COMMENT: I have just spent a full week at the office and I cannot tell you how great I feel. The past few months have, of course, had their delights – and I’ve learnt a lot in the search for the ephemeral work/like balance – but as I reflect, I realise I have really struggled. I have found it really hard.
In a weird way I have felt guilty for how I feel. I am really fortunate. At 28, babies are a little way off, so I have no childcare juggling. I rent a flat with a garden. I lived with a very close friend throughout proper lockdown. I have a very close circle of friends and family who have been brilliant. I am in good health, have some savings in the bank and have all the privileges afforded to me as a young white man. I have great colleagues. The sun has been shining. I’m good by myself. I delight in hearing others tell me how, for the first time in years, they’ve heard the birds sing and seen the flowers bloom, as well as being able to spend more time with their children.
But over the past few months I have been starved of my intrinsic motivation. I’ve disconnected from my peers. I’ve generally been unproductive. I’ve been downbeat, and probably not that fun to work with. Perhaps I also feel guilty because the emerging narrative around me is one of a WFH panacea. I’ve found WFH to be pants.
I am really worried that the debate about the future of work is too one-sided. And I want to offer some perspectives that I’m not hearing discussed loudly enough.
I worry that those with a platform and those who lead their businesses are those that most often benefit from a WFH culture. I encourage you to consider very carefully that those who may need the office the most might not feel confident to speak up for it.
Human connections
We fundamentally need to be connected to other people. It is in our biology. We prospered as a species because of our ability to form tribes and communities, and without them we suffer. We can, of course, augment that experience with technology, but we cannot replace it. We have simply not evolved far enough.
What is harder to replace with technology is our weak ties. Working from home severs many of our weak social ties, which are just as important as our deep ones for our wellbeing. These may be the familiar faces on the commute, our colleagues whose names we forget, the receptionists at new offices, the baristas at our regular coffee shop or the landlady at the local. They are by definition the people you would never plan to see.
And what of gossip. Gossiping is one of our oldest and most important social tools. As Yuval Noah Harari eloquently puts it in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bisons [sic]. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat.”
How do I air my frustrations, my insecurities? How does company culture permeate? How do I make up for a lack of internal communication? How do I work out what other people are up to? We need to come together to gossip or we will all go crazy.
Many of the benefits of working from home stem from this same need for human connection – more time spent with family and in pursuit of things we enjoy and share with others. But we should remember that many us do not share a home with loved ones. We must think about loneliness now more than ever. We are all at different stages of our lives.
No separation anxiety
Our homes are not designed as offices, and very few of us have the space to create a comfortable and healthy workspace, let alone a separated workspace.
We invest in ergonomic desks, chairs and lighting in our offices for our physical health. We create diversity of spaces for breakout and Silicon Valley-style “collisions”. Yet we seem comfortable with asking people to work from a cramped desk in the corner of their bedroom. Very few of us have the space to recreate the office. And what about all of the office perks: tea, coffee, fresh fruit, leftover sandwiches, to name the trivial? All I have now is a bigger electricity bill.
Let us all live through an English winter before we jump to too many conclusions about the pleasure of working from home.
Offices enforce separation, and perhaps we don’t realise how helpful that is. We fight hard to prevent technology’s erosion of the division between work and home, so I am quite surprised at the apparent enthusiasm to completely do away with any separation at all.
For lots of us, the WFH productivity thing is a myth. Without a physical start and finish to my day, my days at home never really get started and never really get finished. I have no urgency and I am easily distracted, preventing me from achieving flow. Days bleed one into another, and I find myself less and less motivated – a vicious circle. I can switch off. For those who can’t, this has meant 16-hour workdays, day after day. Most people don’t have the self-discipline to enforce a routine, nor the space to create physical separation, and I don’t think we should suddenly expect them to.
Just as we need shadow to enjoy light, I strongly believe we need to contrast home with work to enjoy both. So how do we keep work and life separate if they are no longer physically separate? How do we enjoy our homes as homes if they have become offices?
The power of osmosis
The physical co-location of people in an office facilitates all of our unstructured learning. This is a bigger problem for those at the start of their careers, but the learning is two-way.
How do I eavesdrop on telephone calls? Will I really proactively schedule all that unstructured time spent together – travel to meetings, walking to the shop, waiting for meetings to start, grabbing someone because they walk past me? How do I get asked to do something that’s not really my job because I just happen to be the closest person nearby?
When we can physically see someone, we know when it’s OK to disturb them. It’s called the hover-and-pounce manoeuvre, and it is the first thing you learn (by watching others) when you start working in an office. The instant message is rarely responded to instantly. Will you really pick up the phone to ask? Do you know whether you are disturbing them at work or mid-childcare?
Even if some of us are more productive at completing our “work”, are we missing what it means to be productive? How do we spontaneously solve problems together, rather than working in silos? How do we disseminate knowledge to each other when it doesn’t warrant a meeting? Collaborative tools are good to a point, but how do we sit together with a printout or a whiteboard? How do we recreate the serendipity upon which business relies – the chance meeting at Pret, the small talk after a meeting? Why do all the tech companies, proponents of the digital revolution and optimisation, build such enormous HQs to foster collaboration and connectivity?
For IRL (in real life) meetings. And networking.
The backbone of society
My worry is that those at the top benefit most from working from home yet the people who need it the most may be least able to speak up for it.
We struggle to talk about mental health at the best of times. Will colleagues feel confident to be honest about how remote working is affecting them emotionally? Are they prepared to be vulnerable? How confident do your more junior colleagues feel taking a stance in opposition to more senior people in the business?
Has the idea of preferring (or needing) to work from the office become a sign of weakness or a lack of self-discipline or motivation – traits that we regard highly in today’s individualistic society? What role is Big Tech and our individualist culture playing in shaping the narrative that we should embrace the joys of remote working?
You may argue that many of these things can be resolved by adapting to a new way of working. I don’t disagree. But don’t underestimate the extent of the training and investment that it would involve. More importantly, I worry that the lack of human connection risks creating a long-term impact on our mental wellbeing.
I am not advocating a return to the nine-to-five. I remain a champion of a flexible approach to working and a healthy balance. There is much to be gained from working away from the office and the enormous power of technology to do good, but the office remains the backbone of our society.
James Scott is co-founder of Stories
