Don’t go back to the office! And don’t work from home!

A drama in two scenes with some afterthoughts on New Work

Scene 1: Home office horrors

Jane opens her eyes seeing the flickering red numbers on the alarm clock next to her bed: 6.42 AM. Another dark November morning. Before the clock has a chance to ring, she jumps out of her bed stumbling on shaky legs towards the kids’ bedroom. Lucy, Jane’s ten months old daughter is already wide awake crying her lungs out and waking up Matt, her four year old brother, who is now joining the concert with a heartbreaking “mommy mommy”. Both kids are crying. She has get them dressed, ready to go to their daycare. Her partner Joe, tired from late night escalation calls with his struggling company is still snoring under a thick blanket. His boss had told him in the last 1:1 that maybe there will be layoffs due to rising costs and economic uncertainty and that his job as mid-level business analyst could be affected. Yawning, Jane pulls herself together, somehow manages to take care of both kids, feeding them a rushed breakfast. She leaves the apartment to take the big one to kindergarden which is fortunately within walking distance while carrying the little one (still crying) in a baby sling.

Back home, out of breath from climbing the stairs back up to their two bedroom apartment, Jane hands over the little daughter to Joe who is rubbing the sleep from his eyes and runs back to the kitchen table that will serve as her office desk for the coming eight hours while Joe will have all his Zoom calls from the living room. Sometimes his calls with the offshore team go on until late night. She looks at her watch in mild panic. Already 8.57. Hurriedly she throws her laptop on the table, screen and keyboard smeared with traces of baby food. Between yesterday’s dirty dishes and today’s breakfast fallout she flips the device open, puts her headphones on, fires up Teams and Jira with a few routine clicks.

9.00 AM “Good morning everyone!” Jane greets the wall of faceless avatars staring at her. As always she is the only one in the call who switched on her camera. With a smile she says, her voice surprisingly clear and melodic: “A wonderful good morning to you guys! I hope you can hear me!” – no answer. After a few seconds of silence except the faint crackling of a bad microphone somewhere on the other end of a digital connection, she continues: “Welcome to today’s daily standup! Who wants to go first and share what you have accomplished since yesterday and what are your goals for today …” Feeling her back ache from the hard wooden Ikea chair she was sitting on the whole week she looks at the pile of laundry on the floor in front of her, a used diaper on top, thinking to herself: “Why am I doing this? I should actually quit. But then what if Joe loses his job …” – “Ok let me start” the robotic voice of one of the faceless avatars starts speaking inside her headphones with a ‘bad internet’ distortion. “Yesterday, I … wait I don’t see my ticket, can you scroll down? …” She hears her daughter starting to cry again next door. While still trying hard to appear professional smiling at the camera (… did she forget to put on her makeup today?) she carefully pulls out the smartphone under the table typing with her left thumb so people in the call don’t notice while the robotic voice keeps listing the IDs of Jira tickets, “plz honey help. 15 mins, maybe 10. I’ll cut it short.” waiting for a blue checkmark to appear next to her message. “8 hours to go … I can’t do this any more” she ponders, desperately trying to focus and appear happy and motivated, “but what is the alternative?”

Scene 2: Inside the corporate bunker

Jeff stares at the dark grey wall behind the flickering screen in front of him, tortured by a throbbing headache while inhaling the stale air of the grotesquely ugly open plan office. “What the hell am I doing here?” he mumbles to himself. On each side to his right and left there are long lines of identical desks all equipped with the same hardware setup: a mid-sized business monitor – not too small because of employee health regulations, not too large due to budget restrictions -, a docking station, a black keyboard and mouse, nothing else. Crouched in front of each desk, people. “My awesome coworkers”, Jeff whispers sarcastically. Under the flickering cold LED light emanating from the ceiling they appear uniform and grey. Most of them wear noise cancelling headphones over their ears not because they enjoy music but to signal “leave me alone”. Nobody pays attention to Jeff’s mumbling. Behind each row there are more rows of desks with people sitting in front of them, all staring at their flat screens like galley slaves in the underbelly of an ancient war ship. A small grey cleaning robot hums past his desk, undisturbed by the humans around it. It gets stuck between two wheels of an office chair, pulls back in several back-and-forth movements, then navigates its way around a cable connection box and drives back towards the corner in search of its charging station. “The most human-like behaving thing in this room”, Jeff thinks with a sad smirk. Examining the mouse in his right hand checking its brand Jeff’s mind starts to wander.

