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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 [[chatbot]]s — need to come back in where they can by properly watched, audited, measured and periodically thinned.
+[[File:Battery hen.jpg|450px|thumb|center|[[Legal eagle]]s in their eyrie, yesterday.]]
+}}
+In these neurotic, bossy times we hear a lot about what is, or isn’t, the “new normal” and how employers — especially big institutional ones like banks and asset managers — might be “pivoting” back from the unexpected marvel of compulsory remote working — which let’s not forget, they were bounced into, to get them out of a [[COVID]] jam — to their more usual stentorian disposition, in which they insist employees must come to the office where they can be properly over-watched, audited, monitored, measured and assessed for periodic thinning.
-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?
+For the [[service line]] overlords have grown to increasingly distrust the staff in [[service delivery]] who make things go. They see them as a necessary but interim evil — one that they are stuck with until someone can figure out how to deploy the appropriate [[chatbot]]s to ensure continuity and excellence in [[service delivery]].
-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.
+But surely, [[the new normal]] is ''precisely'' the thing for which [[HR]] dogmatists have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. It is simply the logical conclusion of a push, in the name of cost reduction, that has dramatically changed the terms of engagement in office life.
-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.
+Simply put, office working circa 2020 is ''nothing'' like office working in 1990. If folks want to talk about the ''going back to the old normal'', that ship has long since sailed.
-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
+Over that time, employers have systematically dismantled the peripheral values that the office provides to workers, as if they are externalities that do not, except by accident, accrue to the worker. It has been an insidious, gradual erosion — a slowly boiling pot that has transformed 1990’s respected professional to 2020’s battery hen. Things a freshly minted clerk might have expected in 1990 — an office, privacy, discretionary [[travel and entertainment]] budget, an assistant to manage it, an internal mail service, typing pool, proofreaders — all have gone. Even the hardware the firm brought in to replace all of that has been taken away again: “bring your own device” anyone?
+As for that office space: the young clerk had first to share her office, then give it up it for a cubicle with a headset, then a just an un-barricaded dedicated desk, and nowadays has little more than a soft commitment that, all being well, there ''should'' be a spare terminal at a bank of desks that you can log into, assuming enough people are sick or on holiday, and you wipe it clean and sanitise it pursuant to the clewar desk policy before you leave for the day.  If there’s no room you can always log in on your own mobile — assuming you re happy to provide that. As the cleaning bots emerge, there is no trace of humanity. Almost all of this in the service of uniting cause: cost reduction.
+Employees, in the meantime, have kept up ''their'' end of the bargain unalloyed.
+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 subsidy for the cost we bore on our employers’ behalves might have been nice) BYOOP offers us so much more: we can fit it our office to our own specification, have an oak-panelled 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 telescreens and participate in exactly the same Skype video calls that we can do perfectly well from the comfort of our own book-lined dens, only with a larger screen, better coffee 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.
+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.