Here’s a conundrum facing all employers and a significant slab of the workforce: what’s the future of the office in a post-COVID Australia?
Not the TV show, the US iteration of which was the most streamed television series in 2020. Rather, what’s the end point of the COVID pedal-to-the-metal acceleration of work-from-home that’s finally forcing both employers and workers to ask why we ever did this to ourselves? Where “this” is Yeats’ “counter or desk among grey / 18th-century houses” or Dolly Parton’s critique of 9-to-5 workplace alienation, “barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving / they just use your mind, and they never give you credit”.
According to the PwC global workplace study conducted earlier this year, fewer than one in 10 people want to go back to the way things were. About 16% want to work all virtual, all the time. Three-quarters want a bit of both.
Resistance to an unthinking snapback to the pre-COVID office arrangements broke into the open in the US this month when the CEO of online magazine the Washingtonian, Cathy Merrill, said the quiet bit about office work out loud: about 20% of the time people spend in the office has nothing to do with the job they’re paid for.
It’s extra, she said in a Washington Post op-ed: “It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture.” She would have gotten away with it but for going on to the managerially logical next step: “If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor’.”
Here staff kicked back with coordinated tweets and a day of what the Clydeside Scots in 19th century industrialised Glasgow would have called ca’canny — deliberately limiting their output, in this case, by declining to write content for the day.
The office as we know it emerged in the late 19th century as (per Alfred Chandler in his business history The Visible Hand) organisations — first commercial, then public and non-profit — “took the place of market mechanisms in coordinating the activities of the economy and allocating its resources”.
Operating at scale, enterprises needed a tool to manage the two big challenges this task demanded: coordination and control. That tool? The office.
But here’s the twist: despite generations of iteration, organisations struggled to get the tool to work either at scale or consistently over time. The result of this is organisations constantly grasping at the latest big idea, from shape-shifting (open plan!) to cultural sculpting (casual Friday!). Structures morph to mimic the latest boom industry, from the railways’ stationmaster hierarchy in the 1880s, to Silicon Valley’s gamified campus culture today.
Some aspects of what was once core office work have been spun out into their own business units or companies, like call centres and cloud computing.
Other functions have emerged, often through what David Graeber in his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, called, er, “bullshit jobs”, which he divides up into flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
The office itself has largely resisted the two big trends that have otherwise shaped work as business consolidated and state bureaucracy expanded: the Taylorist division of labour early in the 20th century and business process engineering from the 1980s on. Now it’s facing the Amazon trend: work intensification through surveillance tracking and technological speed-up.
The working-from-home experience has suggested that in-office coordination is over-rated — at least for experienced workers — and control is ineffective. That 20% of lost “office culture” ends up split between more productive work and that interface between work and the personal (like thinking while walking the dog).
It’s because office work is best assessed on output, not inputs.
Take this article. The Crikey editor is getting about 700 words on “the office”, without knowing how or when it’s been written — or even what it is, until it hits the inbox. Then the sub-editors will, unsupervised, do their job: correct the spelling and grammar and remove the jokes.
And you? If you’re in the office, you’re probably reading this on screen. Is that work? Depends on what you make of it.
Do you prefer working from home or in an office? Why? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
That Dave Graeber book was a real eye-opener when I read it a couple of years ago, putting into stark terms what is a general malaise in office work and office culture. The games of power among co-workers, tasks that don’t accomplish anything, the need to “look busy” even when things aren’t, etc. – there’s a lot of mind-sapping activities that office work entails that don’t seem to do anything to justify the paycheck and a hell of a lot of resistance when that is questioned.
There’s no reason jobs should be awful soul-sapping experiences, or that trying to achieve what we can to the best of our abilities should be at odds with a prevailing workplace culture.
Graeber’s book was a revelation, not for me personally but for our culture. The office is a spirit demeaning experience these days, devoid of humanity and over-run with pointless MBA management jargon and power playing. As well, there is the process, never examined, never questioned, always circuitous to the purpose. There is great waste in our modern management nightmare, which explains a lot as to why we are all so busy working so many hours to get not very much done.
But if they didn’t waste Time, what would, or could, they do with it?
More & more frequently, SFA because they are skilless in a real, physical sense – deracinated to the point of not knowing whence their daily bread cometh nor which way is up
Graeber’s book was eye opening to me because it showed the myriad problems that work has to offer are quite systemic, whereas going through them feels like a personal failing to adapt to the more crazy aspects of office life.
Not that it always helps dealing with the b*llsh*t on a daily basis. For that, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft came as close to any as articulating how to find value in what we do.
I’ve just read the New Yorker article re the book and its illuminating and amusing! I must track the book down and leave it strategically my the office tea room (open plan) area!
