When you fixate on deciding precisely how much time everybody has to spend in an office, somebody is going to decide the answer is five days. The peculiar obsession with pronouncing the answer to be two days or three days can be dated back to 2020 when a load of people who had never previously taken much interest in the matter decided to reinvent a world that had never existed, by replacing it with something that couldn’t exist. We invented hybrid working when we didn’t need to.
In 2019, we knew that offices were half empty, but organisations just went along with that inefficiency and most offices were best described as adequate. There had been a shift towards flexible working since the late 1980s, implemented patchily, but codified into law as a right.
A number of different office design models had been developed to meet the needs of different work styles and cultures. Progress was slower than it should have been, but it was progress.
Nobody talked about hybrid working. Nobody was interested in implementing a shift system based on an average taken across an economy.
The pandemic changed that. The world of 2019 and earlier was characterised as one in which people were forced to commute into a large city every day to work at a desk 9 to 5, five days a week on a series of largely transactional tasks. Replacing this meant we had to impose a differently rigid pattern of work on organisations.
And anybody who suggested this was a bad idea was a dinosaur. In fairness, some of the people who do push back are Jurassic. But they are often guilty of a belief in the same fallacy.
They didn’t all have desks to return to because the facilities team knew more about how people worked than he did
This famously included Jacob Rees-Mogg MP who declared in 2022 that civil servants needed to get back to their desks full time, only to discover that they didn’t all have desks because the facilities team knew more about how people worked than he did.
And so, the ensuing years have been taken up by the endless, pointless, stupid argument about how many days constitute hybrid work. Most of it dominated by the person with the brain-dead megaphone.
This week, we had the spectacle of a cookie-cutter career politician declaring that Jeff Bezos is getting it all wrong. Now, in most situations, assuming that somebody with whom you disagree might know something you don’t is a good idea.
That is especially so when you are somebody who has never stepped outside of politics since your teens and you find yourself telling the world’s second richest man that he doesn’t know how to run a business. A little self-awareness can go a long way.
This will all drag on of course, as more and more businesses take decisions in what they believe is their best interests while commentators and politicians tell them they don’t know what they are doing. An argument about which end is best to crack a boiled egg.
Maybe some of these organisations are getting it wrong. But a little humility on the issue might help us synthesise a better working culture and higher productivity for everybody. We might even get back to what we knew five years ago.
Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.
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September 20, 2024
Hybrid working may just be a kink in the road to something better
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working
In 2019, we knew that offices were half empty, but organisations just went along with that inefficiency and most offices were best described as adequate. There had been a shift towards flexible working since the late 1980s, implemented patchily, but codified into law as a right.
A number of different office design models had been developed to meet the needs of different work styles and cultures. Progress was slower than it should have been, but it was progress.
Nobody talked about hybrid working. Nobody was interested in implementing a shift system based on an average taken across an economy.
The pandemic changed that. The world of 2019 and earlier was characterised as one in which people were forced to commute into a large city every day to work at a desk 9 to 5, five days a week on a series of largely transactional tasks. Replacing this meant we had to impose a differently rigid pattern of work on organisations.
And anybody who suggested this was a bad idea was a dinosaur. In fairness, some of the people who do push back are Jurassic. But they are often guilty of a belief in the same fallacy.
This famously included Jacob Rees-Mogg MP who declared in 2022 that civil servants needed to get back to their desks full time, only to discover that they didn’t all have desks because the facilities team knew more about how people worked than he did.
And so, the ensuing years have been taken up by the endless, pointless, stupid argument about how many days constitute hybrid work. Most of it dominated by the person with the brain-dead megaphone.
This week, we had the spectacle of a cookie-cutter career politician declaring that Jeff Bezos is getting it all wrong. Now, in most situations, assuming that somebody with whom you disagree might know something you don’t is a good idea.
That is especially so when you are somebody who has never stepped outside of politics since your teens and you find yourself telling the world’s second richest man that he doesn’t know how to run a business. A little self-awareness can go a long way.
This will all drag on of course, as more and more businesses take decisions in what they believe is their best interests while commentators and politicians tell them they don’t know what they are doing. An argument about which end is best to crack a boiled egg.
Maybe some of these organisations are getting it wrong. But a little humility on the issue might help us synthesise a better working culture and higher productivity for everybody. We might even get back to what we knew five years ago.
Bookmarks
How to recover from burnout and rediscover a sense of purpose
The importance of stupidity in scientific research
The memory holing of books
Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all?
A timeless defense of the imagination and the creative spirit
Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.