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We don't always have a good day at the office, but home
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working leaves a lot to be desired
Escaping the glass and steel can feel liberating, but companies thrive on
person-to-person interaction
very morning, Monday to Friday, Elizabeth Perrin saw her husband off to work. She
handed him his briefcase, an umbrella, and bid him goodbye with the cheery wish:
“Have a good day at the office!” To which her husband, Reggie, usually replied, in a
clear and serious voice: “I won’t.”
On his way to the station Reggie passed various streets named after poets –
Wordsworth Drive, Tennyson Avenue, Coleridge Close. But there was no poetry, none
at all, in his banal existence as a sales executive at Sunshine Desserts, an uninspiring
business. The genius of David Nobbs, the creator of Reginald Perrin, was to capture
that quotidian tedium of the all-too-familiar trudge to a dismal workplace, which ended,
inevitably, with some kind of bathetic delay – “Eleven minutes late, signal failure at
Vauxhall.”
No wonder there has been, amid all the difficulties of the pandemic, some relative
celebration of the widespread working from home phenomenon that has been enforced
on many people since lockdown. While many employers have talked quite a good game
on flexibility over the past three decades, far fewer have really practised it. According to
Dr Jane Parry, of the University of Southampton, less than 30% of the workforce had
ever worked from home before the coronavirus.
When the marketing whizzes at Dettol tried to tell us a supposedly encouraging story
about the attractions of office life the response on social media was fierce. Others
pointed out that an expensive commute to a claustrophobic and uncongenial workplace
is no “carrot” at all, despite exhortations from politicians, some newspapers
and others for people to return to the “creativity” of offices.
Work has continued at home, and a lot has been achieved. Sceptical bosses who never
really trusted colleagues to put in a proper shift where they couldn’t be seen have had to
admit that they were wrong – not least because they sometimes were the very people
having to maintain their own levels of productivity from the kitchen table or a back
bedroom.
Yet the rush to declare the death of the office and the immediate reconfiguration of the
economics of cities has been premature and perhaps misguided, however long it takes
our current crisis to play out. Good workplaces have a lot going for them that cannot
truly be replicated online. Zoom fatigue is real. As Stuart Rose, the former Marks and
Spencer boss and now chairman of Ocado, wrote last week, six months of Zoom and
Teams sessions have convinced him that virtual meetings are not as good as the real
thing. Why? “Because if you are chairing, or participating in, a meeting over your
computer rather than in person, how can you get a true feel of what is going on? It is
very hard to read the room; to see who is pulling a face; or who is coming along
grudgingly; or who has come to make a point. Business might get done to some extent
but certainly not as effectively.”
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Trying to recreate an office in a shared (co-working) space is not a cheap option. The d f- x c h a n g
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Financial Times reports that hot-desking costs £450 a month at WeWork’s Mark Square
site in east London’s Shoreditch.
It is grim to tell younger people at the start of their working life that the office will not be
available to them for much of the time, and that they will have to press on in isolation in
their expensive, but often cramped, rented accommodation. Most of what I’ve learned in
three decades of work has been with (and from) other people, people I’ve been sharing
an office with. Few of us set out to have careers as soloists. We want to feel part of a
team.
There may not have been an immediate hit to productivity in the first few months of
lockdown. But the longer term cost of remote working is yet to be calculated. “We make
better decisions in groups, because in a radically uncertain world the group holds more
information than any individual member,” write John Kay and Mervyn King in their
recent book Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an Unknowable Future.
A few months ago – but it feels a lot longer – I visited the European headquarters of
Steelcase, the office furniture designers, in Munich. In their (of course) beautifully
appointed building, their senior vice president, Guillaume Alvarez, told me how
important it was to create workplaces that people wanted to turn up to, especially in
cities where housing costs were high. “An office is not a factory,” he told me. “You
mustn’t kill the human interaction. You lose so much when people don’t get together.”
And he added – although it didn’t seem so significant at the time – “there is very little
small talk in video conferencing”.
I hope, sooner or later, more of us will be able to work safely together, in the same
place. Have a good day at the office? Perhaps you will, again, one day.