Oops SORRY Dogs B!! Am I allowed (aloud?!) to use strategic in this context??!
This was great! Thanks Christopher. I read it while working from home / responding to Teams queries so perfectly illustrating the premise. I saved myself a minimum 2.5 hours of commuting today but miss the midday gym session and dual screen / speed of office systems. Its a conundrum sometimes but a bit of both is helpful. And it shouldn’t result in my being made a contractor, that is classic corporate cost cutting speak!
Great article. Although cloud computing is not ‘core office work’ – it is decentralisation and out-sourcing of data warehouses’ storage/management – most of which sit in their own buildings far from the office.
I’m not sure how cloud computing is any different from old fashioned data warehousing / running mainframe servers – it’s just a way to configure servers so that: programs can scale, services can survive server failure, and applications can be decoupled from server configuration. This can be done in house as much as it can be done by engaging a cloud computing vendor. Sometimes the latter of, of course, more fiscally prudent than trying to wear the costs and risks of maintaining infrastructure.
Cloud computing is more outsourcing of computing infrastructure. Includes operational & warehouse applications. I see it as an variant of the old outsource / insource of corporate computing. Some interesting opportunities in new technologies but at its core it is mainly outsourcing of data centres.
Four day working week, please.
Entirely possible but read Russell’s “In Defence of Idleness” for the likelihood.
Already being tried and found that workers do as much in 4 days per week as they do in 5.
I worked 4 days per week for a while there but knew I was doing more work, and hours, than quite a few full-timers. There are still a lot of time servers out there, and so many functionally useless activities in an office. I went back to full-time in protest at my 20% pay reduction for being efficient.
Russell’s ‘In praise of Idleness’ is well worth the read, and will enlighten you not a jot regarding the likelihood of a 4 day week coming in.
Because Russell is too subtle or is the rationale for maintaining the status quo just too obvious?
On an earlier recommendation from you I ordered Russel from the library.
It arrived yesterday and I’ve just finished the preface by Anthony Gottleib warning that even in 2003 that his discursive style could stymie a (then) modern reader.
I hesitate to presume the title that you ordered but his History of Western Philosophy requires decades of dedicated study of complementary sources.
The book was largely responsible for the break up with my first (real) girlfriend. Her father introduced me to the the book and I took it so seriously. I became much more interested in discussing Russell with her ole man. Broke Rule 0!
After numerous revisits and additional years of reading I came to see that the book is written in a highly amusing and entertaining style (so long as one has the background). The section regarding the Schoolmen contains the same candour as does the chapter on (e.g.) Nietzsche. It is a joy to read.
The stuff on Christianity is a tad discursive and likely because Russell deemed Christianity to be of little value (if any at all).
If it really is “fewer than one in 10 people want to go back to the way things were”, then those who are concerned by the blurring of boundaries et al between the work place and home life are a very vocal minority.
There is certainly a decent number of people who have embraced the culture of working from home, but as I see it, there are also a decent number who thought it would be a good direction for work life to take when the pandemic started, but are now concerned that they either can’t work as effectively with the overlap of family commitments at home, or that because the boundaries are blurred get emails and demands from employers at any time day or night, and there appears to be some expectation of immediate response. Beyond that there also concerns about those who are in abusive relationships at home, who can no longer “escape” to the workplace, or who find that the increased hours at home have also increased the abuse.
My office is at home as I am self employed (and single), so it has had no effect on me in these ways, but other media reporting seems to suggest that it would now be much higher than 10% who want to return to the pre-pandemic work environment.
The boundary between work and home was entirely smashed by email and computers a long time ago Kevin.
There are good arguments for the social benefits of working together, adding humanity to our productivity, but too much is lost on management theory. Every moment spent doing ‘career progression’ and ‘performance development schemes’ is a soulless waste of time. Much of the meetings held are pointless ‘look at me’ experiences. The pointless busy work has overtaken the day job, so people’s hours expand to get their actual job done.
The layers of management, all highly paid with bonuses, now often outnumber the productive workers, and if ever I hear the word strategic again it will be too soon.
When someone explains to you that ‘you are tactical while I am strategic’, or tries to define the difference, you will know you are speaking to another MBA drone who should be avoided at all cost.
What does senior management actually do, other than fill their diaries with meetings and annoy their underlings. I saw, over 40 years, as much good management as I saw hen’s teeth and rocking horse manure.
Maybe my life experience being in regional and country areas has given me the good fortune to miss this type of (mis)management class.
I don’t know what the correct balance is, particularly if you are raising a family, but while this will certainly work for some, I have doubts that this is the most suitable for many.
Extra kudos for the MBA drone recognition signs.