This is almost certainly the most important book about work and workplaces to appear in the first half of this year. Working Assumptions by Julia Hobsbawm will be one of the two most important published this year, as we shall soon discover. It is also one packed with wisdom, knowledge and a central premise that is undoubtedly true. Namely that the events of the past four years have given us the opportunity to rethink how we work and so how we spend our days and our lives more generally.
If you don’t already own this book, you should. Packed with ideas and information, Julia Hobsbawm writes with passion. It’s an easy book to like from a person who is just as easy to like. I wouldn’t argue with Julia about pretty much anything she has to say on the subject. She is making arguments that I have been engaged with for thirty years and for which the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible.
And yet – here it comes – I found reading it a weirdly uncomfortable experience at times. After discarding a couple of theories about why that was – I could tell you over a drink – I realised that it was less to do with the book itself, but the way in which it evoked wider concerns I have with the way conversations about work in the post covid era have been framed over the past four years.
I found reading it a weirdly uncomfortable experience at times
The most prominent of these is the way that the conversation routinely overlooks the majority of working people. This isn’t just about the two thirds for whom the conversations about four day weeks, hybrid working and the impact of generative AI are irrelevant. It’s also about clusters within the most-talked about 30 percent, who have wildly varying expectations, preferences and circumstances.
It is why I insert my own asterisk to many pronouncements about the future of work to denote that they are about a minority, but it would be tiresome to say it after every single point. To Julia’s credit she applies an actual asterisk in this way as early as page 2, and includes a whole chapter addressing the issue. Shame that more people don’t seem to do the same. In their heads at least.
The book’s main strength is its compelling business case for a new way of thinking about work. And that means by adopting a remote first mindset. There is also a very good business case for people to come together to work, but it’s one that is usually poorly made by the office sector and when it is, relies on some easily refutable vacuity such as ‘watercooler moments’. Even when it’s made well, it doesn’t mean it has to happen all the time. Julia is much better armed and pushing against an open door from the point of view of employees.
The way we work has always had its insanities and the pandemic gave us the opportunity to do something about them on a much wider front than in the past
The way we work has always had its insanities and the pandemic gave us the opportunity to do something about them on a much wider front than in the past. Commuting, bland and half-empty offices (they have always been half empty – that is not a consequence of hybrid working), useless meetings and most of all, the compulsion to carry out tasks in an office that could be done just as well or better elsewhere.
The book’s subtitle refers to “what we thought we knew about work before Covid. And the answer is an awful lot of stuff that is now mainstream thinking alilgned with the things for which Julia is arguing so compellingly. Which is why it is such a shame that pioneers such as Jack Nilles and Frank Duffy don’t even get a mention.
You can lift whole passages from their work that read as if they have only just been written. And are almost always more interesting and even more forward looking and informed than the relentless squawks – increasingly regurgitated as AI generated slop – that ‘hybrid working is here to stay’.
Nearly all of the work cited in the book dates from 2020 onwards. I understand that Julia wants to look forward and not return to what she refers to as a ‘pre Covid way of working and living’. But this begs the question of what you think that world was and this is where I may have one of my biggest issues with the whole debate.
Even before 2020, we had already developed much of the thinking that now defines mainstream conversations about work and workplaces. Some of it, in the case of Jack Nilles and Robert Propst and others dates back to the 1960s. Christel Kammerer developed the idea of flexible working in Germany in the 1960s.
In the 1980s and 1990s the work of Frank Duffy and others explored the consequences of the revolution in communications and miniaturisation of tech. We started talking about new ways of working. There were journals dedicated to them. Offices adopted models of activity based working and other forms of shared space to accommodate the new work cultures and a peripatetic or remote workforce.
When we ignore this history of the pre-covid workplace, we wind up with that Swiftian spat between one side arguing how we need to return to a past that never existed, while another argues we shouldn’t go back to a past that never existed
Flexible working was codified into law in 2003 in a way that is yet to happen for hybrid working. When we ignore this history of the pre-covid workplace, we wind up with that Swiftian spat between one side arguing how we need to return to a past that never existed, while another argues we shouldn’t go back to a past that never existed. This matters not only because this strife is tedious, ridiculous and pointless, but also because we have already synthesised the solutions that will break the impasse.
I don’t think that will entail the creation of a ‘sweet spot’ for hybrid working of three days in the office, two at home, for the simple reason that it seems to be more rigid than the shift to flexible working that was already underway.
Nick Bloom, undoubtedly the most important researcher working in the field today, must bear some of the responsibility for this even though, as Julia Hobsbawm points out, it appears to be Rory Sutherland who first coined the phrase TWaT to describe the idea. By establishing the ideal average split between in-office and remote work, Nick Bloom may have inadvertently fed the fixation with working out a split that may function on a spreadsheet, but probably doesn’t serve individuals. I already see signs that firms are moving away from this fixation, even if some of them have overshot the mark with draconian, so-called return to office mandates.
Dilbert made sense to us because of the universal themes of human behaviour it poked fun at, not because of the cubicle farms
One other issue that may not work for British readers is that the book often looks across the Pond for its standpoints when it should be gazing over The Channel. British working culture and office design have more in common with European models than they do the US. Dilbert made sense to us because of the universal themes of human behaviour it poked fun at, not because of the cubicle farms.
In fact, I’d argue that the European model has led the world in progressive thinking about workplaces until recently, when Australia seems to have picked up the baton. The US has had far further to shift on this stuff and is still adapting. I am prone to ask people – still – why the case studies we get in of American offices tend to be so stuffy. Why are the executive offices so big? Why have they got so much dark hardwood?
