The future of office work

Office anthropology™ The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ →Go uptown intro sa Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1959) Resources and Navigation The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungle Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Essays

In its abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature Burgess Shale — a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity.

It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers.

COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one change manager was ready for it or, for that matter, needed. The world just changed. No strategies were presented, no consultants engaged, no business continuity plans invoked: there was no time. Around the world businesses great and small, coped. (It rather begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, change managers and BCM programmes do, but that is another story.)

We adapted. We learned: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!

As the lockdowns rolled off, there was no great snap back to the previous regime. Thought-leaders took to LinkedIn to grapple with What It All Means For The Future Of Work. Broadly, they fell into two camps: “everything has changed,” and “nothing has”.

“Everything has changed”

The first said, “this time is different. There is no going back”.

The scales have fallen, we are no longer in the ’60s and though we can now leave our homes without being arrested, we shouldn’t have to any more. A diverse, dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters requires flexibility. Since we now know business can manage it — right? — there is no reason it shouldn’t.

You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.

“Ditch the jim-jams and get back to work”

The second said, “get back into the the office, punks”.

The Man — for it was mostly The Man saying it — teetered for a while, between, “I’m not having these good-for-naught meatsacks in their pyjamas on my dime” and the more squirrelly, “hang on: if these clowns work at home we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our technology spend so let’s not rush this”. Sometimes these two impulses merged, and businesses ditched office space and ordered everyone back to work.

TikTok Girl and the future of office work

The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around an unlikely, tearful graduate whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”, confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again.

“I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, crazy.”

As the formidable thought-leadership we expect from “the marketplace for ideas” went through its machinations, there was predictable mockery from some quarters and spirited defence from others.

The arguments on both sides have been pretty flimsy.

For the future of office work depends not on what we would like to happen nor, really what The Man would like to happen — but on how the complex system we inhabit behaves.

That, in turn, depends on human incentives and the behaviour of different components in the system. These will only play out over a long period of time.

Behavioural incentives are subtle. They have a habit of confounding expectations that things will quickly, and permanently, be different in a way we all find easier and better.

We have seen the sudden, delightful difference COVID wrought upon the system by forcing it to stop dead in its tracks. The system — we — somehow improvised a brand-new mode of operation that suited the hard, artificial, temporary constraints the system was under. We made it work.

This is not necessarily permanent. Now those constraints have eased, we should expect to see the system revert to how it used to behave, however perversely, unless there are selfish, opportunistic and persistent reasons for it to behave in another way which is even more perverse.

That is the question: what has, really, fundamentally changed to the commercial world because of COVID? What is there about what we do now that wasn’t possible — or at least thinkable — before?

It isn’t COVID any more

To be sure, working from home during COVID was, for a certain type of middle-aged white-collar worker, a revelation. People like the JC. During lockdown we reacquainted ourselves with the local ’hood — that neighbours’ WhatsApp group still going strong, amirite? — clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, trampled down our green spaces, avoided the tube and still, by most measures, our productivity rose.

But. COVID was a weird, sui generis time:

First, there was nothing else to do, bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work.

Second, all the usual work distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes that humanise the experience of being penned up for eight hours a day — were abruptly cut off. Since we were each isolated in our own private hell — or heaven, as the case may be — there were no “watercooler moments”, no sotto voce carping about the boss, no frank exchanges about last night’s Celebrity Love Island — we just got on with what we were meant to be doing.

Third, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just us who was disoriented. Middle management was discombobulated too. The work-creation machine struggled to find people whose time it could waste: everyone was out of sight, out of mind. For a time, the calendar was blissfully bereft of opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, MIS dashboards and line manager one-to-ones. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things.

Now, the bureaucratic industrial complex got its act together soon enough, but it took a while to get back to peak entropy. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid — you don’t have to pick up — and even when they finally got the weekly workstream catchup back up online it was a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom.

Lastly, there was no competitive advantage. Everyone was in the same boat. How it would have played out, had Goldman been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote? Who would have done better? There was no control group. Maybe being in the office would have been even more productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can choose their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we do. We will see.

Just because things worked during lockdown, it doesn’t mean they work best that way, nor that the changes COVID wrought are secular or permanent. The productivity bump faded as lockdown ground on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease off on the gas grew.

Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight.

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

Stewart Brand had the insight to envision the onward progress of a complex system through the interaction of revolving concentric layers of significance, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. Brand’s “pace layering” metaphor describes many kinds of complex system, but is especially well-suited to human ones like markets and workplaces.

The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that, “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (If the geology moves unexpectedly, everything else moves pronto!)

The interacting adjacent pace layers regulate and stabilise the system: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny, new and potentially destabilising and so command our attention; slow layers store deep system knowledge, steady the ship and stop the system failing and so should command our respect. In a human system the layers also reflect embedded practices, learning, ways of working, and individual positions in the hierarchy. The pace layers describe existing “power structures”.

How fashion changes the world: slowly

So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight, however good it seems. It must persist until the commercial layer, and those who wield influence there, have embraced it. The shift in the commercial layer must, in turn, persist even longer to influence the infrastructural and governance layers it sits on.

To take a germane example: the personal computer revolution — think IBM 386, Apple IIe, Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 — started as a fad. As it persisted, it picked up commercial momentum. The infrastructure began to respond to the demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic (bless you, Global Crossing!) — created more capacity. More computers shipped. They developed in sophistication. Macintosh. Windows. They were in turn able to handle more complicated applications. Computers networked. This in turn provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage and to lay more cable: this positive feedback loop was a strong system effect. It has been running for decades. It is still running. We are somewhat at its mercy.

Twenty years later that infrastructure allowed services industries to make their extraordinary instant pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that system effect not been running for twenty years, the COVID experience may have been very different. (Such are the impossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way).

A word about pyjamas

Throughout this article I have mischievously described remote workers “at the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, “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 they might be, well, phoning it in.

This may provoke indignance. 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. Some choose to work from home. Some just work better that way. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen-fifties. We are not living in a Mad Men episode. Wake up and smell the coffee, JC. We have the capabilities to work away from the downtown office, so why the hell shouldn’t we? You are perpetuating grossly unfair stereotypes.

Now, every word of this is true.

But it doesn’t matter. For many office workers, deep in their blackest hearts, do think remote work is a soft option. It might irrational, unfair, or wrong — but they do. They might not often say it out loud, but this is what they think.

This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to justify their own worth and belittle others’. An easy way to do this is by visible effort.

And what a good proportion of the people in a system think conditions how the system, over the long run, behaves.

COVID and the adjacent possible

We often hear, therefore, the argument put that COVID was the “black swan” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed.

No one could credit that everyone could work remotely. The required investment, the necessary planning, the contingency planning, the difficult business case: the barriers to taking the necessary risk, with inarticulable benefits, were too high.

It took an Act of God to push us across the threshold: once we moved through that door the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.

But this is to assume that cultural layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too, and that some veil has, until now concealed from us this better way of working.

After all, the tools to implement remote working are hardly new. Nor is “remote working” any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: “offshoring” subsidiary and administrative tasks is a foundational dogma of modern management, as the JC frequently complains. “Bring your own office” was really just its final logical step. So, if it really were an effective universal way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?

Humans have worked together in communal spaces for hundreds of years. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution. But it is not like our communal office model was settled at a stroke in 1760 and never subsequently changed. It has iterated, adapted, updated and evolved. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, partitions and cubicles, the typewriter, postal services, telex, fax machines, computer networks, email and the internet.

Human collaboration models are constantly adapting, always tending to local maxima. Like the rare successful legal technology implementations, we just don’t notice them because they don’t feel, for long, like innovations. They feel like furniture.

COVID provided, for a brief moment, the biological imperative to be distant, overriding all other considerations. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by effortlessly coping. Commerce carried on, in rude health. But COVID has stopped now.

But we have been networked for decades. Is the fact that we still congregated, until COVID, just a matter of habit? Are our cultural and biological impulses to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? Has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new local maximum?

If this is a permanent shift remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — and do it better than modern communal working does. It might do that if it solves new problems, or presents new opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic showed us.

But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only non-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life. We can only judge that over forty years: not four.

