The future of office work: Difference between revisions

Scanlon credits Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — for realising he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a hundred years ago, was born the nine-to-five.  

Scanlon implies things have not since changed, without really explaining why she thinks that, but declares it is now time they did. 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 it is “time to progress again”.  

Let’s park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an agrarian day out in the fields, whether one can sensibly equate factory production lines with a modern offices, or ''who'' it is that is meant to have stuck with 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, even with a commute at each end is, across the great sweep of human endurance, ''not that much to ask''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question.  

(By the way, TikTok Girl herself mainly complains about the commute and seems to accept the working day is tolerable, yet has become a lightning rod for this bigger question.)

Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there. The nature of work — ''what'' we do, ''how'' we do it, and ''who'' does it — has changed out of all recognition. Until quite recently, “white collar” professional occupations were reserved for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite. The conversion of this remote enclave into a military-industrial complex in which the traditional professions (law, medicine and divinity!) exploded and were joined by a slew of new ones — audit, accountancy, engineering, marketing, branding, human resources, design, architecture, technology, management and operations —, happened only recently and has created an entirely new category of labour evolving its own customs, conventions and modes of operation as it has developed. It is its own complex system, dynamically adjusting how it works to the environment.

Things have certainly changed since Henry Ford’s day, but working practices have changed with them.

In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|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. 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?  

 

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''?

{{quote|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.  

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 the tendency of embittered prior generations to trot out commonplaces like the screed above, who instinctively think the next generation can 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.<ref>I doubt anyone actually says that, in so many words, but rather Scanlon imputes it.</ref> … [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 to swing it.

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.

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.

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|''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.