Work Week Madness
We are promised a new government publicity campaign intended to 'extol virtues' and make an 'emotional case' for returning to the office. Brace yourself.
Is there a regular sight less virtuous and more emotionally oppressive than a morning commuter crowd in the wee hours of the morning? Dozens of people squeezed against each other at half past eight in the morning, wasting away what poet Mary Oliver called 'your one wild and precious life'. Famously, Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár was once called upon to testify in a court case. He wasn't all together fond of mornings and legend has it that as he stumbled on a busy street packed with commuter crowd he was heard exclaiming 'Bloody hell, are all these people involved in this stupid case as well?' I was once one of that crowd and vowed to myself to arrange my life in such a way so as to never experience the horrific ignominy of the morning commute ever again.
The Director general of the CBI, Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, warned that: "Our offices are at risk of dying. And we would regret that very much if we allowed that to happen." Invariably, the alleged 'we' are never office workers themselves. Instead its corporations who have propped up now failing service industries around commuter culture and politicians parroting cases of their corporate donors. Attempting to solve office crisis by pressuring office workers back into the office is a square peg in a round hole solution. For one thing, offices deserve to die.
In all my years as a freelancer I learned one thing: work is not a destination, it's an activity. There are a lot of jobs where work activity is inseparable from a physical place, but office work is not it. Take working hours for example. There's no point struggling into the office during morning rush hour, at great personal and financial cost, if you are going to spend the first few hours working on a report or emails on a screen that would look exactly the same as it would at home. In fact, often times it is the exact same screen because you just dragged the damn laptop with you. Which makes the whole thing even more ridiculous; you are effectively carrying your emails across town so you can read them visibly in front of others.
Those concerned that many service businesses will fail because commuters are no longer spending fortunes in Prets of the world are accurate to a degree. But they won't fail, they will relocate. Instead of buying overpriced coffees and sandwiches in central London, ex-commuters can now buy same overpriced coffees and sandwiches in their local communities while supporting local businesses.
One prevalent concern of policymakers seems to be that employers will soon realise that their employees spend a lot fewer hours working than they would in the office. One cabinet minister is quoted as saying “Companies will realise some people weren’t working as hard as they thought … There is going to be a review of how productive people are.” Good, but it's no reason to force people back into the offices, in fact it's quite the opposite.
What I suspect these reviews will show is that people are able to do the work they are expected to do while taking one third of the time. Office for National Statistics estimates that an average person in the UK works on average 7.5 hours a day, yet a number of productivity studies reveal that only 2.5 hours are spent actually working. Regular office work simply does not require 37.5 hours a week. What policymakers consider work is actually a mimicry of productivity and presenteeism on an industrial scale.
In any sane world this would be reason enough to rethink the nature of work and the working week but these are politicians and reflexive response of the government is to usher people back into the offices where they can pretend to be busy. Once again, the idea is to change how we feel about the problem instead of solving the problem itself. Thankfully, as is everything else our government does, the ploy is unlikely to be in any way effective. People who have once experienced what work can be are unlikely to settle for the same old work patterns ever again. Arranging your work around life, as oppose to life around work, is no privilege, it's sanity.