Work from home? It’s office life that keeps us human

YOU do not have to be worried about a global coronavirus pandemic to wonder why you work in an office in close proximity to people who, on any given day, may not be feeling quite the ticket. But, as I have discovered this week, it helps.

‘Is this wise?’ I have had cause to ask myself on several mornings as I have secured the safe haven where I live and ventured into the uncertain world where I make a living.

These are technologically sophisticated times. Couldn’t all this be done from my sofa?

On standing-room-only buses and trains conveying rush-hour commuters to workplaces groaning with winter coughs and wheezes, I imagine the same thought may be gaining traction.

Many of us have been communicating by email for more than 20 years; all but the most wilfully eccentric have mobile telephones.

Really, in the year 2020, what is the purpose of this five-day-a-week migration from home to office and back again?

Think for a moment how much traffic could be taken off our heaving road and rail networks if more of us stayed away from the office – and how much less polluted urban environments might be as a consequence.

Consider the benefits for public health of avoiding that daily commute in overcrowded compartments where one un-stifled sneeze might have dozens shifting nervously in their cramped berths.

Hysteria

That is before we arrive at work stations in open-plan offices in modern buildings, often with many floors and confined metal boxes in shafts the only practical means of travelling between them. This week, you feel, a loud enough ‘AACHOO!’ in one of those vessels could trigger hysteria.

Yes, as coronavirus cases on this side of the Border leap from one to three to six – and likely more by the time you read this – it is easy to see why a certain twitchiness now attends your average Scottish office worker.

And, should the situation worsen, it is easy to envisage tough decisions ahead for employers. Already several major firms, including Nike and Sony, have evacuated their offices as a precaution to prevent mass infection.

Others will likely follow suit and, down the line, if the virus returns every winter, large organisations may come to question the very fundamentals of office life.

Are these analogue working practices strictly necessary in an age of conference calls and Skype? Have we become too hung up on presenteeism in times when the means of production and producers themselves might actually benefit from a few more empty seats at head office?

After all, in many trades, including my own, we are practised at working remotely. Sometimes journalists happen on a quiet café with excellent wifi and mocha to die for from which to compose and file their copy.

Other times it’s 2,000 words bashed out in a lay-by on the A9 outside Inverness as snow whites out your windscreen. Either way, the job gets done.

I have seen younger colleagues write lengthy news-paper reports on their smartphones, their fingers a blur as they quickstep around the tiny keyboards. Some older ones I know cannot bear the thought of being officebound. Their desk is any flat surface they can find – failing that, their laps.

In law, banking, computing, advertising, accountancy, insurance, public relations and countless other largely office-based careers, the absolute necessity for large numbers of employees to gather every day in the same space is becoming at least questionable – as those who have negotiated home working deals may be starting to prove.

And yet, I fear, vast swarms of us would be quite lost without office life.

Indeed, it seems to me that offices equip their workers with something no technology ever could: a sense of community, of being part of something besides the tasks we are performing.

Minutiae

For many, the office has come to represent a sort of social life – a place where popular culture is dissected, weekends previewed or reviewed and daily life’s minutiae commentated upon.

It is a highly ritualised environment. In one corner of the Scottish Daily Mail office a colleague with a newspaper open at the birthdays section reads out the names of celebrities while two or three others guess how many candles are on their cakes that day. Takes about five minutes. Happens every morning.

From time to time, gossip or amusing vignettes are dispatched by email to a couple of co-workers sitting perhaps 10ft away. Wordless glances may thereafter be shared over the top of computer screens. It is part and parcel of working in a modern office environment.

For some of us, the rhythms of office life are familiar enough to cause us to wonder sometimes if we have been institutionalised – if, much as we may dream of escape, we have come to depend on those rhythms for our mental equilibrium.

Similarly, some may now take for granted the discipline which office life bestows on its detainees. Without it, how long before we wander through to our home work station in our pyjamas?

With no appearances to keep up, how long before we remain in them all day, unshowered and unbreakfasted because the bad old days of reporting for duty every morning are behind us?

Whether we always enjoy it or not, the office demands standards which many, perhaps most, would be happy to relax if working at home.

That is before we come on to the question of productivity. How much more we would get done, it is tempting to think, if we were not required to commute to offices awash with chatter and ringing phones and deliveries and water cooler refills and…

Lately some have started putting on headphones, thereby at least providing the option to choose the noise over which they must attempt to hear themselves think.

Me, I have a pair of ear defenders like those worn by pneumatic drill operators and space shuttle ground crew. Today hasn’t been so bad. They have stayed in the drawer.

But, while many of us may feel we would achieve more at home, many of our bosses fear the opposite would be true.

Ordered

Can we, hand on heart, truly imagine a scenario where office evacuations such as those ordered by Nike and Sony result in spikes in productivity? Or is the reality that office life persists in spite of the technological innovations which might render it obsolete because we know ourselves too well?

At their very best, offices are inspiring places where we raise our games precisely because our games are under observation by others, because there is no hiding place.

Conversely, at their worst, our homes may be the very hiding places which foster apathy. Who knows? In time, the coronavirus’s grip on day-to-day life may tighten to the extent that all of the above is academic. In the final analysis, it is our health and not our productivity which must stand as the bottom line.

But, for all its short-term attractiveness, I wouldn’t be too quick to welcome the age of home working or the demise of office life.

Showing face at work every day makes some of us who we are; weathering crises keeps us strong. For now, I’ll keep taking my chances at the office desk.