The future of office work

Office anthropology™ The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ →Go Premium intro sa Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1959) Resources and Navigation The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungle Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Essays

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COVID’s aftermath will reverberate long after the last “keep your distance and wash your goddamn hands” notice has faded from the public space. Whether or not the pandemic was a black swan — the arguments for and against are tiresome — our sudden dislocation gave us a rare chance to see what happens in a time of worldwide, unexpected change. Not a single change manager engaged, no business continuity plan invoked, and yet, in businesses great and small across the globe, the change went through overnight and without a hitch.

Not even in a time of war has the entire citizenry been restricted to private quarters for months on end.

And we learned some new things: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!

As the COVID tide receded, thought leaders in the marketplace of ideas took to LinkedIn and Twitter to grapple with what it all meant for the future of work. They fell broadly into two camps: everything and nothing

The first — advanced by the thought-leaderati and legal disruptor crowd — was to say, “this time is different”: the scales have fallen, we are no longer in the ’60s and even though we can leave our homes without being arrested, we shouldn’t have to, and a diverse and dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters now requires flexibility so, since we now know the business can manage it — right? — there is no reason it shouldn’t. You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.

The second — The Man’s — was, “get back into the the office, punks”. With a twist: The Man teetered for a while between “I’m not having these good-for-naught meatsacks in their goddamn pyjamas on my dime”, and the more squirrelly “hold on: if these clowns work at home on their own PCs we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our IT bill so let’s not rush this”. The two impulses then merged and The Man compromised by ditching half the office space and ordering everyone back to work.

Gen Z Girl

The debate has coagulated around poor Gen Z Girl, tearfully confiding to TikTok the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a normal day and commute home again. Predictable mockery from some quarters, spirited defence from others.

It isn’t COVID any more

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, our productivity rose during lockdown. But COVID was a weird, sui generis time:

First, there was nothing else to do, bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work.

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 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, 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 opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, MIS dashboards and 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. Everyone 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.

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.

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.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 satisfies the formal model of what it is to work, but largely fails the informal one.

Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart

“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production.

— James C.Scott, Seeing Like A State

There are two ways of viewing a firm: vertically — via its org chart, which depicts the firm as a kind of root system whose ley-lines radiate out from the top centre, and laterally, by starting from any node on the network, and tracking where, when and how often that node interacts with the others. The first is the firm’s formal structure — how it might looks if in a portrait, framed, and at rest — the second its informal structure — how it looks when in action. The first is static; the second dynamic.

The formal structure is the view from the executive suite. Sedate; cool; analytical, but essentially inert. But the workplace looks very different up close, from the worker’s perspective. There, we see, and react to, what is in front of us: we help out, we keep eyes peeled, we go beyond our remit, we ignore or truncate obviously inappropriate procedures, and take a view on marginally relevant policies. These are informal actions: well meant, fundamentally benign, constructive to the organisation but they are totally invisible to central management. We deal with them because we can see them, and the CEO can’t. Where we contravene established rules we do so with the best of intentions — it is inevitable that some rules are out of date, misconceived, badly framed or ineffective. This is why employees are better than machines. They can take a view.

These interventions are necessarily ad hoc. They depend on us being there, in the right place, able to act — seeing what’s going on. This informal, buzzy, analogue communication channel needs to be wide open. It is the same channel of the mythical watercooler moments, where sudden flashes of inspiration, or fast thinking that averts disaster — a disaster averted is one the CEO will never know about — or accidentally discovers penicillin, Velcro, post-it notes, Teflon, vulcanising rubber or potato crisps.

Now it is not to say that these serendipities can’t happen in a remote environment, but they are necessarily harder.

But a firm working purely according to its formal communication lines, strictly according to its documented policies and procedures is, literally, in a “work-to-rule” — once a popular form of industrial action, shy of an outright strike. To work-to-rule was to refrain from doing anything or exercising any judgment, effort, energy, time or discretion beyond what is officially required — to obey only the formal lines of the org chart — as a means of choking productivity and pressuring management into better working conditions.

This kind of

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).

But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.

At the moment, the connection is only with facetime and presenteeism: “attendo, ergo sum” — all beset around with cuddly but dubious ideas such as “the importance of watercooler moments” and “the spark of spontaneous creativity that only arises through unexpected physical interactions in the office”. But you will spend a long time embedded in the legal department of an multinational bank before witnessing serendipitous sparks of ingenuity. The risk is that this winsome commitment to physical serendipity commutes to cynical suspicion that what these people do, in or out of the office, doesn't add up to a great deal.

Form and substance

So we see impassioned please from Bank administrators for their employees to return to the office at least three days a week. And it is fascinating to see how formalized they are about this. Rather than assessing value added, increased productivity, or rate of generation of serendipitous spontaneous creative sparks, we here Citibank proposing to deny bonuses to staff who do not turn up at least three days a week.

About that serendipitous opportunity

Working from home — the logical final step in the modernist programme of systematically digitising human capital, reducing the prestigious, professional, ineffable to the quotidian, standardised and algorithmic —

See also

• Org chart
• Work-to-rule
• Bring your own premises