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The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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, 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]]s, [[Steering committee|steerco]]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 | 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 [[opco]]s, [[Steering committee|steerco]]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 did finally go online ''it was 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. | 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. | ||
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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. Sure, there was an initial productivity bump, as all the physical meetings were cancelled and distractions were sponged off the agenda without replacement. If you need to get stuff done without interruption, working from home is great. | Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked ''best'' that way, or that the change is permanent. Sure, there was an initial productivity bump, as all the physical meetings were cancelled and distractions were sponged off the agenda without replacement. If you need to get stuff done without interruption, working from home is great. | ||
And there is an element of work creation that comes from incidental interaction. The number of people with whom you | And there is an element of work creation that comes from incidental interaction. The number of people with whom you can “socialise” an issue — colour me cynical, but another way of saying that is, “the amount of the organisation’s time you can ''waste''” — depends on how many people you can get hold of. | ||
In any case, that bump faded as lockdown carried on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the | In any case, that bump faded as lockdown carried on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease up increased. | ||
What remained was a framework where the flow of informal information were shut off. The firm began to resemble its | What remained was a framework where the flow of informal information were shut off. The firm began to resemble its formal model: when it is at rest. | ||
==== Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight. ==== | ==== Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight. ==== | ||