The future of office work: Difference between revisions

{{freeessay|work|working from home|{{image|sheeple|jpg|''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? {{vsr|1959}}}}}}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.  

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 leader|thought-leaderati]] and legal disruptor crowd — was to say, “[[This time it’s different|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 [[Meatware|meatsack]]s 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.  

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.

TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|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|followers]] of her frenetic tiktoks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]], blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, ''just'', she has the [[lived experience]] to weigh in and recently did so.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref>  

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.  

''[[This time it’s different|Things have changed]].'' The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]]” instead of making goods in factories — means [[this time it’s different|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<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — 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.