And middle-agers — with accumulated wealth, nice houses, home offices and expensive pyjamas, who have largely exhausted practical avenues for career advancement — are not the ones to judge. They will soon be long gone.

Energetic, hungry youngsters, who don’t yet have home offices and nice PJs, for whom success is yet a potential not an actual, who are hungry to learn, change the world, advance, get preferment and take over the wheel from the comfy fifty-somethings — they will shape working culture over the next twenty years. Are they likely to do that working from home?

Cultural stereotypes about presence and commitment

There is a deeply ingrained cultural conviction that commitment is a cardinal virtue. All other things being equal, people who are committed are people who show up.

Common metaphors for commitment, or the lack of it, equate effort and energy with 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”.
“Are you with us?”
“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.

Being shocked into looking round corners

To be sure, there is a tension between this societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and see what could be different — the “adjacent possible”. Now we know that the business can operate indefinitely without anyone showing up at the office, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise.

Clearly, some things are better. Not having to take the tube is better. We can agree with TikTok Girl about that. But equally, not everything is. Our zoom avatar is a not-always-on, two-dimensional approximation of what we really are. It satisfies the formal model of what it is to work, but largely fails the informal one.

Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart

“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State

There are two ways of viewing a firm: vertically — via its org chart, which depicts the firm as a kind of root system whose ley-lines radiate out from the top centre, and laterally, by starting from any node on the network, and tracking where, when and how often that node interacts with the others.

The first is the firm’s formal structure — how it might look in a portrait, framed, and at rest — the second is its informal structure — how it looks when in action. The first is static; the second dynamic.

The formal structure is the view from the executive suite. Sedate; cool; analytical, but essentially inert.

But the workplace looks very different up close, from the worker’s perspective. There, we see, and react to, what is in front of us: we help out, we keep eyes peeled, we go beyond our remit, we ignore or truncate obviously inappropriate procedures, and take a view on marginally relevant policies. These are informal actions: well meant, fundamentally benign, constructive to the organisation but they are totally invisible to central management. We deal with them because we can see them, and the CEO can’t. Where we contravene established rules we do so with good intentions — it is inevitable that some rules are out of date, misconceived, badly framed or ineffective. This is why employees are better than machines. Employees can take a view.

These interventions are necessarily ad hoc. They depend on us being there, in the right place, able to act — seeing what’s going on. This informal, buzzy, analogue communication channel needs to be wide open. It is the same channel of the mythical watercooler moments, sudden flashes of inspiration, or the engineer’s quick thinking improvised patch that averts a potential disaster the CEO will, now, never find out about — or that accidentally discovers penicillin, Velcro, post-it notes, Teflon, vulcanising rubber or potato crisps.

Now it is not to say that these serendipities can’t happen in a remote environment, but just that it makes them necessarily harder.

Bullshit jobs

Counterpointing this is business manager’s subconscious suspicion that much of what staff do from day to day is essentially meaningless.

Few, other than the late David Graeber, say it out loud, but the implication of an offshoring, outsourcing, and downskilling strategy is that current employees, in the office, are not worth what they cost.

But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.

Still there is that tension between the accountants — who see the opportunity to shrink the downtown footprint — and the HR folk who basically do not trust staff any further than they can throw them, which is nowhere near as far away as their own box-rooms and kitchen tables.

We expect this tension to resolve in favour of HR, for the simple reason that something that really can be done remotely is probably so formalistic that it ought not need to be done at all.

Songs of innocence and experience

It is tempting to blame the siren call of the office on “the usual grumblings of old age”, or “pea-brains” who “can’t envision a future different than the present”.

But over the long term, by which cultural shifts measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. Any system effect that draws people back into physical offices will be prompted by the people entering the system, not those leaving it. If won’t be grumpy boomers driving this, but young people wanting jobs.

Oh what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

— William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, from Songs of Innocence (1789)

We are not fixed in time and space. We are each on our own private life journey. At the start, we sing only songs of innocence: we have little to offer but energy, effort and time. But then we learn. We practice. We get better. We grow. We experience. We get old.

