82,883
edits
The future of office work: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 8: | Line 8: | ||
===It isn’t COVID any more=== | ===It isn’t COVID any more=== | ||
It is true that working from home during COVID was, for professional office working types, an overwhelming success | It is true that working from home during COVID was, for professional office working types, a revelation and an overwhelming success. By some measures productivity ''rose'', at least in the early phases, but we should not close the case on this account. COVID was a weird, ''sui generis'' time. | ||
Firstly, away from work, there was absolutely nothing else to do bar listening to podcasts while walking around the prison perimeter at a safe distance from your immediate family. No wonder people threw themselves into work. | |||
Secondly, all those informal interactions and interludes of unofficial humanity — you know, ''distractions'' — that are a inevitable but regretted consequence of sequestering humans in an air-conditioned battery farm were suddenly cut off. There, as everyone was isolated in a form of solitary confinement, there were no “watercooler moments”, no ''sotto voce'' carping about the boss, no exchanges of views about last night’s ''Celebrity Love Island'' — so people kind of just got on with it. | |||
Thirdly, when they did, they found, to their delight, it was not just they who were discombobulated. Middle management was too. The bureaucrats took a while to adapt — to find people’s time to waste. Suddenly, the calendar was mainly bereft of all those opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, line manager one-to-ones. Weirdly, even [[All-hands conference call|online meetings]] that could have gone ahead got cancelled. So the meatware had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. As lockdown continued the middle management military industrial complex got its act together and the bureaucracy levels returned, but never quite got back to once they were. something about physical separation makes them harder to avoid, and even if the weekly operational robustness legal and compliance workstream catchup goes online ''it is a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom''. | |||
Lastly, every firm was in the same boat. ''There was no competitive advantage to lockdown''. We don’t know 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? 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 organise their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we ''do''. We will see. | |||
===Pace layers: things revert to how they were.=== | ===Pace layers: things revert to how they were.=== | ||