Above. Photo by olly18/DepositPhotos.

BitDepth 1368 for August 22, 2022

As restrictions have relaxed, old skirmishes are being fought over ground that many thought had been decisively won.

Instead of an acceptance of hybrid work and continuing to trust employees to do the tasks assigned to them, there has been a large scale declaration that it’s time to get back to the office.

It’s a real Dawn of Justice moment for work from home (WFH), pitting Superman who shows up at the office (only to duck out ten minutes later, because there’s a hurricane somewhere) against Batman who works from home in a literal man cave with the computer setup we all really want.

I know that whenever I showed up in an office with a damn tie in those dark and difficult days, my heart was still in that cave, waiting for me to return and put the cape back on.

Showing up for the man of cubicle’s team recently was a real life superhero of alternative wisdom and reductive reasoning, Malcolm Gladwell.

In an interview with podcaster Stephen Bartlett of Diary of a CEO, he weighed in heavily on the side of going back to work at the office.

“The people who have tended to leave [his business] are the ones who are most socially disconnected from the organisation,” Gladwell said.

“[Those] who came into the office the least. It’s very hard to feel necessary when you are physically disconnected. We want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary. We want you to join our team and if you’re not here, it’s really hard to do that.”

“It’s not in your best interests to work at home. I know it’s a hassle, but if you’re sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?

“Don’t you want to feel part of something? If we don’t feel like we are part of something important, what’s the point? If it’s just a paycheck, what have you reduced your life to?”

Malcolm Gladwell has been inventively right about many things in his career as an analytical columnist and author, and he’s not entirely wrong here either.

There are some jobs that really soar on the dynamics of inspired, in-person collaboration, but there is also an aspect of this that reeks of privilege.

I have no doubt that going to work at Pushkin.fm, his podcast and audiobook production company, is an awesome experience, and that the enlightened businesses he visits are also well equipped to inspire their teams.

As sad as Gladwell’s impassioned perspective made me, I considered that Gladwell, for all his everyman sense of wonder, is both the boss and a person of means who can shape his workspace to his aspirations.

But what if that isn’t the case? What if you don’t care for indifferently maintained common bathroom facilities and lunchrooms that are too small and ill-equipped?

What if showing up for work and after parking a mile from where you work and swinging your cramping legs out of the driver’s seat, your first inspired thought is to get back in the car and go back home?

Gladwell laments that leaders aren’t able to effectively explain the value of presence to their employees. But what if that’s not what the employer wants?

Curiously, much of the early half of the interview is given over to a thoughtful contemplation of what happiness means at work, but that doesn’t factor into any empathetic deliberations about why employees might want WFH.

Most of the employers I’ve dealt with don’t have any illusions that their staff like their jobs, or believe that their tasks should deliver emotional fulfillment.

If these crappy jobs can be done in a comfortable space that just happens to be part of their home, why shouldn’t they be allowed to blunt the edge of that daily grind?

Most of the employees who want the freedom to choose where they work aren’t as empowered as say, Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer who built a nursery (on her own dime, in 2013) next to her office for her newborn four-month-old child.

Most cubicle dwellers have hard limits on how many pictures of their family they can put on the walls, and won’t have any success trying to fit actual family in their office space.

Also denied the option of WFH independence are an entire tier of hands-on workers.

Anyone who manages atoms, moving packages from one place to another, sliding meals across a counter or shoveling tar onto a road that’s recently been dug up again by WASA can’t work from home and will face one more workplace distinction between their work and that of bluecollar workers.

The situation is even more nuanced for neurodiverse workers who found new freedom in WFH from the social and physical challenges of a shared workspace outside their control.

Over two years of pandemic restrictions they carved out environments that made them happy, allowed them more flexibility to care for loved ones and for themselves and enabled a new way of thinking about getting work done.

There is a world of difference between explaining to a four-year-old that you need a minute and trying to tell Carl that no, you didn’t watch the match, and please can you leave this limited space that isn’t even mine?

It isn’t a clear win for anyone. This study found that people working at home did the same amount of work but took 30 per cent longer to do it.

But we’ve been working in offices for more than two centuries. It’s crazy to think that two years of forced WFH will deliver an unassailable path forward.