By degrees, our relative value shifts from energy and time to wisdom and judgment.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

— William Blake, “London”, from Songs of Experience (1794)

By the end, we sing only songs of experience. We who, short years ago, were scrappy, stroppy, hungry upstarts — are now worldly-wise, world-weary and valued not for our energy but our experience. We have little to prove: what advancement we stood to gain happened, or didn’t, but either way the ship sailed. We have little further need for elbows: those who had them, used them and by now are long since out of sight. If someone will pay us a decent wage to work from home, happy days.

This is not the cohort trying to force anyone back to the office. Why would we? That would mean we had to come back. too. Who amongst Generation X wants that? Lockdown rocked.

But there is a group who wants that.

Remember the dynamic at the front end of the labour curve, where new generations enter it: a graduate’s main point of differentiation from her peers is energy: expertise and skill comes later. Organisations need to find people with energy. Graduates seeking jobs, and those with jobs seeking advancement, want to show it.

And, culturally, how do we symbolise energy and effort?

We turn up.

So as the seasons turn, and existing graduates grow into subject matter experts, existing subject matter experts move on and yet new generations, with boundless energy, enter the workforce, it is not hard to see the system effect at work. We of the COVID generation will eventually collect our belongings. Those with the personal circumstances, experience and relationship capital to justify it, will continue to work remotely, as they always did.

And the rest will tend to go to the office —

Until the next pandemic.

See also

• Org chart
• Work-to-rule
• Bring your own premises

References

In its abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature Burgess Shale — a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity. It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers.

COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one change manager was ready or, as it turned out, even needed. The world just changed. No strategies needed presenting, not consultants were engaged, no business continuity plans were invoked. There was not time.

Yet, in businesses great and small, all around the world, profound change went through, without warning, overnight, with barely a hitch. (It rather begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, change managers and BCM programmes do, but that is another story.)

For never, not even in a time of war, has even one nation’s citizenry been quarantined indefinitely for months on end, let alone all of them. We quickly adapted, and quickly learned: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!

As the immediate lockdowns ended, there was no great snap back to the previous regime. Many stayed at home, at least for part of the week. Some thought this was a good idea, others did not.

Thought-leaders took to LinkedIn to grapple with What It All Means For The Future Of Work and fell broadly into two camps: “everything has changed,” and “nothing has”.

Everything has changed

The first said, “this time is different. There is no going back”.

The scales have fallen, we are no longer in the ’60s and though we can now leave our homes without being arrested, we shouldn’t have to any more. A diverse, dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters requires flexibility. Since we now know business can manage it — right? — there is no reason it shouldn’t.

You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.

Ditch the jim-jams

The second said, “get back into the the office, punks”.

Well: The Man teetered for a while, between, “I’m not having these good-for-naught meatsacks in their pyjamas on my dime”, and the more squirrelly, “hang on: if these clowns work at home we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our technology spend so let’s not rush this”. Sometimes these two impulses merged, and businesses ditched office space and ordered everyone back to work.

TikTok Girl and the future of work

The debate chuntered on. Recently, it coagulating around poor “TikTok Girl”, a tearful grad confiding to her TikTok account the exhausting experience of having to commute, work an eight-hour day and then commute home again.

“I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, crazy.”

Cue predictable mockery from some quarters, spirited defence from others.

Notable among TikTok Girl’s supporters was Kyla Scanlon, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million followers of her own frenetic TikToks, podcasts, tweets, blogs and so on.

For context on the 9-to-5, Scanlon gives us a potted history of industrial relations, starting with agrarian societies who worked “only” daylight hours (sounds fun, right?), until forced to give this up by “Big Machine” during the late industrial revolution.

Scanlon credits Henry Ford — not your classic Gen Z pin-up, but hey — for realising he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a century ago, was born the nine-to-five.

Scanlon thinks things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why, but declares it is now time they did. The nature of how we now are — networked, digital and online — and what we now do — delivering services like “B2B SaaS,” instead of making old-fashioned widgets in factories — means it is “time to progress again”.

Let’s park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an agrarian day out in the fields, whether one can sensibly equate factory production lines with a modern offices, or who it is that is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour day, since it wasn’t any service industry the JC has ever been involved in — but as we do, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.

Look: an eight-hour day in an office, even with a commute at each end, across the great sweep of human endurance, is not that much to ask.

Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there. The nature of work — what we do, how we do it, and who does it — has changed out of all recognition. Until quite recently, “white collar” professional occupations, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work.

The conversion of this remote enclave into a military-industrial complex in which the traditional professions were joined by a slew of new ones — audit, accountancy, engineering, marketing, branding, human resources, design, architecture, technology, management and operations — happened only in the 1980s and from it a brand new category of labour has emerged: a complex system of work with its own evolving customs, conventions and modes of operation.

Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.

But the questions still remains: Can we change? What? And how?

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

—Anon.

In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid proved it. But this is a bit like saying we can eat peas with a knife. Work in modern professional services is inherently collaborative. Is the best way of collaborating to have your people sequester themselves in their box rooms, interacting solely through the media of Slack, Zoom and Teams?

Is there something different, then, about Generation Z that makes them more suited to this different rhythm? “Yes,” says Scanlon:

“Gen Z grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.”

Look, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. “Unprecedented challenges?” If Kyla Scanlon is allowed to dispense history lessons, then we should be able to as well.

Such civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights as there were, the boomers won them. No-one had even thought of trans rights.

South Africa was apartheid, Berlin partitioned — the whole of Europe was partitioned, come to think of it — and there were international wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and multiple military coups d’état in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and while Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. Meanwhile across the western world the cold war jacked up political tension such that the nuclear arms race was out-of-control, people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning.

The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt, the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called Never Mind The Bollocks, there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, famine in Africa, while Eastern Europe slowly went to pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes.

The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, Dutch Elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and listen to Phil Collins and Level 42, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked — and there was no internet.

Things were shit in the decades before you were born, kids.

Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly sided with Team TikTok Girl, too.

Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?

Good questions, but again: is this time different? Few people glorify the daily grind. We have configured the way we work — the grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping and box ticking. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest art, the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the beast. If you don’t find it edifying — and on David Graeber’s account of it, why would you? — the answer is to find something else to do.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be our fault for giving them false expectations. But here is the thing. If the high modernist ideals of our consultant overlords were true, and the highest plane to which we could aspire was the flawless pursuit of abstract form: checking boxes, following policies, giving approvals, pushing buttons — then, and only then, remote working would be perfect. For bureaucrats need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to prevent unplanned interactions.

And remember, full-scale remote working is the reductio ad absurdum of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out. If this were really how business worked best overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the scope for bumptious worker-drones to have bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. This would be some kind of Gilliamesque autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while the overwatched by loving telecreens.

In any other universe, getting together in a central office has great appeals which outweigh the attractions of staying at home.

We need to work out how to get the balance right between the Zoomer-style coddling and the Boomer-style stiff upper lip — that’s tricky.

Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable Nietzsche, but die Kriegsschule das Leben is no more than counsel to seek out antifragility. In that spirit, if the choice is between coddling and stiff upper lip, it is easy: stiff upper lip, every time.

It isn’t COVID any more

Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. During lockdown we reacquainted ourselves with the local ’hood, clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, trampled down our green spaces, avoided the tube and still, by most measures, our productivity rose.

But COVID was a weird, sui generis time:

First, there was nothing else to do, bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work.

Second, all the usual work distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes that humanise the experience of being penned up for eight hours a day — were abruptly cut off. Since we were each isolated in our own private hell — or heaven, as the case may be — there were no “watercooler moments”, no sotto voce carping about the boss, no frank exchanges about last night’s Celebrity Love Island — we just got on with what we were meant to be doing.

Third, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just us who was disoriented. Middle management was too. The busy-bodies and bureaucrats struggled to find people whose time they could waste: out of sight, out of mind. For a time, the calendar was blissfully bereft of opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, MIS dashboards and line manager one-to-ones. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. To be sure the bureaucratic industrial complex got its act together soon enough, but the work-creation schemes took a while to get back to peak entropy. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid — you can decline to answer ths call — and even when the weekly workstream catchup finally got back up online it was a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom.

Lastly, there was no competitive advantage. Everyone was in the same boat. How it would have played out, had Goldman been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote. Who would have done better? There was no control group. Maybe being in the office would have been even more productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can choose their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we do. We will see.

Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked best that way, or that the change wrought is secular and permanent. In any case, the productivity bump faded as lockdown carried on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease up increased.

What remained was a way of working where informal information flow — those quick chats , bumpings into, and vibes dried up. The firm began to resemble its formal model: a work-to-rule.

Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight.

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

Stewart Brand had the fabulous insight to imagine the onward progress of a complex system through the interaction of revolving concentric layers of significance, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. Brand’s “pace layering” metaphor describes many kinds of complex system, but is especially well-suited to human ones.

The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that, “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (But if the geology suddenly moves, everything else moves pronto!)

Adjacent pace layers interact with each other and thereby the system self-regulates: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny, new and destabilising and so command our attention; slow layers store deep system knowledge and stop the system failing and so should command our respect.

How fashion changes the world: slowly

So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight. It must persist until the commercial layer has embraced it. The shift in the commercial layer must, in turn, persist even longer to influence the infrastructural and governance layers it sits on.

The personal computer revolution — think IBM 386, Apple IIe, Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 — started as a fad. As it persisted, it picked up commercial momentum and the infrastructure began to respond to the ongoing commercial demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic (bless you, Global Crossing!) — created more capacity. This in turn enabled novel applications for networked computers, which in turn provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage and to lay more cable: this positive feedback loop was a strong system effect.

Twenty years later that infrastructure allowed services industries to make their extraordinary instant pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that system effect not been running for twenty years, the COVID experience may have been very different. (Such are the impossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way).

COVID and the adjacent possible

We often hear the argument put that COVID was the “black swan” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed. No one could credit that we could all work remotely. The barriers to trying it out were too high. It took an Act of God to push us across the threshold: Once we moved through that door the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.

But this is to make an assumption that layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too — namely cultural and biological ones — and that some veil had hitherto concealed this better way of working from the collective, for decades: the tools that enabled remote working were not new. Nor, indeed, was remote working.

Nor was the concept or remote work any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: relocating subsidiary and administrative tasks away from head office — outsourcing and offshoring — is a central dogma of modern management, as the JC frequently complains: “bring your own office” was really just its final logical step. So, if it really were an effective way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?

Humans have worked together in communal offices for hundreds of years. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution. But it is not like our communal office model was settled at a stroke in 1760 and never subsequently changed. It has iterated, adapted, updated and evolved ever since. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, the typewriter, postal services, telex, fax machines, computer networks, email and the internet. Human collaboration models have constantly adapted, always tending to local maxima.

Then came COVID. For a brief moment, the biological imperative, to be distant, overrode everything else. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by coping. Commerce carried on, in rude health.

But we had been networked for decades. Was the fact that we still congregated until COVID just a matter of habit? Is our cultural and biological impulse to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? This is the question: has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new local maximum?

Now COVID’s biological and governance imperatives have gone, remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — ideally better than modern communal working does. It might to that if it solves new problems or presents new opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic illustrated them.

But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only non-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life-cycle. We must judge that over forty years: not four.

And we middle-agers, with our wealth, nice houses, home offices and expensive pyjamas, who have largely exhausted our practical avenues for career advancement even if we do show up — we are not the ones to judge. We will be long gone. Energetic, hungry youngsters, who don’t yet have home offices and nice PJs, for whom success is yet a potential not an actual, who are hungry to learn, change the world, advance, get preferment and take over the wheel from the comfy fifty-somethings — they will shape working culture over the next twenty years. They aren’t likely to do that working from home.

A word about pyjamas

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.

Being shocked into looking round corners

To be sure, there is a tension between this societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and see what could be different — the “adjacent possible”. Now we know that the business can operate indefinitely without anyone showing up at the office, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise.

Clearly, some things are better. all other things being equal, not having to take the tube is better. We can agree with TikTok Girl about that. But equally, not everything is. Our zoom avatar is a not-always-on, two-dimensional approximation of what we really are. It satisfies the formal model of what it is to work, but largely fails the informal one.

Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart

“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production.

— James C.Scott, Seeing Like A State

There are two ways of viewing a firm: vertically — via its org chart, which depicts the firm as a kind of root system whose ley-lines radiate out from the top centre, and laterally, by starting from any node on the network, and tracking where, when and how often that node interacts with the others.

