The home office.
no hypothesis to test beyond survival. No time parameters. No feedback loop. Participation has been compulsory. And no-one has been monitoring, recording, or adjudging when enough has been learned, ready to call time. Governments have drawn boundaries with wildly differ- ing interpretations of risk. Yet while the majority of workers continued to attend their place of work, exposed to viral whim and chance, the minority seized the narrative and thereby liberated us all. As the possibility of resuming a recog- nisable working life has emerged, across borders and sectors, the enthusiasm for doing so has ranged from muted accept- ance to outright rejection. As CEOs clutch at relevance with vague suggestions of their intentions on physical presence, we find ourselves once again pondering the ‘future of the office’.
There’s been a curious surprise that the pandemic has seen an increase in productivity for most. Yet for those who have long been committed to location-in- dependent working that was never in doubt – it was just that many organi- sation’s weren’t too keen on taking the chance when the present model seemed to be working just fine. Why volunteer for catastrophe? That’s because productivity is doing what we know how to do today, co-ordinating and co-operating with our colleagues. Doing so online rather than
26 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
face-to-face was hardly ‘digital trans- formation’. It was simply a pragmatic response. Those who crowed about the incredible effort they made to get every- one up and running out of the office were admitting to an embarrassing lack of appreciation of how and where much of their work was being done. Pre-Covid, for several decades the function and form of the office had been converging on a model, of sorts – var- ied, amenity and service-rich (fully or part) shared spaces, consolidated into urban transport hubs. They tried to do everything for everyone, given the idea was we spent a portion of our life way
beyond that contracted within its confines. Where tenancies were small, landlords were persuaded to act in loco parentis. More, more of everything. It was growing rather dull, ‘workplace strategy’ was copy and paste. Each of these homages to internal flexibility, however, revealed a broader appreci- ation of the opportunity as they were usually half empty at any point of any day; a quarter empty on Friday. It wasn’t called-out as waste, but waste it was. Some was due to natural non-at- tendance – holidays, illness, meetings off site – some to the ebb and flow of work and interaction. However, some was clearly due to not needing to be there at all to get stuff done. The emer- gent post-Covid world was in glorious evidence pre-pandemic, only most accepted it as being simply the way of things.
It’s easy to forget, too, that the image of the modern office we conjure is of the frozen foreplay of steel, glass, timber, sunlight and foliage. The materiality of wealth and the preparedness to divert a little to its representation. Those for whom the aesthetic is both important and meaningful, where the human com- ponent is the positive survey response, a fragmented and amalgamated ‘like’. For most, out of super-A grade metropoli- tan chic, its fifty or more shades of crap
September 2021
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