for many, coming into the office requires a distinctly unromantic commute. It means cobbling together childcare plans, particularly with the nationwide bus driver shortages and school quarantine regulations after illness or a potential exposure. It means paying for parking, and packing or paying for their lunches, and handing over anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours of their day. They are enduring the worst parts of a “traditional” job, only to go into the office and essentially work remote, with worse conditions and fewer amenities (and, in many cases, less comfort) than they had at home. It’s the worst of both work worlds.
Twitter avatar for @Lollardfish
David M. Perry
@Lollardfish
I was forced to go to the office today and with one exception only spoke to people on zoom. The exception was a nice chat with an old friend/mentor. We could have just had coffee somewhere though.
Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen
“There’s this weird tension....We want everyone back in the office, but we still want everyone to do work by video.”
Maybe....because they don't all need to be back in the office
https://example.com/0kE7uNYiza
September 28th 2021
In many cases, the university is an organization that is mis-conceiving its customers’ actual needs — and then making pretty nonsensical staffing decisions in order to accommodate those misconceptions. The same is true for tens of thousands of lawyer’s offices, nonprofits, accounting firms, you name it, all still requiring reception and administrative staff to be in the office full-time “just in case” a client stops by — or, in the case a client or customer wants to come into the office for a meeting, so the client can see the “worth” (e.g., hustle and bustle and ‘work’) of the office itself.
If Slack and too-many-meetings are a way to Live Action Role Play (LARP) your job, requiring people in the office for these reasons is LARPing your service’s value. Put differently: the shiny office, the receptionist proffering bottled water, the conference room, the support staff, all of it evinces the quality of the service someone is paying for, e.g., the reason a lawyer bills as much as they do an hour. (Or, in the academic context, this is why you are pay the tuition you do). Value LARPing is inefficient and infuriating and not actually making anyone’s customer experience that much better. But it justifies the status quo — and thus must be sustained in whatever form necessary.
A similar thing is happening when senior leadership (and white men in particular) demand others to be in the office whenever they are — even if, once there, they largely keep to themselves in their own offices. They crave the feeling of management to which they had become accustomed over decades in power, and that feeling is only approximated through others’ ambient presence in their vicinity.
Many of these leaders only feel like they’re doing their jobs — which is to say, they only feel powerful — in scenarios in which that status quo is restored. It’s an incredibly wasteful, inefficient way of leading, but it is facilitated through cheerleading from other leaders, and underlined by people in corporate real estate with a very real stake in the game, the majority of whom are….also white men. (Wonder what’s going on here! Why would a bunch of white men need to have a visceral experience of power in this moment?!?)
Today, that waste is looking more and more ridiculous. Back in the Spring of 2020, transitioning to remote work was a major test for most organizations; many struggled and, especially in early months, straight-up failed. Still, faith, fear, and loyalty kept many employees tied to their employers, with the trust that only the most dynamic and skilled of organizations could’ve handled that sudden and severe of a transition with any sort of grace.
That was 18 months ago. The patience is gone. And the back to the office plan — it’s a crucible. It clarifies all of your leaders’ vulnerabilities: in planning, in communication, and in execution. More importantly, it makes organizational reluctance, rigidity, and general lack of vision impossible to ignore.
If a company is forcing you back into the office now with no reason other than “it’s time,” they’re scared. If they’re hauling out rhetoric of “we need to sustain company culture” by enforcing two days a week in the office, but have no plans or infrastructure for actually cultivating that culture virtually or in person — they don’t actually know what company culture is. If they complain, as one worker told me, that they don’t want the physical office to become “an expensive paperweight” and want to show the c-suite “it’s being used” but haven’t considered what sort of office design, size, or location might actually meet employees’ needs — they haven’t been asking employees the right questions or, even more importantly, haven’t been listening to their answers.
I am not anti-office. I am anti arbitrary office. I am against sucking two hours out of someone’s day just to briefly make a bad manager feel good. I am against siphoning power from workers and piping it directly to leaders’ already overflowing stores of it. We have such a unique, authentically exciting moment to take stock of what “office” work could look like moving forward — what parts of it need a collective space, which parts do not, and what office spaces will look like and provide. And so many organizations are straight up squandering that opportunity.