The future of office work: Difference between revisions

{{freeessay|work|working from home|{{image|sheeple|jpg|''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? {{vsr|1959}}}}}}As the inquest into what the politicians did and did not get right with COVID, the rest of the world is making its own assessment: what to make of it all? What can we learn? How do we do things differently? In its , abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature [[Burgess Shale]] —  a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity. It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers.

As seismic changes do, COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one [[change manager]] was ready or, as it turned out, even needed. The world just ''changed''. No strategies needed presenting, not consultants were engaged, no [[business continuity plan]]s were invoked. There was not time.  

Yet, in businesses great and small, all around the world, profound change went through, without warning, overnight, with barely a hitch. (It rather begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, [[change manager]]s and [[BCM]] programmes do, but that is another story.)

For ''never'', not even in a time of war, has even ''one'' nation’s citizenry been quarantined indefinitely for months on end, let alone ''all'' of them. We quickly adapted, and quickly learned: working from home is pretty cool! [[Pyjamas]]! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!  

As the immediate lockdowns ended, there was no great snap back to the previous regime. Many stayed at home, at least for part of the week. Some thought this was a good idea, others did not.  

 

===== Everything has changed =====

===== Ditch the jim-jams =====

Well: [[The Man]] teetered for a while, between, “I’m not having these good-for-naught [[Meatware|meatsack]]s in their pyjamas on ''my'' dime”, and the more squirrelly, “hang on: if these clowns work at home we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our [[technology]] spend so let’s not rush this”. Sometimes these two impulses merged, and businesses ditched office space ''and'' ordered everyone back to work.  

==== TikTok Girl and the future of work ====

The debate chuntered on. Recently, it coagulating around poor “TikTok Girl”, a tearful grad confiding to her TikTok account<ref>https://www.tiktok.com/@brielleybelly123/video/7291443944347405614</ref> the exhausting experience of having to commute, work an eight-hour day and then commute home again.  

 

 

 

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 century ago, was born the nine-to-five.

 

Scanlon thinks things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why, 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 old-fashioned widgets 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 wasn’t any service industry the JC has ever been involved in<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, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.

 

 

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, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work.<ref>Thus, the {{plainlink|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-6-3_Rule|3-6-3 rule}}: borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6, on the tee at 3pm.</ref>

 

The conversion of this remote enclave into a [[military-industrial complex]] in which the traditional professions were joined by a slew of new ones — [[audit]], accountancy, engineering, [[marketing]], branding, [[human resources]], [[design]], architecture, [[technology]], [[Management consultant|management]] and [[operations]] — happened only in the 1980s and from it a brand new category of labour<ref>Many of these are what [[David Graeber]] might call “[[Bullshit Jobs: A Theory|bullshit jobs]]”.</ref> has [[Emergent|emerged]]: a [[complex system]] of work with its own evolving customs, conventions and modes of operation.

 

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.}}

 

 

 

Is there something different, then, about Generation Z that makes them more suited to this 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?” If Kyla Scanlon is allowed to dispense history lessons, then we should be able to as well.

{{quote|Such civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights as there were, the boomers won them. No-one had even ''thought'' of trans rights.  

South Africa was apartheid, Berlin partitioned — the whole of Europe was partitioned, come to think of it — and there were international wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and ''multiple'' military ''coups d’état'' in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.  

There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and  while Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. Meanwhile across the western world the cold war jacked up political tension such that the nuclear arms race was out-of-control, people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning.  

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, 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, famine in Africa, while Eastern Europe slowly went to 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 listen to Phil Collins and Level 42, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked —  and there was ''no internet''.}}

 

 

Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly sided with Team TikTok Girl, 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? Few people ''glorify'' the daily grind. 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. That’s the beast. If you don’t find it edifying — and on [[David Graeber]]’s account of it, why would you? — the answer is to ''find something else to do''.

 

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|''form'']]: checking boxes, following policies, giving approvals, pushing buttons — then, and only then, ''remote working would be perfect''. For bureaucrats need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to ''prevent'' unplanned interactions.

 

And remember, full-scale remote working is the [[reductio ad absurdum]] of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out.  If this were really how business worked best overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the scope for bumptious worker-drones to have bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. 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.

 

In any other universe, getting together in a central office has great appeals which outweigh the attractions of staying at home.

 

 

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:

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. 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.  

“It is just wrong for you to imply that remote workers all take it easy. Some have personal circumstances beyond their control. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen-fifties. We are not living in a ''Mad Men'' episode. Some people ''choose'' to work from home. They work better that way. Wake up and smell the coffee, JC. We have the tools and capabilities to work away from the downtown office, so why the hell shouldn’t we use them? You are perpetuating grossly unfair stereotypes.”}}

Now, every word of this is true.  

But it is to miss the point, which is this: whether they are right to or not, many office workers, deep in their blackest heart, ''do'' think remote work is a soft option. They might not say this in public, but they do. It might not be rational or fair, but they do. This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to ''justify'' their own contribution against others’ — to ''elevate'' and ''aggrandise'' it. A really easy way to do this is by comparing ''visible effort''. There is, in western culture a deeply ingrained conviction in the virtue of commitment and, all other things being equal, ''committed people show up''.  

Our [[metaphor]]s denoting commitment, or the lack of it, tell us about our common cultural values. By and large they, equate effort and energy with ''physical contact'' and ''presence'':  

{{quote|

“He ''phoned it in''”.<br> “The Arsenal just ''didn’t show up'' in the second half”. <br>“It was an ''unengaging'' performance”. <br>“She ''went missing in action''”. <br>“He was ''AWOL'' when we needed him”. <br>“She seemed a bit distant in the meeting today”. <br>“Sorry, I was ''miles away''".}}

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.

Clearly, ''some'' things are better. all other things being equal, not having to take the tube is better. We can agree with TikTok Girl about that.  But equally, ''not everything'' is. 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.

:— [[James C. Scott|James C.Scott]], {{br|Seeing Like A State}}}}

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>

Still there is that tension between the accountants — who see the opportunity to shrink the downtown footprint — and the HR folk who basically do not trust staff any further than they can throw them, and certainly can’t throw them as far as their own box-rooms and kitchen tables. We expect this tension to resolve in favour of HR, for the simple reason that something that really can be done remotely is probably so formalistic that it ought not need to be done ''at all''.

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''.  

So as the seasons turn, and existing graduates grow into subject matter experts, existing subject matter experts move on and yet new generations, with boundless energy, enter the workforce, it is not hard to see the [[system effect]] at work. We of the COVID generation will eventually collect our belongings. Those with the personal circumstances, experience and relationship capital to justify it, will continue to work remotely, as they always did. And the rest will tend back to the office —