Talk:The future of office work: Difference between revisions

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''.  

 

Yes, this is a heuristic; it is unsupported by data; it leads to gross mis-valuation of work contributions, but it exists, and it runs deep.

 

Our metaphors denoting commitment, o 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 really needed him”. “She seemed a bit distant in the meeting today”. “Sorry, I was ''miles away''".

 

These cultural values sit in a layer below the infrastructure. They are not arbitrary: they reflect a common historical perception. It may shift, but only slowly, and ''only if that perception is no longer true''.