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The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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===It isn’t COVID any more=== | ===It isn’t COVID any more=== | ||
Working from home during COVID was, for white collar | Working from home during COVID was, for white collar types over a certain age, a revelation. Generally, it was an overwhelming, unexpected, success: by some measures, productivity ''rose'' during lockdown, at least in the early phases, but we should not close the case on this account. COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time. For many reasons. | ||
Firstly, away from work, there was ''nothing else to do'', bar listening to podcasts whilst pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from relatives and other humans. No wonder people threw themselves into work. | Firstly, away from work, there was ''nothing else to do'', bar listening to podcasts whilst pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from relatives and other humans. No wonder people threw themselves into work. | ||
Secondly, all those casual workplace interactions & interludes of unofficial humanity — you know, ''distractions'' — that are an inevitable but yet regretted [[externality]] of sequestering humans in glorified air-conditioned battery farms were ''abruptly cut off'' | Secondly, all those casual workplace interactions & interludes of unofficial humanity — you know, ''distractions'' — that are an inevitable but yet regretted [[externality]] of sequestering humans in glorified air-conditioned battery farms were ''abruptly cut off''. | ||
Thirdly, when they did | Since each person was isolated into her own private hell<ref>Or heaven, as the case may be.</ref> of solitary confinement, there were no “watercooler moments”, no ''sotto voce'' carping about the boss, no frank exchanges of view about last night’s ''Celebrity Love Island'' — so people, undistracted, just got on with it. | ||
Thirdly, when they ''did'' go to get on with it, to their delight they found it was not just ''they'' who were discombobulated. Middle management was, too. The bureaucrats struggled to adapt. They scrambled to find people’s time to waste. | |||
Suddenly, the calendar was 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. | 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. | ||