He imagines the back-and-forth of negotiations, offers, tenders that needed to happen between the procurement department and several listed hardware suppliers before they could finally place their order of 10.000 identical work stations for the new “Omni Work Experience” as they called it. His friend Greg works in procurement. Some time ago while having lunch in the cantina, Greg had explained to him the whole process. How many rules they had to follow and why it was virtually impossible to order any uncertified equipment outside the corporate catalog. Even getting a USB stick was complicated. Sometimes, he said, one of the younger middle managers was somehow able to somehow order the latest smartphone to impress his peers in a leadership retreat. “He made them all jealous”, Greg laughed. But most who try give up. He remembers how Greg had made fun of the success story his boss had him write about the “Next iteration of people-empowering agile workplace innovation”, “New Work paradigms unlocking a vibrant diversity of perspectives”, “Work-life sustainability to strengthen our corporate footprint”. He had forgotten about “that bullshit”, Greg said, until he found the same text slightly shortened but basically unchanged and published on an intranet page where the CEO herself – ok, more likely someone from the “employee engagement” department writing in her name – announced that finally everyone was given the great opportunity to go back to the office to become “an office hero”. “The article was meant as a joke”, Greg said, “I never believed they would publish it. Actually my secret hope was that they would fire me for this …”

“Become an office hero …” Jeff mumbles … “or else …” – “If you don’t follow friendly invitation to heroism, the department of Corporate Politics will empower you to re-join the vibrantly diverse crowd of job seekers …” Jeff notices that he hadn’t seen Greg in a while. He always had a talent for practical jokes. “I guess they eventually fired him”, Jeff thinks, falling back into his previous thoughts. “All of this feels wrong. Sitting in this horrible room. Ticking boxes, punching cards and pretending to be hero” His eyes meet the empty black gaze of a surveillance camera, a small red dot periodically flashing on its front like an “SOS”, its lens staring directly at him. “I just want to go home” he says while clicking the mouse to finally open the next Excel spreadsheet.

Ok, both examples are horrible. Now what?

First, yes, these are extreme cases. And yes, they are exaggerated. But they are both based on actual experiences and they reflect real possibilities of how things can go wrong when working from home or from the office.

But what are we actually talking about when we talk about working from home or from the office? We talk about work!

It’s the work, stupid.

When talking about where to work, we talk about work.

Work is what dominates our life over a large timespan, at least for many of us in our (Western) culture. Revolutions have been started to redefine the way we work, to give workers equal rights, to empower people to own their work. Work has been pointed out as the thing that gives our life value, justification, meaning.

We will not dive into the history or philosophy of work and its development over the centuries (although this one is really an interesting rabbit hole to nerd away in).

Let’s keep it simple instead:

• Firstly, work is an activity. It is a form of doing something. The person who works spends her time and directs her attention towards doing it.
• Secondly, work is a social activity. There is no isolated work happening in a vacuum outside of society. An activity is work only if it affects someone else. This someone else can be coworkers, bosses, clients, you have it. There is always someone with whom, for whom (against whom …) you work.
• Thirdly, work is about getting things done, no matter where it is done. It is about moving something from a state of “to do” to “done”. Work leads to outcomes.

Work is a part of life and there are many possible ways in which life and work and the rest of life can go together (more on this below).

The way the “work from home” versus “back to the office” debate is framed is a setting of employees working in or for a company or organization. This is the standard way most people in our age and society go about work.In this standard setting, employees work to earn a living. Organizations employ employees to reach their goals – be it financial, idealistic and purpose-driven or just to keep things running.

Ignoring the shiny world of employer marketing for the moment, employers want to make sure they get what they need out of their employees. And interview pitches aside, employees want to limit the portion of their precious lifetime and energy they give away for their employers. You don’t need to be a Karl Marx to realize that this does not always develope into a love story. The question from where to work is only one aspect of this complex, often complicated relationship.

Employees offer their talents, energy and time. Employers offer a compensation plus varying perks. Somehow both meet somewhere where their interests overlap. This means: we are talking about a deal. Like with most deals, the partners agreeing on it are rarely 100% happy about it and have natural interests in making the deal work out more or less in their own favor.

New Work!

The question is how to make the deal work out better for both sides. Some very basic considerations:

• Employers, in their own interest, try to make work work (pun intended) for workers as part of their life: They try to make it more fulfilling, more engaging, more compatible with the life of working people.
• Where fulfilling work is not attainable: they try to reduce negative aspects of unfulfilling work, balance them with positives, giving it a combination of incentives and a sense purpose or promise beyond the activity as such.
• But what about the workers / the employees? Being human, they are not only rational but emotional beings. They don’t want to spend their time doing something only because it “makes sense”, is necessitated by rationality as kind of a lesser evil. If you give them a choice, they want to do what they really, really want.

You heard similar ideas somewhere? You may be right. We talk about “New Work“!

