The future of office work: Difference between revisions

Cue predictable mockery from some quarters and spirited defence from others, as the formidable [[Thought leader|thought-leadership]] we expect from “the marketplace for ideas” <ref>I.e., [[LinkedIn]] and [[Twitter]].</ref> went through its machinations. In truth, the arguments either way were pretty flimsy, which prompted the JC to hold forth.  

How “the future of work” plays out depends not on what we think will happen, or would like to happen and nor, really what [[The Man]] thinks or would like to think will happen, but on emergent properties of the operation of a [[complex system]] having certain behavioural incentives. Behavioural incentives are typically subtle.  They have a habit of confounding expectations — especially when you expect things to quickly, and permanently, be ''different''.

We have seen sudden, delightful difference while the whole complex system was, exceptionally, obliged to stop dead in its tracks and then jury rig a brand-new mode of operation to suit a set of hard, artificial and temporary constraints. Now those constraints have eased, we should not be surprised to see the system start to revert to how it used to behave.

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:

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 the 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]].  

[[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 layering|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''.

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]].   

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 possible|adjacent possibilities]] changes forever.<ref>The “hero’s challenge”, in which the hero at first rejects the call to adventure until he is forced into it by circumstances beyond his control, is a favourite trope of Joseph Campbell ’s “monomyth”, as set out in {{br|The Hero with a Thousand Faces}}. Luke Skywalker rejecting the call of the Rebel Alliance until the Empire murders his aunt and uncle and destroys the family farm. It is an appealing figurative device — it appears in almost all movies these days — but our dappled moral world is rarely quite so cut and dried.</ref>

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 premises|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]], [[Facsimile|fax machines]], computer networks, [[email]] and the internet. Human collaboration models have constantly adapted, always tending to [[Local maximum|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.

Throughout this piece I have, mischievously, referred to remote staff working “from the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, or “eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie, on the sofa while dialled into the stakeholder weekly check-in call” and generally insinuating that remote workers might be, well, ''phoning it in''.  

This may provoke indignance. I freely admit it is meant to.  

The lack of a causal link between presence and effort just makes the association harder to break: in the same way the many piss-takers and half-hearts who ''do'' “turn up” every day don’t create an association between presence and disengagement, nor will a notable minority who are more effective from home, or work harder, or with more practical commitment, break the opposite perception. They will be considered exceptions: they will be credited for their extraordinary commitment ''in spite'' of they fact that they work from home, not because of it. Only if ''most'' remote workers demonstrate more practical commitment might that perception shift.

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.  

Few, other than the late [[David Graeber]], say it out loud, but the implication of an offshoring, [[outsourcing]], and [[Downgrading|downskilling]] strategy is that current employees, in the office, are not worth what they cost. Why else would you pursue one?<ref>For the record, the JC’s view is that a management team that pursues outsourcing and downskilling is not worth what it costs.</ref>

But over the long term, by which cultural shifts measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. Any [[system effect]] that draws people back into physical offices will be prompted by the people ''entering'' the system, not those leaving it. If won’t be grumpy boomers driving this, but from ''people wanting jobs''.