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The future of office work: Difference between revisions

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The future of office work (view source)

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Who is right? Well, for the reasons stated, neither, but the JC reluctantly senses [[The Man]] is on the right side of history, but not for the reasons [[The Man]] ''thinks'' are the right ones.  
Who is right? Well, for the reasons stated, neither, but the JC reluctantly senses [[The Man]] is on the right side of history, but not for the reasons [[The Man]] ''thinks'' are the right ones.  


===It isn’t COVID any more===
==== It isn’t COVID any more ====
Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain age — older ones — a revelation. By some measures, productivity ''rose'' during lockdown, at least at first, but we should not close the book just yet. COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time, and it lent itself to ephemeral productivity boost.
Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain age — older ones — a revelation. By some measures, productivity ''rose'' during lockdown, at least at first, but we should not close the book just yet. COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time, and it lent itself to ephemeral productivity boost.


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Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked best that way, or that the change is permanent.
Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked best that way, or that the change is permanent.


===Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight.===
==== Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight. ====
{{Quote|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''.
{{Quote|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''.
:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}
:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}
Humans have worked together in communal offices since at least the industrial revolution. We’ve had the means to work remotely for a couple of decades. That we still congregate is no matter of “fashion”, nor commerce, infrastructure, or governance, and it is not simply because until now we haven’t had the choice. There are material benefits to being together. Our need for interpersonal communication is embedded in the “culture” layer — possibly even at the top end of “biology”. For the changes wrought by the pandemic to become permanent, now the infrastructural and governance requirement for staying away from the office have gone, they must be matters  not just of personal preference, or fashion, but they must also continue to optimise the “problems” of each successive layer. It might do, even if it is no longer solving not problems presented by a pandemic, if it solves ''other'' problems we didn’t know we had until the revelation of working from home illustrated them, and proved itself a better way of handling them. For that, snap judgments, motivated by the personal preferences of employees (look: who wouldn’t prefer to work in their pyjamas at the kitchen table, all else being equal?) won’t be the end of the matter. The suit and tie has still hung on, despite a twenty-year onslaught: there is a lot less common sense propelling that.
[[Stewart Brand]]’s pace layers, from the top down, are fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and biology. Humans have worked together in communal offices for over two hundred years — that was when the enabling ''infrastructure'' arrived to satisfy our ''cultural'' impulse to be together. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution.  


Only time will tell, as a generation steps through the working life cycle — but we can only judge that over forty years: not ''four''.  
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. 


We fifty-somethings, having by now acquired reasonable wealth and exhausted most of our practical avenues for career development or life change, are not the ones to judge. We are happy enough to swim lengths, clicking in and out remotely and connecting the paycheque as long as someone else is gormless enough to pay it to us. The merits of working downtown against the den in the attic. New entrants who are still hungry to learn, progress, take responsibility and relieve bored fifty-somethings of their executive responsibilities will shape culture over the next twenty years. We will be long gone.
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? 


===Being shocked into looking round corners===
For the changes to become permanent, now the biological and governance imperatives for staying away have gone, remote working must still satisfy cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives better than does communal working. They might if they solve ''new'' problems or present new opportunities we didn’t know we had until the 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''. 
On the other hand there is attention between our societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and examine the contents of doors in the adjacent possible. Now we know that businesses can operate remotely for extended periods, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise. Likewise, and entire aging generation of technophobes were forced to go online. This may mean that the usual impassioned please about post offices and Bank branches needing to remain open because elderly people don’t understand the internet will die more quickly than they might otherwise have done.
 
===Bullshit jobs===
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.
 
==== 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. But our zoom avatar is a not-always-on, two-dimensional approximation of what we really are.
It largely satisfies the formal model of what it is to work, but largely fails the informal one.
 
==== Working from home as codifying the org chart ====
There are two ways of looking at a corporate organisation: the vertical one, which is to see it as a kind of root system, connected centrally from the top, where one sees only its formal organisational lines, and the lateral one, which starts from any node on the network, and traces where, when and how often that node interacts with the others.
 
==== Bullshit jobs ====
Counterpointing this is the implicit fact that most businesses suspect that much of what their employees do from day to day is essentially meaningless. This is a buried, subconscious instinct — no one (other than the late [[David Graeber]]) says it out loud or even thinks it (it carries the  recursive risk that it may be true of one’s own job, so is best left unsaid and, ideally, unthought) — but it propels much of the modernist dogma of contemporary management: offshore in comma outsourcing, downskilling all must be predicated on the theory that what employees do isn't quite as hard as they like to make it out to be).
Counterpointing this is the implicit fact that most businesses suspect that much of what their employees do from day to day is essentially meaningless. This is a buried, subconscious instinct — no one (other than the late [[David Graeber]]) says it out loud or even thinks it (it carries the  recursive risk that it may be true of one’s own job, so is best left unsaid and, ideally, unthought) — but it propels much of the modernist dogma of contemporary management: offshore in comma outsourcing, downskilling all must be predicated on the theory that what employees do isn't quite as hard as they like to make it out to be).


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* [[Org chart]]
*[[Bring your own premises]]
*[[Bring your own premises]]
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