The call of cubicle farms and a wave of resistance
PremiumEmployees in sizeable numbers are reluctant to return to their offices. Employers must find a win-win balance that maximizes worker satisfaction within the constraints of work aims
A New Yorker cartoon from March 2020 let the cat out of the bag. A man at home in his pyjamas, in front of his laptop, staring into the distance with a horrified look on his face, as it struck him: “My god… those meetings really could all have been e-mails". Cheekiness aside, we have had to throw out old beliefs about productivity in the pandemic. White-collar workers have been freed of long commutes, even longer meetings, and have met their targets. Some workers found they could focus better on work without the white noise of cubicle talk and lunch banter. The office is no longer the box of glass and concrete that we once wheeled our way to, but a web of connections we carry around in laptops and smartphones. It’s not work from home, but work from anywhere. Geography is finally becoming history in our daily lives.
Employers that want to turn back the clock aren’t having it easy. Recently, WhiteHat Jr, a coding platform owned by Byju’s, was convulsed by mass resignations when it asked employees to return to office full-time. Such mutinies are rare, but companies across sectors are finding it difficult to coax employees back to their cubicles. Marquee names in the infotech sector, some of India’s biggest employers, still have an average 90-95% of their staff working from home. Some are nudging employees to show up in the office twice or thrice a week. There is validity in the argument that there is nothing like an office huddle to initiate young workers into a company’s culture, or lift team spirits sagging from the isolation of remote work. Employers also fret about droopy work discipline and a slide in creativity. But, to mix metaphors, that bus has probably left the office building. Workers who moved out of metros into smaller cities are reluctant to return to big-city rents and the madding traffic. This is a global phenomenon. In the US, highly skilled workers at top tech firms are rebelling against being summoned back to ‘cubicle farms’. In a survey of more than 32,000 American workers, two-thirds said they would find a new job if required to attend office full-time. Indian opinion polls have detected similar resistance.
This looks like a turning point in the brief history of the office. After all, till a few centuries ago, all human work was done at home. The industrial age and efficiency logic of Adam Smith’s ‘pin factory’ split the spheres of work and home apart. Today’s office is descended from centralized factories built to slot workers into efficient modes of production. But modern technology has liberated much value creation from spatial fetters. It might also have spelt the end of the one-size-fit-all workplace that made no allowance for, say, the needs of those who are also parents, or women made invisible by aggressive male-bonding work cultures. The bottomline, however, is that it is always about the bottomline. In attrition-wracked sectors, employees might hold the chips in setting their terms of work. That could change, though, if business begins to slump. The remote leeway granted should ideally go by a strategic design that aims to maximize staff satisfaction within the constraints of goal orientation. Hybrid work models could be optimized unit by unit, even function by function. Firms keen to attract people to workplaces could try using creatively designed spaces and ‘free’ time for idea-storms and innovation. The future of the office will depend on a sweet spot found between the demands of work and our work-life balance.