No one should make us go back to the office. But what would we lose?
We won’t have to pay a fortune for commuter trains any more. Or crowd into densely populated city centres. We can ditch the politics, keep the boss happy with a couple of hours a day on Zoom and focus on a better work-life balance, while becoming more productive and saving our employees the vast expense of a few floors of a skyscraper somewhere.
The British have converted more enthusiastically to working from home than employees in any other country, and right now, they seem very reluctant to go back to the office.
According to its evangelists, many of whom have adopted a quasireligious zeal, work from home or WFH as they prefer to call it, is a long overdue revolution.
We don’t need to go back to the office, and no one should make us. There is a problem, however, and it is not exactly a minor one. While you can of course work from home if you have to, and can perform adequately, you can’t create, deal, innovate or decide.
As an emergency turns into the new normal and then just the plain old everyday normal, we will slowly start to lose all the things that made work not just a set of routine, solitary tasks, but a creative and collaborative endeavour. In technology, it might well work, but ad-men, architects and designers need to spark ideas off each over, and so do traders, dealers, bankers, lawyers, film-makers and publishers. The creative, wheelerdealing economy needs to get back to working face-to-face again – and that matters more in this country than most because those happen to be the only industries the UK leads the world in any more.
Defending the office these days is about as socially acceptable as owning up to voting for Brexit at a north London dinner party. The “Pret economy”, as the Financial Times refers to it, is airily dismissed as a 20th century relic, about as relevant to a networked, post-covid workplace as typewriters and bowler hats. We are all meant to have enthusiastically embraced tapping away on a laptop perched on the edge of the kitchen table. And, of course, there is some truth in the claims.
The internet has meant people don’t have to cluster in the same space simply to talk to one another, and share documents. With Wi-fi, they can do that from anywhere. The hours spent on commuting can be more productively used for something else, and companies can slash costs, while making employees happier. In that sense, Covid-19 has merely accelerated a change that was inevitable anyway, in much the same way the Second World War kick-started women joining the workforce: it was always going to happen, but it happened faster than it otherwise would have done. We are ditching the traditional nine-to-five in the same way.
Here’s the problem, however. It is going too far. A few lone voices are starting to admit that, actually, they kind of miss the office. In a blog post that went viral last week, Marco Bertozzi, a senior executive at Spotify, hardly the most conservative of companies, argued that we have lost more than we yet realise. “So much good has come from the office environment,” he wrote. “Sure, it was not perfect and came with some downsides, but on the whole it worked because of one simple thing. We don’t want to spend our lives perched in a room somewhere staring at a small screen, and for the most part we don’t want to be alone. Offices at their heart are social places where we thrive off social interaction. I sometimes think that is lost in the war on office culture.” He is far from alone. “Working from home, I am drawing on a stock of social capital I have built up over years,” one management consultant told me last week. “It works for a while, but like any form of capital, if you don’t replenish it, then after a while, it is not there any more.”
In fact, there are four major issues that are going to emerge if WFH becomes permanent. First, we will lose the creativity that comes from social interaction. Google or Facebook might be able to get their programmers to work from anywhere. So might engineers and tax accountants. But many industries depend on sparks flying between carbon-based lifeforms gathered in the same place and no amount of silicon and code can ever quite replace that. Plenty of great innovations came about almost accidentally in workplaces. The microwave, for example, which began when an engineer called Percy Spencer at Raytheon noticed that radio waves made the chocolate in his pocket gooey. Or the Post-it note, created in the 3M office, when researchers were looking at a reusable adhesive. From products to slogans to pitches, collaboration drives new ideas. We can’t do that on Zoom.
Next, our contacts wither. You can keep working with people whom you already know over email and videoconferencing, and finish off projects that were already under way. But it is very hard to make new connections. There are no chance encounters, no private conversations, nor any chance to bond over a meal or a few drinks. The result: deals are not getting done. There are no takeovers in the City, and there are hardly any new share listings either. New products are not being launched, and neither are new ad campaigns.
Thirdly, we can’t deal. Some
investment banks in the City have already brought their traders back to the desks, on the grounds they are “key workers”. That is a stretch. We could probably get by without anyone shorting oil futures, or speculating furiously on the yen-euro exchange rate. But the point is this. They can’t do that work in isolation. In truth, neither can salesmen. Or property developers. Or lawyers. Or just about anyone who has to collaborate with other people to get their work done.
Finally, we can’t manage, either. Working from home operates fine with staff you already trust. But you can’t assess who deserves a promotion, and who doesn’t. Nor can you train up new people. Nor can you build motivation within a team. After a few months, everyone becomes a freelancer – and will become as expendable as every other gig worker.
No one imagines we are going to reset the world to 2019. We may well move to some form of office-home hybrid, with a couple of days at home while gathering with our colleagues at a hot-desking hub the rest of the week. Companies and their staff can work out the right balance between themselves. But the righteous evangelists for home working should step down from their pulpits. In reality, if we ditch the office completely, we will miss it far more than we realise right now – and we will all end poorer for its demise.
‘Many industries depend on sparks flying between carbon-based lifeforms gathered in the same place’