The future of office work

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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.

TikTok Girl and the future of work

The debate has coagulated around poor TikTok Girl, tearfully confiding her social media channel the exhausting experience of having to commute, work an eight-hour day and then commute home again. Predictable mockery from some quarters, spirited defence from others.

I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and i am in person, and I am commenting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, crazy.

TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is Kyla Scanlon, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million followers of her frenetic tiktoks, podcasts, tweets, blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, just, she has the lived experience to weigh in and recently did so.

Back in the day, she says, agrarian societies worked daylight hours only giving up their circadian rhythms when forced to by the industrial revolution. It took Henry Ford — not your classic Gen Z pin-up, but hey — to realise he would get more out of his workers if he paid them properly and gave them time off. So was born, apparently, the nine-to-five: visionary, but that was a hundred years ago.

Things have changed. The nature of how we now are — networked, digital and online — and what we now do — delivering services like “B2B SaaS” instead of making goods in factories — means it’s different this time.

Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked a regular agrarian day out in the fields, or who still uses the eight-hour day, since it definitely isn’t the financial services industry or its professional advisors — but as we do, dispense a bit of tough parental love: an eight-hour day in an office downtown with a commute each side of it is, across the epochal sweep of human perseverance, no great imposition. It might be dull, sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working in your jim-jams from the kitchen table.

So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs can be delivered remotely.

Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.

But is Scanlon’s conception of what her generation, in general, can reasonably expect from professional working life any less informed by the world she inhabits personally? Hers is a trajectory few twenty-somethings can sensibly aspire to. Look, if they could be financial services influencers, they would. Wouldn’t we all? But the market is small.

But, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: Can we change? What? And how?

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

—Anon.

In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid proved it. But this is a bit like saying we can eat peas with a knife. Work in professional services — IT, law, finance, accounting, design, architecture, consulting — is inherently collaborative, in the way “social media influencing” isn’t. Is the best way of collaborating to have your people sequester themselves in their box rooms, interacting solely through the media of Slack, Zoom and Teams? And is it best for them: Digital natives are as captive as the rest of us to the urge for advancement, compensation, stimulation and kudos, and your best shot at that is if you are there, on the spot, when the opportunity arises. Few will stop and ring around the home-workers to see who’s about, if there’s a bright-eyed youngster right in front of you, raring to go.

And seeing as digital communication constrains us to formal, metered, monitored channels, this should at least not be taken for granted. See last week’s piece on the org chart.

Is there something different, then, about Generation Z that makes them more suited to a different rhythm? Yes, says Scanlon:

... Gen Z, grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.

Look, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. Unprecedented challenges? Really?

There were barely and civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights you’d recognise, beyond suffrage, until the boomers won them for you. No-one had even thought of trans rights. South Africa was apartheid, Berlin was partitioned, there were hot wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel and of course the big Cold one between East and West. There was an out-of-control nuclear arms race: people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning. There were civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and a famine which only Boomer Bob Geldof could fix, and multiple military coups d’état, in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and plenty of other places, and revolution in Iran. There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and meanwhile across Europe, Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt and the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called Never Mind The Bollocks, there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, while the other side the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe slowly went to violent pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes. The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, Dutch elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and dig Nik Kershaw, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked — and there was no internet.

Things were really shit in the decades before you were born, kids.

She might object she is talking only about that professionally educated cohort that is already in the Bay area, or Hoxton. But that’s not how it works: ambitious kids, however formally educated, work like tyros, wherever they are. If there’s an advantage to being there in person, they’ll take it. They will show up in the office even if you don't. They will get in earlier and work later if you do. These are the ones who will compel you to get to the office, if you want to get ahead, not “embittered boomers”.

But, Scanlon might say, “okay, but that was then. Thanks, and all, but it is different now. Why don’t we change now?” She puts it down to intransigence and, a little bit, to we of the embittered prior generations, who trot out commonplaces like the screed above, and don’t see why the next generation can’t suck it up too.

“Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of ‘I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible’ or some variation of that. … [but] to be unable to envision a future different from the present is pea-brained.”

