastructural layer. It may not be causal, but nor did it arise by accident: it reflects a common historical experience. The perception may shift, but only slowly, and only if the historical experience no longer holds.

The lack of a causal link between presence and effort just makes the association harder to break: in the same way the many piss-takers and half-hearts who do “turn up” every day don’t create an association between presence and disengagement, nor will a notable minority who are more effective from home, or work harder, or with more practical commitment, break the opposite perception. They will be considered exceptions: they will be credited for their extraordinary commitment in spite of they fact that they work from home, not because of it. Only if most remote workers demonstrate more practical commitment might that perception shift.