The Jolly Contrarian

The future of office work: Difference between revisions

Page Discussion

The future of office work (view source)

Revision as of 20:16, 9 November 2023

211 bytes added ,  9 November 2023
no edit summary
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
Line 1: Line 1:
{{freeessay|work|working from home|{{image|sheeple|jpg|''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? {{vsr|1959}}}}}}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.
{{freeessay|work|working from home|{{image|sheeple|jpg|''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? {{vsr|1959}}}}}}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.


COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one [[change manager]] was ready, or needed. The world just ''changed''. No strategies were presented, no consultants engaged, no [[business continuity plan]]s invoked: there was no time. Around the world businesses great and small, ''coped''.  
It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers.  


It begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, [[change manager]]s and [[BCM]] programmes do, but that is another story.
COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one [[change manager]] was ready for it or, for that matter, needed. The world just ''changed''. No strategies were presented, no consultants engaged, no [[Business continuity plan|business continuity plans]] invoked: there was no time. Around the world businesses great and small, ''coped''. (It rather begs the question what good all those strategies, consultants, [[change manager]]s and [[BCM]] programmes do, but that is another story.)


We adapted. We learned: working from home is pretty cool! [[Pyjamas]]! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!  
We adapted. We learned: working from home is pretty cool! [[Pyjamas]]! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!  
Line 21: Line 21:
[[The Man]] — for it was mostly [[The Man]] saying it — 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.  
[[The Man]] — for it was mostly [[The Man]] saying it — 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 ====
==== TikTok Girl and the future of office work ====
The debate chuntered on, recently coagulated around the unlikely figure of a tearful grad whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”,<ref>https://www.tiktok.com/@brielleybelly123/video/7291443944347405614</ref> confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again.  
The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around an unlikely, tearful graduate whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”, confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again.  


{{quote|
{{quote|
Line 29: Line 29:
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, there was 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, there was predictable mockery from some quarters and spirited defence from others.   


In truth, the arguments on both sides were pretty flimsy,<ref>[https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity This] was one of the more developed arguments, and well — it could do with a bit of work.</ref> which prompted the JC to hold forth.
The arguments on both sides have been pretty flimsy.<ref>[https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity This] was one of the more developed arguments, and well — it could do with a bit of work.</ref>


“The future of work” depends not on what ''we'' would ''like'' to happen nor, really what [[The Man]], or the coming generation, would like to happen — but ''how the [[complex system]] we inhabit behaves''. That, in turn, will depend on the intricate effect of interactions between the behavioural incentives in the system over a long period of time.  
For the future of office work depends not on what ''we'' would like to happen nor, really what [[The Man|''The Man'']] would like to happen — but on how the [[complex system]] we inhabit ''behaves''.  


“Behavioural incentives” are subtle. They have a habit of confounding expectations — especially when you expect things to quickly, and permanently, be ''different''.
That, in turn, depends on human incentives and the behaviour of different components in the system. These will only play out over a long period of time.


We have seen the sudden, delightful difference wrought upon the whole complex system while it 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. ''This is not necessarily permanent''. Now those constraints have eased, we should expect to see the system revert to how it used to behave, unless there are persistent, selfish, reasons for it not to.
Behavioural incentives are subtle. They have a habit of confounding expectations that things will quickly, and permanently, be ''different'' in a way we all find ''easier and better''.<ref>John Gall’s stone-cold classic {{Br|Systemantics: The Systems Bible}} is a must-read on this.</ref>


That is the question: what has, really, fundamentally changed to the commercial world because of COVID? What is there about what we do not that wasn’t possible — or at least thinkable — before?
We have seen the sudden, delightful difference COVID wrought upon the system by forcing it to stop dead in its tracks. The system — we — somehow improvised a brand-new mode of operation that suited the hard, artificial, temporary constraints the system was under. We made it work.
 
''This is not necessarily permanent''. Now those constraints have eased, we should expect to see the system revert to how it used to behave, however perversely, unless there are selfish, opportunistic and persistent reasons for it to behave in another way which is even ''more'' perverse.
 
That is the question: what has, really, fundamentally changed to the commercial world because of COVID? What is there about what we do ''now'' that wasn’t possible — or at least thinkable — ''before''?
   
   
==== It isn’t COVID any more ====
==== It isn’t COVID any more ====
To be sure, working from home during COVID was, for a certain type of middle-aged white-collar worker, a revelation. People like the JC. 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''.  
To be sure, working from home during COVID was, for a certain type of middle-aged white-collar worker, a revelation. People like the JC. During lockdown we reacquainted ourselves with the local ’hood — that neighbours’ WhatsApp group still going strong, amirite? — 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:
''But''. COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time:
Line 72: Line 76:
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).
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====
==== A word about pyjamas ====
We often hear, therefore, 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 everyone could work remotely. It was unthinkable: the required investment, the necessary planning, the contingency planning, the difficult business case: the barriers to taking the necessary risk, with unarticulable benefits, were simply too high.  
Throughout this article I have mischievously described remote workers “at the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, “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 they might be, well, ''phoning it in''.
 