Anyway. I seem to have spent half of this review picking at a book that I will keep returning to as a source of ideas and inspiration. So it goes. There is little doubt that Julia is already one of the most influential people in the world right now when it comes to talking about work in its new incarnation. This book will cement that reputation and should be added to the bookshelf of anybody serious about thinking about this stuff. So think of this review as a footnote to that work. One more asterisk to add to an important conversation.
Working Assumptions by Julia Hobsbawm is available through your local bookshop or library.Â
Main image: Henrietta Garden
July 8, 2024
Book review – Working Assumptions by Julia Hobsbawm
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design
If you don’t already own this book, you should. Packed with ideas and information, Julia Hobsbawm writes with passion. It’s an easy book to like from a person who is just as easy to like. I wouldn’t argue with Julia about pretty much anything she has to say on the subject. She is making arguments that I have been engaged with for thirty years and for which the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible.
And yet – here it comes – I found reading it a weirdly uncomfortable experience at times. After discarding a couple of theories about why that was – I could tell you over a drink – I realised that it was less to do with the book itself, but the way in which it evoked wider concerns I have with the way conversations about work in the post covid era have been framed over the past four years.
The most prominent of these is the way that the conversation routinely overlooks the majority of working people. This isn’t just about the two thirds for whom the conversations about four day weeks, hybrid working and the impact of generative AI are irrelevant. It’s also about clusters within the most-talked about 30 percent, who have wildly varying expectations, preferences and circumstances.
It is why I insert my own asterisk to many pronouncements about the future of work to denote that they are about a minority, but it would be tiresome to say it after every single point. To Julia’s credit she applies an actual asterisk in this way as early as page 2, and includes a whole chapter addressing the issue. Shame that more people don’t seem to do the same. In their heads at least.
The book’s main strength is its compelling business case for a new way of thinking about work. And that means by adopting a remote first mindset. There is also a very good business case for people to come together to work, but it’s one that is usually poorly made by the office sector and when it is, relies on some easily refutable vacuity such as ‘watercooler moments’. Even when it’s made well, it doesn’t mean it has to happen all the time. Julia is much better armed and pushing against an open door from the point of view of employees.
The way we work has always had its insanities and the pandemic gave us the opportunity to do something about them on a much wider front than in the past. Commuting, bland and half-empty offices (they have always been half empty – that is not a consequence of hybrid working), useless meetings and most of all, the compulsion to carry out tasks in an office that could be done just as well or better elsewhere.
The book’s subtitle refers to “what we thought we knew about work before Covid. And the answer is an awful lot of stuff that is now mainstream thinking alilgned with the things for which Julia is arguing so compellingly. Which is why it is such a shame that pioneers such as Jack Nilles and Frank Duffy don’t even get a mention.
You can lift whole passages from their work that read as if they have only just been written. And are almost always more interesting and even more forward looking and informed than the relentless squawks – increasingly regurgitated as AI generated slop – that ‘hybrid working is here to stay’.
Nearly all of the work cited in the book dates from 2020 onwards. I understand that Julia wants to look forward and not return to what she refers to as a ‘pre Covid way of working and living’. But this begs the question of what you think that world was and this is where I may have one of my biggest issues with the whole debate.
Even before 2020, we had already developed much of the thinking that now defines mainstream conversations about work and workplaces. Some of it, in the case of Jack Nilles and Robert Propst and others dates back to the 1960s. Christel Kammerer developed the idea of flexible working in Germany in the 1960s.
In the 1980s and 1990s the work of Frank Duffy and others explored the consequences of the revolution in communications and miniaturisation of tech. We started talking about new ways of working. There were journals dedicated to them. Offices adopted models of activity based working and other forms of shared space to accommodate the new work cultures and a peripatetic or remote workforce.
Flexible working was codified into law in 2003 in a way that is yet to happen for hybrid working. When we ignore this history of the pre-covid workplace, we wind up with that Swiftian spat between one side arguing how we need to return to a past that never existed, while another argues we shouldn’t go back to a past that never existed. This matters not only because this strife is tedious, ridiculous and pointless, but also because we have already synthesised the solutions that will break the impasse.
I don’t think that will entail the creation of a ‘sweet spot’ for hybrid working of three days in the office, two at home, for the simple reason that it seems to be more rigid than the shift to flexible working that was already underway.
Nick Bloom, undoubtedly the most important researcher working in the field today, must bear some of the responsibility for this even though, as Julia Hobsbawm points out, it appears to be Rory Sutherland who first coined the phrase TWaT to describe the idea. By establishing the ideal average split between in-office and remote work, Nick Bloom may have inadvertently fed the fixation with working out a split that may function on a spreadsheet, but probably doesn’t serve individuals. I already see signs that firms are moving away from this fixation, even if some of them have overshot the mark with draconian, so-called return to office mandates.
One other issue that may not work for British readers is that the book often looks across the Pond for its standpoints when it should be gazing over The Channel. British working culture and office design have more in common with European models than they do the US. Dilbert made sense to us because of the universal themes of human behaviour it poked fun at, not because of the cubicle farms.
In fact, I’d argue that the European model has led the world in progressive thinking about workplaces until recently, when Australia seems to have picked up the baton. The US has had far further to shift on this stuff and is still adapting. I am prone to ask people – still – why the case studies we get in of American offices tend to be so stuffy. Why are the executive offices so big? Why have they got so much dark hardwood?
Anyway. I seem to have spent half of this review picking at a book that I will keep returning to as a source of ideas and inspiration. So it goes. There is little doubt that Julia is already one of the most influential people in the world right now when it comes to talking about work in its new incarnation. This book will cement that reputation and should be added to the bookshelf of anybody serious about thinking about this stuff. So think of this review as a footnote to that work. One more asterisk to add to an important conversation.
Working Assumptions by Julia Hobsbawm is available through your local bookshop or library.Â
Main image: Henrietta Garden