And that seems to be it: beyond saying we shouldn’t mock younger generations — personally, I’m not sure why not: they seem happy enough to mock us — and we shouldn’t close our minds to new ways of working — which is certainly true, but those new ways of working really need to be different.

None of Scanlon’s reasons are new. Circadian rhythms have been out of whack since barley threshers collapsed in a heap in front of the fire in the Seventeenth Century. Max Weber’s “iron cage” of hierarchy, rules, and process has been with us since, well when Weber noticed it, a hundred and twenty years ago.

If things really will change, these aren’t the arguments.

The FT’s Jemima Kelly — a few years older than Scanlon and “best known for snark, sarc & Sark” against the run of play added her support. too.

Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?

Good questions, but again: is this time different? No-one — except maybe Jamie Dimon and Steven Schwartzman — glorifies the daily grind. Like greed, it isn’t actually good, so much as inevitable. We have configured the way we work — the grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping and box ticking. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest art, the highest aspiration of professional life.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be our fault for giving them false expectations. But here is the thing. If the high modernist ideals of our consultant overlords were true, and the highest plane to which we could aspire was the flawless pursuit of abstract form: checking boxes, following policies, giving approvals, pushing buttons — then, and only then, remote working would be perfect. For bureaucrats need no interaction. Bureaucrats are there to prevent unplanned interaction.

If this really were how business worked, overheads would be slashed, IT and real-estate infrastructure outsourced to the staff, and the scope for bumptious worker-drones to have bright ideas and flashes of inspiration would be pared back to the minimum. This would be some kind of Gilliamesque autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while the overwatched by loving telecreens. But it would work.

In any other universe, getting together in a central office appeals.

We need to work out how to get the balance right between the Zoomer-style coddling and the Boomer-style stiff upper lip — that’s tricky.

Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable Nietzsche, but 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.

It isn’t COVID any more

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:

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

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 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”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (But if the geology suddenly moves, everything else moves pronto!)

Adjacent pace layers interact with each other and thereby the system self-regulates: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny, new and destabilising and so command our attention; slow layers store deep system knowledge and stop the system failing and so should command our respect.

How fashion changes the world: slowly

So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight. It must persist until the commercial layer has embraced it. The shift in the commercial layer must, in turn, persist even longer to influence the infrastructural and governance layers it sits on.

The personal computer revolution — think IBM 386, Apple IIe, Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 — started as a fad. As it persisted, it picked up commercial momentum and the infrastructure began to respond to the ongoing commercial demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic (bless you, Global Crossing!) — created more capacity. This in turn enabled novel applications for networked computers, which in turn provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage and to lay more cable: this positive feedback loop was a strong system effect.

Twenty years later that infrastructure allowed services industries to make their extraordinary instant pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that system effect not been running for twenty years, the COVID experience may have been very different. (Such are the impossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way).

COVID and the adjacent possible

We often hear the argument put that COVID was the “black swan” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed. No one could credit that we could all work remotely. The barriers to trying it out were too high. It took an Act of God to push us across the threshold: Once we moved through that door the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.

But this is to make an assumption that layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too — namely cultural and biological ones — and that some veil had hitherto concealed this better way of working from the collective, for decades: the tools that enabled remote working were not new. Nor, indeed, was remote working.

Nor was the concept or remote work any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: relocating subsidiary and administrative tasks away from head office — outsourcing and offshoring — is a central dogma of modern management, as the JC frequently complains: “bring your own office” was really just its final logical step. So, if it really were an effective way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?

Humans have worked together in communal offices for hundreds of years. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution. But it is not like our communal office model was settled at a stroke in 1760 and never subsequently changed. It has iterated, adapted, updated and evolved ever since. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, the typewriter, postal services, telex, fax machines, computer networks, email and the internet. Human collaboration models have constantly adapted, always tending to local maxima.

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? This is the question: has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new local maximum?

Now COVID’s biological and governance imperatives have gone, remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — ideally better than modern communal working does. It might to that if it solves new problems or presents new opportunities we didn’t know we had until 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