This may provoke indignance. 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. Some choose to work from home. Some just work better that way. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen-fifties. We are not living in a Mad Men episode. Wake up and smell the coffee, JC. We have the capabilities to work away from the downtown office, so why the hell shouldn’t we? You are perpetuating grossly unfair stereotypes.'' 


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>
Now, every word of this is true.  


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 concealed this better way of working for ''decades''. After all, the tools that enabled remote working were hardly new. Nor, indeed, was remote working.  
But it doesn’t matter. For many office workers, deep in their blackest hearts, ''do'' think remote work is a soft option. It might irrational, unfair, or wrong — ''but they do''. They might not often say it out loud, but ''this is what they think''.


Nor was the idea remote work a sort  of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: relocating subsidiary and administrative tasks away from head office — [[outsourcing]] and offshoring — is a foundational 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 universal way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?
This is because they are human: they generalise, they categorise, they look for ways to ''justify'' their own worth and belittle others’. An easy way to do this is by ''visible effort''.


Humans have worked together in communal spaces 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. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, partitions and cubicles, the typewriter, postal services, [[telex]], [[Facsimile|fax machines]], computer networks, [[email]] and the internet.  
And what a good proportion of the people in a system think conditions how the system, over the long run, behaves.


Human collaboration models have constantly adapted, always tending to [[Local maximum|local maxima]].  
====COVID and the adjacent possible====
We often hear, therefore, 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.  


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 effortlessly ''coping''. Commerce carried on, in rude health.
No one could credit that ''everyone'' could work remotely. The required investment, the necessary planning, the contingency planning, the difficult business case: the barriers to taking the necessary risk, with inarticulable benefits, were too high.


''But we had been networked for decades''. Is the fact that we still congregated, until COVID, just a matter of habit? Are our cultural and biological impulses to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset?   
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>


This is the question: has COVID so fractured how we work so as to create a new [[local maximum]]? Are the old ways gone? 
But this is to assume that cultural layers ''below'' the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too, and that some veil has, until now concealed from us this better way of working.


Without the COVID imperatives, remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — and do it better than modern communal working does. It might do that if it solves ''new'' problems, or presents ''new'' opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic showed us. 
After all, the tools to implement remote working are hardly new. Nor is “remote working” any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: “offshoring” subsidiary and administrative tasks is a foundational 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 universal way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there?


But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only ''non''-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life. We can only judge that over forty years: not ''four''.
Humans have worked together in communal spaces 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. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, partitions and cubicles, the typewriter, postal services, [[telex]], [[Facsimile|fax machines]], computer networks, [[email]] and the internet.  


And, sure, 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.
Human collaboration models are constantly adapting, always tending to [[Local maximum|local maxima]]. Like the rare successful [[Legaltech|legal technology]] implementations, we just don’t ''notice'' them because they don’t feel, for long, like innovations. They feel like [[furniture]].  


==== A word about pyjamas ====
COVID provided, for a brief moment, the biological imperative to be distant, overriding all other considerations. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by effortlessly ''coping''. Commerce carried on, in rude health. But COVID has stopped now. 
I have mischievously referred to remote workers “at the kitchen table”, “in their jim-jams”, “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. 
''But we have been networked for decades''. Is the fact that we still congregated, until COVID, just a matter of habit? Are our cultural and biological impulses to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? Has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new [[local maximum]]?


{{quote|
If this is a permanent shift remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — and do it better than modern communal working does. It might do that if it solves ''new'' problems, or presents ''new'' opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic showed us.
“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 objection is true.  
But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only ''non''-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life. We can only judge that over forty years: not ''four''.


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.
And middle-agers — with accumulated wealth, nice houses, home offices and expensive pyjamas, who have largely exhausted practical avenues for career advancement — ''are not the ones to judge''. They will soon be long gone.


They might not say this in public, ''but they do''. It might not be rational, or fair, ''but they do''. 
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. Are they likely to do that working from home?


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, an ingrained conviction in the virtue of commitment and, [[all other things being equal]], ''committed people show up''.  
==== Cultural stereotypes about presence and commitment ====
There is a deeply ingrained cultural conviction that ''commitment'' is a cardinal virtue.  [[All other things being equal]], people who are ''committed'' are people who ''show up''.


Our [[metaphor]]s denoting commitment, or the lack of it, tell us about our common cultural values. They equate commitment, effort and energy with ''physical contact'' and ''presence'':  
Common [[Metaphor|metaphors]] for commitment, or the lack of it, equate effort and energy with ''presence'':{{quote|
{{quote|
“He really ''put a shift in'' on this”. <br>“She has a real ''presence''”. <br>“Stay ''close'' on this one”. <br>“Keep ''on top of it''”. <br>“Stay engaged during the final stages of the project.”}}
“He really ''put a shift in'' on this”. <br>“She has a real ''presence''”. <br>“Stay ''close'' on this one”. <br>“Keep ''on top of it''”. <br>“Stay engaged during the final stages of the project.”}}


Line 132: Line 139:
==== Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart ====
==== Formal and informal: when WFH codifies the org chart ====
{{quote|“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.  
{{quote|“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|James C.Scott]], {{br|Seeing Like A State}}}}
:— [[James C. Scott]], {{br|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.  
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.  


Retrieved from "https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Special:MobileDiff/80256"