Week Notes // 30th October
A scruffy painting on a doorway along the seafront in Deal, Kent
The temptation this week is just to list a load of things and go light on the narrative. That sort of defeats the object of this initiative though. It’s meant to be about noticing, collecting, editorialising and then sharing. It shouldnt be about voiding my brain, emptying words lodged in my head onto a page. That’s of no value to anyone. Least of all me.
I have been interested this week by the the return to office ‘trend’ which seems to be gaining steam: major companies mandating that their staff come back to working in offices either permanently or with more fixed days per week. Nike is a high profile business to make the news in the last couple of weeks for increasing it’s policy of office work from three to four days. Closer to home, Publicis have made Monday a mandatory office day and barred employees from having two consecutive remote days.
Nike have said, via this article, that they have seen the “power and energy that comes from working together in person, and we aim to create more of that”. This is hard to argue with. What business wouldn’t want to create power and energy among it’s workforce? What is harder to understand though is whether employees are coming back to the same environments they left back in March 2020. As much as anything, flexible or hybrid working has allowed employers to re-shape their contractual obligations where commercial real estate is concerned. Fewer desks, fewer meeting rooms, fewer square feet. Even fewer buildings if you’re someone like Meta. Flexible working has concealed some of these subtle shifts. We’ve not had to deal with 100% occupancy for some time.
Employees too have changed and when they’re in the office, they now work in a completely different way. The new primacy of video calling means people speak in an entirely differently to when they left. I started my career in a press buying department where 30 people used the phone all day long. Audibly, it was manageable and people easily mixed ‘deep work’ and interactive, collaborative work. Now, being sat next to someone on a teams call requires gigantic levels of concentration if you’re trying to accomplish any task beyond choosing a font you might like.
If companies want employees back, especially in the name of collaboration and creativity, they have to work to ensure the spaces they’re bringing people back to are fit for purpose. Saying ‘Just do it’ and hoping for the best is fool-hardy. This means providing employees with a space which aligns to the tasks they want and need to complete when in the office, not just a different place to sit infront of a laptop and do calls on Zoom.
It means applying strategic thinking to the space you have, aligning it to the wider goals of the business.
Employees, similarly, can hopefully realise that a mandate to return to the office doesn’t necessarily equate to a mandate to be chained to a desk. What other facilities do you have in or near your office which you can use to work from or in?
There is a danger we end up subscribing to a brutal, binary logic.
That the office equals excellence.
But, presence in the office is no guarentee of productivity in the same way that allowing people to sit at home isn’t a guarentee of beautiful, well considered output.
If we’re going to be strategic about our space, then how do we measure it’s use and the contribution it’s making to a company. Measures put in place to assess occupancy are not measures of productivity. A system of analysis is required which focusses on causal links between behaviours and attitudes to tangible outcomes, not just outputs. Is the work more creative or more valuable? Are your people more engaged and less likely to leave? Is the business more efficient?
Personally, I am far too risk averse to have made any of the significant lifestyle changes that I could have during the pandemic. I didn’t suddenly buy a dog. I didn’t get a Pelaton. I didn’t move to the country. And so I have no issues with my employer asking me to come back to the office more frequently. Personally, I’ve used the office as much as I can. But, having said this, if the ‘great reset’ transpires to just be a return to how we used to do things before the outbreak of COVID, then that would be a huge shame.
After all of the shitty stuff that was thrown up by COVID and the associated lock downs (and it was really shitty), one of the small hopes I’d harboured was that it might give us (society, government, employers) a moment to think about how we could re-design some of the deeply entrenched systems we collectively subscribed to.
Work being one of those. For all of the challenges that managers navigated during the pandemic, the opportunity to completely re-write the practices of their business feels like a once in a generation thing. Unless there is another pandemic, it feels unlikely to present itself again.
To apply the teachings of an essay I’m in the process of slowing spewing out into reality: we could try and ask ourselves ‘better questions’ where our return to work is concerned, and not just see the return to the office as a big, monolithic problem to be tamed.
Not just questions of function: Which days? What seat? How long? Which location?…
But more philosophical, strategic questions:
Why do we come into office? What do we want people to think or feel when they are there? How can we use the office as a ‘media channel’? How do we allow our company’s culture to manifest itself physically (and not just print words for the walls)? How can we ‘rent’ or borrow’ places which we can annexe to the space we ‘own’? How do we make the office a desirable place to be? How do we create a sense that the space belongs to the employees, not the business they work for? How might we ‘invite people back’, not demand their attendence?
Etc, etc, etc.
May Day by Andreas Gursky. Currently on display at Tate Modern as part of the ‘Capturing The Moment’ Exhibition
