The Office Is Not For Work
The Office Is Not For Work
The Death of Desks, Chairs, and Conference Rooms - Pt. 1
Here’s the deal… the obstinate proletariate refuses to return to the office and the input/output model of work that so many of us in the managerial class expect (present company excepted). It is, after all, a simple equation: the plebes arrive dutifully, their presence is registered as any other bit of data that affirms productivity, us managers witness live-action talking (ipso facto collaboration), and then they plebe-pool home. This is how the system is supposed to work, people. Now, with everyone working from home in their sweatpants while doing their laundry and peddling one of those under-desk bicycles, we’re confident each and every employee is an itinerant scofflaw grifting off our executive bonuses. Very few are doing “excellent” work, right, Elon?
Yet, the peoples persist. And so the battle rages. Our hero Jamie was among the first to publicly capitulate. The tech giants took a “firm” stand and sparked skirmishes in the Valley. But even mighty Apple failed to fend off a decentralized work rebellion. Frankly, we managers think you all are insane. Really? Sixty-four percent of you would quit if asked to return to a physical office packed with all those super cool amenities we built for you over the years. For you! And you’re not even grateful for the new perks we dreamed up while you were away taking conference calls from your claw-footed bathtubs. (We all have those, right)?
Frankly, we can’t wait for the bot revolution, but Google says sentience is still like way away, so we’re stuck with unreliable, moody, sometimes talented, humans, and bunch of office space - our second biggest expenditure (after the aforementioned humans) - that is borderline obsolete. Can you feel our seething frustrations, dear reader? It’s like all the work we did over the years - and we put in the time - to destroy the solidarity of the workforce, was all undone by some rapidly-mutating, spiked proteins. It’s the hope that kills you.
Oh oh oh. As if things weren’t bad enough. The young ones, all those folks under, I don’t know, let’s say forty, the lazy, entitled, snowflakes that don’t want to work hard, to really grind for their swag, just want swaddled stability. So you see, dear reader, our predicament: we managers have heaps of employees that don’t like using our really expensive assets. If only we could let them eat cake. (Heavy sigh).
It has been suggested a time or two that maybe we managers “be creative” or “listen” to support the emerging needs of our decentralized workforce. Perhaps, after two long years and handful of months (without diminished productivity), it is time to concede. And thus it falls upon us, fellow benevolent managers, to listen to the peoples, to hear their cries, and develop experiences within our “office space” to foster talent development and distinguish our style of decentralized work from competitive brands. So let us put our ears to the digital door of these woke weaklings to assuage their peasant concerns:
Loneliness - Turns out that being isolated and alone - or even more torturously, isolated with other people - is bad for mental health. And the declared “end” of the pandemic has not been the hoped for panacea. Too many routines permanently disrupted. Too many social networks fractured by firings or geography. Too many beloved third places closed. Where employees once complained of distractions from human interactions, they now soldier forth in solitude. Lesson: in-person engagements are fundamental for flourishing social networks.
Malaise - The shift to decentralization accelerated the dissolution of boundaries between work and not-work. Once upon a time, employees were expected be somewhere at specific hours. Then work ended. (It feels good to reminisce). We know that even in the before-times, “work-life balance” was morphing from lofty ideal to dark humor. Mass adoption of decentralized work initiated the eradication of that balance. You’re home, right? And you have a computer? And internet access? Why aren’t you responding to my emails? This expectation for constant contact, always-on energy, deprives humans of the mental rest they legitimately need (it’s science) to fully function. So instead of happy, healthy humans, the workforce descends into collective malaise, or, as it is more colloquially known, burnout. Spaces create opportunities to deliver rejuvenation - corporate-sanctioned, turn-off-your-phone rejuvenation - for a decentralized workforce.
Growth - Recently, one leader of our managerial fellowship cleverly opined: “A job can be done at home. But I’m not sure a career gets built.” Bravo. A career is about relationships and networks. And those are significantly harder to instigate and maintain without a physical presence (or social objects like MOOGs (video games), but we’d imagine that gets in the way of work). Even before the pandemic, most corporations struggled with basic formal and informal mentorship programs. Investing in employee growth is hard: the spaces to safely experiment and take risk benefit from physical presence, where all the social cues can be read, and is, perhaps, one of the most compelling arguments for retaining that expensive square footage.
Aimless - This one makes us managers squirm and triggers wrinkling faces resembling upset emojis. Who needs purpose and mission when you have money? Not rhetorical. But the youngs seem discontent with the state of affairs in the world. We might, too, if we didn’t have go-bags and helicopters on standby and houses on floating islands kept secret from the rest of the world. (We definitely don’t have those. Definitely). But fine. You want a mission. You want to feel part of something bigger. Heard. Space itself articulates this mission, and presence provides connections necessary to confront the cascading traumas affecting pretty much everyone.
Precarity - Sometimes us managers know we have to go to streets to learn what’s what. So on an intelligence gathering mission, we descended on the Ivy’s and some Ivy-wannabes, incognito, to put a finger of the pulse of everyday students. Figuratively. What we heard shocked us beyond belief. These students, educated in some of the most elite universities in the world, who made it here solely on the meretricious efforts of their singular, individual, hard work, were practical. Neigh! Pragmatic. And also scared. Lock down a good job. Lock down a job with health insurance. Lock that W-2 down! Decentralized work exacerbates this search for stability, security. With weaker attachments to organization and peers, the ties that bind can fray and make workers more vulnerable to employment instability. It’s almost like growing up in the Great Recession instilled a dread of returning to “the parents basement.” Space affords the flexibility to support employees forced to run side hustles to pay off things like avocado toast tabs (condescending joke) and crushing student debt (very real).
That is… disappointing. Ugh. Why isn’t there a louder drumbeat for next-generation table tennis? Can we maybe interest you in some shuffleboard? No? How bout the metaverse? Wait! No. The metaverse is a trap. It’s fake land! We have real offices that need filling, physical conference rooms that need meetings, human employees that need line-of-sight supervision. BUT! What if we didn’t? What if the employee experience at our physical locations actually embraced the needs of a decentralized workforce instead of rigidly adhering to archetypes developed during the industrial revolution?
Some ideas, dear reader, us managers are lukewarm about if we have to embrace a future of decentralized work… will come next week because we are bumping right up against the tl;dr word counts I once promised. Get back to the managing and subscribe to receive our next dispatch in your inbox.
[Disclaimer: The author is not, nor has ever been a manager, but stumbled into this voice while in notebook form and ran with it. Sorry not sorry to actual managers].