The future of office work: Difference between revisions

Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. We reacquainted ourselves with our local neighborhoods, clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, got to know green spaces, avoided the tube and still by most measures, productivity still ''rose'' during lockdown. But we should not close the book just yet. COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time, and it lent itself to ephemeral productivity boost.

Second, all those in-office distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes of humanity that are the inevitable [[externality]] of penning humans up in air-conditioned battery farms — were ''abruptly cut off''. Since each person was isolated in 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'' — we just got on with what we were meant to be doing.  

Third, when we ''did'' that, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just ''us'' who was disoriented. Middle management was too. All the busy-bodies and bureaucrats struggled to glom on to people whose time they could waste: out of sight, out of mind. The calendar was blissfully bereft of [[opco]]<nowiki/>s, [[Steering committee|steerco]]<nowiki/>s, [[stakeholder]] check-ins, [[Management information and statistics|MIS]] dashboards and [[Line manager|line manager one-to-ones]]. Even meetings that ''could'' have gone ahead online vanished from the calendar. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. The bureaucratic military industrial complex got its act together soon enough, and the work-creation schemes returned, but things took a while to get back to how they once were. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid, and even when the weekly operational robustness legal and compliance workstream catchup goes online ''it is a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom''.

Lastly, ''there was no competitive advantage to lockdown''. Every firm was in the same boat. We don’t know how it would have played out, relatively, 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 in a time of cholera 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.