The first is the firm’s formal structure — how it might look in a portrait, framed, and at rest — the second is its informal structure — how it looks when in action. The first is static; the second dynamic.

The formal structure is the view from the executive suite. Sedate; cool; analytical, but essentially inert.

But the workplace looks very different up close, from the worker’s perspective. There, we see, and react to, what is in front of us: we help out, we keep eyes peeled, we go beyond our remit, we ignore or truncate obviously inappropriate procedures, and take a view on marginally relevant policies. These are informal actions: well meant, fundamentally benign, constructive to the organisation but they are totally invisible to central management. We deal with them because we can see them, and the CEO can’t. Where we contravene established rules we do so with the best of intentions — it is inevitable that some rules are out of date, misconceived, badly framed or ineffective. This is why employees are better than machines. They can take a view.

These interventions are necessarily ad hoc. They depend on us being there, in the right place, able to act — seeing what’s going on. This informal, buzzy, analogue communication channel needs to be wide open. It is the same channel of the mythical watercooler moments, sudden flashes of inspiration, or the engineer’s quick thinking improvised patch that averts a potential disaster the CEO will, now, never find out about — or that accidentally discovers penicillin, Velcro, post-it notes, Teflon, vulcanising rubber or potato crisps.

Now it is not to say that these serendipities can’t happen in a remote environment, but just that it makes them necessarily harder.

Bullshit jobs

Counterpointing this is business manager’s subconscious suspicion that much of what staff do from day to day is essentially meaningless.

Few, other than the late David Graeber, say it out loud, but the implication of an offshoring, outsourcing, and downskilling strategy is that current employees, in the office, are not worth what they cost. Why else would you pursue one?

But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.

Still there is that tension between the accountants — who see the opportunity to shrink the downtown footprint — and the HR folk who basically do not trust staff any further than they can throw them, and certainly can’t throw them as far as their own box-rooms and kitchen tables. We expect this tension to resolve in favour of HR, for the simple reason that something that really can be done remotely is probably so formalistic that it ought not need to be done at all.

Songs of innocence and experience

It is tempting to blame the siren call of the office on “the usual grumblings of old age”, or “pea-brains” who “can’t envision a future different than the present”.

But over the long term, by which cultural shifts measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. Any system effect that draws people back into physical offices will be prompted by the people entering the system, not those leaving it. If won’t be grumpy boomers driving this, but from people wanting jobs.

Oh what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

— William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, from Songs of Innocence (1789)

We are not fixed in time and space. We are each on our own private life journey. At the start, we sing only songs of innocence: we have little to offer but energy, effort and time. But then we learn. We practice. We get better. We grow. We experience. We get old.

By degrees, our relative value shifts from energy and time to wisdom and judgment.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

— William Blake, “London”, from Songs of Experience (1794)

By the end, we sing only songs of experience. We who, short years ago, were scrappy, stroppy, hungry upstarts — are now worldly-wise, world-weary and valued not for our energy but our experience. We have little to prove: what advancement we stood to gain happened, or didn’t, but either way the ship sailed. We have little further need for elbows: those who had them, used them and by now are long since out of sight. If someone will pay us a decent wage to work from home, happy days.

This is not the cohort trying to force anyone back to the office. Why would we? That would mean we had to come back. too. Who amongst Generation X wants that? Lockdown rocked.

But there is a group who wants that.

Remember the dynamic at the front end of the labour curve, where new generations enter it: a graduate’s main point of differentiation from her peers is energy: expertise and skill comes later. Organisations need to find people with energy. Graduates seeking jobs, and those with jobs seeking advancement, want to show it.

And, culturally, how do we symbolise energy and effort?

We turn up.

So as the seasons turn, and existing graduates grow into subject matter experts, existing subject matter experts move on and yet new generations, with boundless energy, enter the workforce, it is not hard to see the system effect at work. We of the COVID generation will eventually collect our belongings. Those with the personal circumstances, experience and relationship capital to justify it, will continue to work remotely, as they always did. And the rest will tend back to the office —

Until the next pandemic.

See also

• Org chart
• Work-to-rule
• Bring your own premises