New Work, as famously defined by the seminal New Work philosopher Frithjof Bergmann, can be split into three parts:

1. Gainful employment
2. High-tech self-providing and smart consumption
3. Work that you really, really want.¹

It seems that as a society we are getting closer to a point where not only part 1 (gainful employment and absence of unemployment) but also the other two are moving within reach at least in developed countries.

“Self-providing and smart consumption” is enabled by technologies in the realm of fabrication, prototyping, easy access to materials, methods, tools for decentralized building of things along with the digital platforms to connect makers to resources.

Work that you really, really want comes within reach through automation of all the work that you don’t want. Robotics, AI, digital tools and machines are pushing the limits of what can be done without forcing humans to engage in unfulfilling, unattractive work. This development is rolling like a wave from blue to white collar industries and jobs. The work that is left for humans to do is becoming increasingly less unattractive. At least potentially.

There is a tension between parts 2 and 3 versus part 1. There is some anxiety about employment levels (part 1) being threatened by the emergence of technologies that enable part 2 and 3. Feeling optimistic however one could reply that (a) So what? If there are less employment opportunities while self-providing and fulfilling work becomes feasible, just do less of the “gainful” employed work and increase the time allocated to the other parts (as Bergmann suggested to 1/3 of your working time each), or you could say (b) Great! Then let creativity invent new forms of gainful employment!

If the jobs we know to day will disappear this will not necessarily lead to less jobs overall. They may just be different (e.g. collaborating with robots or AIs as tools or virtual co-workers). And even if there is less traditional work, the sum total of productivity may still go up creating a surplus for people who may have the privilege of working less while getting more out of it.

New Work is still an utopia. But it is one that is becoming less utopian by the day.

Back to the question: From where to work?

Put into the context of work as such – and the idea of New Work in particular – the “from where” becomes much less important than the “how” and the “what” of work (not to mention the “why“).

If we see the gainful employment as only part of work and more concretely as a deal between employer and employed, the details such as from where to work become negotiable.

It also becomes more clear now how “working from X” cannot be seen in isolation from other aspects of work. Which rules, regulations or practices are in place forms part of a work culture.

Based on this, we can draw a pragmatic conclusion.

What Would the Pragmatic Agilist Do?

Make the deal explicit.

• As employer: ask yourself what you really (really) need from your employees. Do you need to have them co-located in a specific place? If so, do you need them there all the time? Or just for certain activities, occasions, events, project phases? And can you explain why?
• As employee: check which employer suits your expectations regarding work organization and culture. Be adult enough to own what you sign up for.
• Both: be clear about expectations and realities. What do you expect from your prospective company as an employee and what do you expect from future employees as a company? Cultural fit and matching expectations first, fruit basket second.

Prioritize flexibility.

• As employer: Before establishing fixed rules and regulations on where (not) to work, check the maximum of flexibility that you can allow without compromising your part of the deal. You can do this as an easy thought experiment. Take away flexibility only where it is mission critical. This can mean of course that some will end up with a strict on-site policy and perhaps other things that are left more open and up to individual preferences.
• As employee: check not only work in the sense of part 1 (gainful employment) of the New Work triad (see above) but also the other parts. Depending on your phase in life, your range of possibilities and where you want to go.
• Both: take a broader view on the location of work. Does it have to be either office or home? Consider the whole range of options from office work to becoming a nomad.² Work can be done at airports, in buses, on beaches, in cafes, beer gardens, mobile homes, night clubs … Work is more than what you do in a certain location. Such locations, like offices and factories, can be more than places of work. No need to be dogmatic about it.

Be utopian!

“Utopia” is a term derived from ancient Greek meaning “having no place“.³ Thus it fits an open, intellectually curious, creative approach to where work can be done: nowhere – and everywhere!

Think ahead not only for the next few months but long term: how do you want to collaborate in the future? At the same time allow short term experiments along the way. Remind yourself of what it is that your work is actually about: its outcomes. How are your outcomes measured? Can these measurements be improved to make room for trust-based work that needs less co-location or supervision and enable more flexibility?

In many cases the proper way is not just “black or white” but a continuum of many shades reflecting where you stand and where you want to go as an organization, i.e. as a group of people joining forces to reach common objectives. Find your own specific and unique way. Avoid copying what others are doing or promoting.

And finally, if you have the privilege of flexible work, light a candle and spend a moment of silence thinking of all the nurses, firefighters, construction workers, ambulance drivers, pilots, waiters etc. who will probably never enjoy these kind of discussions.

Continue the discussion

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1. See Bergmann’s “New Work, new culture“. Good no-nonsense read on the topic: https://beltmag.com/rise-fall-center-new-work-flint-bergmann-gull/ ↩︎
2. https://nomadlist.com/ ↩︎
3. Cf. https://www.britannica.com/topic/utopia ↩︎