Working 9 to 5 (in an office): is that the way to make a living?

Here’s a conundrum facing all employers and a significant slab of the workforce: what’s the future of the office in a post-COVID Australia?

Not the TV show, the US iteration of which was the most streamed television series in 2020. Rather, what’s the end point of the COVID pedal-to-the-metal acceleration of work-from-home that’s finally forcing both employers and workers to ask why we ever did this to ourselves? Where “this” is Yeats’ “counter or desk among grey / 18th-century houses” or Dolly Parton’s critique of 9-to-5 workplace alienation, “barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving / they just use your mind, and they never give you credit”.

According to the PwC global workplace study conducted earlier this year, fewer than one in 10 people want to go back to the way things were. About 16% want to work all virtual, all the time. Three-quarters want a bit of both.

Resistance to an unthinking snapback to the pre-COVID office arrangements broke into the open in the US this month when the CEO of online magazine the Washingtonian, Cathy Merrill, said the quiet bit about office work out loud: about 20% of the time people spend in the office has nothing to do with the job they’re paid for.

It’s extra, she said in a Washington Post op-ed: “It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture.” She would have gotten away with it but for going on to the managerially logical next step: “If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor’.”

Here staff kicked back with coordinated tweets and a day of what the Clydeside Scots in 19th century industrialised Glasgow would have called ca’canny — deliberately limiting their output, in this case, by declining to write content for the day.

The office as we know it emerged in the late 19th century as (per Alfred Chandler in his business history The Visible Hand) organisations — first commercial, then public and non-profit — “took the place of market mechanisms in coordinating the activities of the economy and allocating its resources”.

Operating at scale, enterprises needed a tool to manage the two big challenges this task demanded: coordination and control. That tool? The office.

But here’s the twist: despite generations of iteration, organisations struggled to get the tool to work either at scale or consistently over time. The result of this is organisations constantly grasping at the latest big idea, from shape-shifting (open plan!) to cultural sculpting (casual Friday!). Structures morph to mimic the latest boom industry, from the railways’ stationmaster hierarchy in the 1880s, to Silicon Valley’s gamified campus culture today.

Some aspects of what was once core office work have been spun out into their own business units or companies, like call centres and cloud computing.

Other functions have emerged, often through what David Graeber in his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, called, er, “bullshit jobs”, which he divides up into flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.

The office itself has largely resisted the two big trends that have otherwise shaped work as business consolidated and state bureaucracy expanded: the Taylorist division of labour early in the 20th century and business process engineering from the 1980s on. Now it’s facing the Amazon trend: work intensification through surveillance tracking and technological speed-up.

The working-from-home experience has suggested that in-office coordination is over-rated — at least for experienced workers — and control is ineffective. That 20% of lost “office culture” ends up split between more productive work and that interface between work and the personal (like thinking while walking the dog).

It’s because office work is best assessed on output, not inputs.

Take this article. The Crikey editor is getting about 700 words on “the office”, without knowing how or when it’s been written — or even what it is, until it hits the inbox. Then the sub-editors will, unsupervised, do their job: correct the spelling and grammar and remove the jokes.

And you? If you’re in the office, you’re probably reading this on screen. Is that work? Depends on what you make of it.

Do you prefer working from home or in an office? Why? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.