The future of office work
|
Office anthropology™
The Jolly Contrarian holds forth™ Resources and Navigation
|
See also
References
COVID’s aftermath will reverberate long after the last “keep your distance and wash your goddamn hands” notice has faded from the public space. Whether or not the pandemic was a black swan — the arguments for and against are tiresome — our sudden dislocation gave us a rare chance to see what happens in a time of worldwide, unexpected change. Not a single change manager engaged, no business continuity plan invoked, and yet, in businesses great and small across the globe, the change went through overnight and without a hitch.
Not even in a time of war has every citizen in the land been restricted to private quarters for months on end.
And we learned some new things: working from home is pretty cool! Pyjamas! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!
As the COVID tide receded, thought leaders in the marketplace of ideas took to LinkedIn and Twitter to grapple with what it all meant for the future of work. They fell broadly into two camps: everything and nothing
The first — advanced by the thought-leaderati and legal disruptor crowd — was to say, “this time is different”: the scales have fallen, we are no longer in the ’60s and even though we can leave our homes without being arrested, we shouldn’t have to, and a diverse and dynamic economy of gig-working, side-hustling cosmopolitan youngsters now requires flexibility so, since we now know the business can manage it — right? — there is no reason it shouldn’t. You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.
The second — The Man’s — was, “get back into the the office, you punks”. With a twist: The Man teetered for a while between “I’m not having these good-for-naught meatsacks in their goddamn pyjamas on my dime”, and the more squirrelly “hold on: if these clowns work at home on their own PCs we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our IT bill so let’s not rush this”. The two impulses then merged and The Man compromised by ditching half the office space and making everyone go back to work.
Who is right? Well, for the reasons stated, neither, but the JC reluctantly senses The Man is on the right side of history, but not for the reasons The Man thinks are the right ones.
It isn’t COVID any more
Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain age — older ones — a revelation. By some measures, productivity rose during lockdown, at least at first, but we should not close the book just yet. COVID was a weird, sui generis time, and it lent itself to ephemeral productivity boost.
First, there was nothing else to do, bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work.
Second, all those in-office distractions — the casual interactions & unsanctioned interludes of humanity that are the inevitable externality of penning humans up in air-conditioned battery farms — were abruptly cut off. Since each person was isolated in her own private hell[1] of solitary confinement, there were no “watercooler moments”, no sotto voce carping about the boss, no frank exchanges of view about last night’s Celebrity Love Island — we just got on with what we were meant to be doing.
Third, when we did that, we found to our delight that it wasn’t just us who was disoriented. Middle management was too. All the busy-bodies and bureaucrats struggled to glom on to people whose time they could waste: out of sight, out of mind. The calendar was blissfully bereft of opcos, steercos, stakeholder check-ins, MIS dashboards and line manager one-to-ones. Even meetings that could have gone ahead online vanished from the calendar. Suddenly we had the time, space and lack of distraction to get on with things. The bureaucratic military industrial complex got its act together soon enough, and the work-creation schemes returned, but things took a while to get back to how they once were. Something about physical separation makes pencil-pushers easier to avoid, and even when the weekly operational robustness legal and compliance workstream catchup goes online it is a lot easier to multi-task on Zoom.
Lastly, there was no competitive advantage to lockdown. Every firm was in the same boat. We don’t know how it would have played out, relatively, 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 in a time of cholera 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.
Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked best that way, or that the change is permanent.
Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight.
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
Humans have worked together in communal offices since at least the industrial revolution. We’ve had the means to work remotely for a couple of decades. That we still congregate is no matter of “fashion”, nor commerce, infrastructure, or governance, and it is not simply because until now we haven’t had the choice. There are material benefits to being together. Our need for interpersonal communication is 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 not 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.[2]
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 —
See also
References
- ↑ Or heaven, as the case may be.
- ↑ “Bank staff who fail to swipe in for three days a week could lose bonuses” —The Sunday Times, 2 September 2023.