The future of office work: Difference between revisions

Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable [[Nietzsche]], but ''[[military school of life|die Kriegsschule das Leben]]'' is no more than counsel to seek out [[antifragility]].  In that spirit, if the choice is between coddling and stiff upper lip, it ''is'' easy: stiff upper lip, every time.

Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. During lockdown we reacquainted ourselves with the local ’hood, clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, trampled down our green spaces, avoided the tube and still, by most measures, our productivity ''rose''.  

 

But COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time:

Second, all the usual work distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes that humanise the experience of being penned up for eight hours a day — were ''abruptly cut off''. Since we were each isolated in our own private hell — or heaven, [[as the case may be]] — there were no “watercooler moments”, no ''sotto voce'' carping about the boss, no frank exchanges 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. The busy-bodies and bureaucrats struggled to find people whose time they could waste: out of sight, out of mind. For a time, 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]]. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. To be sure the bureaucratic industrial complex got its act together soon enough, but the work-creation schemes took a while to get back to peak entropy. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid — you can decline to answer ths call — and even when the weekly workstream catchup finally got back up online ''it was a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom''.

Lastly, ''there was no competitive advantage''. Everyone was in the same boat. 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? ''There was no control group.'' 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 choose 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 wrought is secular and permanent. Sure, there was an initial productivity bump, as all distractions were sponged off the agenda without replacement.  

And those incidental interactions do tend to generate their own work: the number of people with whom you can “socialise” a problem you should probably solve yourself— 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, the productivity 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 way of working where informal information flow — those quick chats , bumpings into, and vibes dried up. The firm began to resemble its formal model: a [[work-to-rule]].  

[[Stewart Brand]] had the fabulous insight to imagine the onward progress of a [[complex system]] through the interaction of revolving concentric layers of significance, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. Brand’s “[[pace layering]]” metaphor describes many kinds of complex system, but is especially well-suited to human ones.  

The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture” and finally “biology” and “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest.