The future of office work
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Office anthropology™
The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ Resources and Navigation
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The after-effects of the COVID pandemic will reverberate long after the last “keep your distance and wash your hands” notice has faded from the public space. Whether or not you agree that that Coronavirus was a black swan — the arguments for and against that proposition are tiresome — the sudden, utter dislocation gave us a rare chance to see what would happen in a time of sudden nationwide, fracturing change. Not even in a time of war has every citizen been restricted to quarters for a period of months. We learned some new things: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!
Covid lead broadly to two conclusions. The first was the thought leader’s, and it is basically this time is different: the scales have now fallen from our eyes, we are no longer in the 1960s and even though we can now leave our homes without being arrested, a diverse and dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters will require flexibility so, since we now know the business can manage it — right? — there is no reason flexible working should not become a fact of commercial life.
The other is the Man’s, and it is, “get back the the office, you punks”. With a twist: the Man teetered for a while between that — “these good-for-naught meatsacks are in their goddamn pajamas and I’m not having that on my dime” but the COO got fidgety and said “hold on, Clive, we can sublet half the office and slash our IT bill if these clowns work remotely on their own PCs let’s just think about it for a bit” — so they compromised by cutting office space and making everyone come back to work.
Which is right? Well, neither, naturally, for the reasons stated, but the Man is on the right side of history in terms of how things will play out. For a few reasons, but mainly because, as ever, this time isn’t different.
It isn’t COVID any more
It is true that working from home during COVID was, for professional office working types, a revelation and an overwhelming success. By some measures productivity rose, at least in the early phases, but we should not close the case on this account. COVID was a weird, sui generis time.
Firstly, away from work, there was absolutely nothing else to do bar listening to podcasts while walking around the prison perimeter at a safe distance from your immediate family. No wonder people threw themselves into work.
Secondly, all those informal interactions and interludes of unofficial humanity — you know, distractions — that are a inevitable but regretted consequence of sequestering humans in an air-conditioned battery farm were suddenly cut off. There, as everyone was isolated in a form of solitary confinement, there were no “watercooler moments”, no sotto voce carping about the boss, no exchanges of views about last night’s Celebrity Love Island — so people kind of just got on with it.
Thirdly, when they did, they found, to their delight, it was not just they who were discombobulated. Middle management was too. The bureaucrats took a while to adapt — to find people’s time to waste. Suddenly, the calendar was mainly bereft of all those opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, line manager one-to-ones. Weirdly, even online meetings that could have gone ahead got cancelled. So the meatware had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. As lockdown continued the middle management military industrial complex got its act together and the bureaucracy levels returned, but never quite got back to once they were. something about physical separation makes them harder to avoid, and even if the weekly operational robustness legal and compliance workstream catchup goes online it is a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom.
Lastly, every firm was in the same boat. There was no competitive advantage to lockdown. We don’t know 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? 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 organise their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we do. We will see.
Pace layers: things revert to how they were.
Recalling Stewart Brand’s idea of pace layering: working together physically, in communal office, does not, we think, subsist in the “fashion” layer, nor commerce, infrastructure, or governance: rather, it is deeply embedded in the “culture” layer — possibly even at the top end of “biology”. For the changes wrought by the pandemic to become permanent, now the infrastructural and governance requirement for staying away from the office have gone, they must be matters not just of personal preference, or fashion, but they must also continue to optimise the “problems” of each successive layer. It might do, even if it is no longer solving not problems presented by a pandemic, if it solves other problems we didn’t know we had until the revelation of working from home illustrated them, and proved itself a better way of handling them. For that, snap judgments, motivated by the personal preferences of employees (look: who wouldn’t prefer to work in their pyjamas at the kitchen table, all else being equal?) won’t be the end of the matter. The suit and tie has still hung on, despite a twenty-year onslaught: there is a lot less common sense propelling that.
Only time will tell, as a generation steps through the working life cycle — but we can only judge that over forty years: not four.
We fifty-somethings, having by now acquired reasonable wealth and exhausted most of our practical avenues for career development or life change, are hardly the ones to judge. We are happy enough to swim lengths, clicking in and out remotely and connecting the paycheque as long as someone else is gormless enough to pay it to us. The merits of working downtown against the den in the attic. New entrants who are still hungry to learn, progress, take responsibility and relieve bored fifty-somethings of their executive responsibilities will shape culture over the next twenty years. We will be long gone.
Being shocked into looking round corners
On the other hand there is attention between our societal drift back to what we are used to, and the opportunities presented by being forced to look sideways and examine the contents of doors in the adjacent possible. Now we know that businesses can operate remotely for extended periods, there is no sense trying to pretend otherwise. Likewise, and entire aging generation of technophobes were forced to go online. This may mean that the usual impassioned please about post offices and Bank branches needing to remain open because elderly people don't understand the internet will die more quickly than they might otherwise have done.
Bullshit jobs
Counterpointing this is the implicit fact that most businesses suspect that much of what their employees do from day to day is essentially meaningless. This is a buried, subconscious instinct — no one (other than the late David Graeber) says it out loud or even thinks it (it carries the recursive risk that it may be true of one’s own job, so is best left unsaid and, ideally, unthought) — but it propels much of the modernist dogma of contemporary management: offshore in comma outsourcing, downskilling all must be predicated on the theory that what employees do isn't quite as hard as they like to make it out to be).
But now that the workforce has decided it quite likes staying at home, administrators are beginning to hear their inner voices, louder and louder, saying “our people are swinging the lead”.
At the moment, the connection is only with facetime and presenteeism: “attendo, ergo sum” — all beset around with cuddly but dubious ideas such as “the importance of watercooler moments” and “the spark of spontaneous creativity that only arises through unexpected physical interactions in the office”. But you will spend a long time embedded in the legal department of an multinational bank before witnessing serendipitous sparks of ingenuity. The risk is that this winsome commitment to physical serendipity commutes to cynical suspicion that what these people do, in or out of the office, doesn't add up to a great deal.
Form and substance
So we see impassioned please from Bank administrators for their employees to return to the office at least three days a week. And it is fascinating to see how formalized they are about this. Rather than assessing value added, increased productivity, or rate of generation of serendipitous spontaneous creative sparks, we here Citibank proposing to deny bonuses to staff who do not turn up at least three days a week.[1]
About that serendipitous opportunity
Working from home — the logical final step in the modernist programme of systematically digitising human capital, reducing the prestigious, professional, ineffable to the quotidian, standardised and algorithmic —
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References
- ↑ “Bank staff who fail to swipe in for three days a week could lose bonuses” —The Sunday Times, 2 September 2023.