Unto the promised land...possibly

© Simon Poulter 2021

As day trips go, last Thursday's wasn't the most scenic. Nor was it the most productive. But it was liberating beyond all measure. The occasion was the briefest of visits to my official place of work, for the first time since I was actually employed to work there, exactly 12 months ago today. The reason for visiting was to finally collect my security badge, allowing me - when needs require it - to go into the office and work there. 

You see, I have a tactical need, every couple of weeks, to work somewhere other than the increasingly knackered sofa that has been my workplace exclusively for the last year. Day after day, e-mail after e-mail, Teams meeting after Teams meeting, I have sat on that sofa like some condemned breakfast TV presenter, with a make-do arrangement enhanced only by the acquisition of a hybrid coffee table with a pop-up desk element. It’s hardly been an adequate solution, and God knows what attrition has been caused to my spine, let alone to my general health (itself a topic of lengthier consideration another time). But it has worked. In fact, it has all worked.

In these last 12 months, I’ve contributed to my company’s quarterly financial results, two product launches, an advertising campaign launch and even an IPO. And all from that dilapidated settee (which, I swear, has sunk by a good inch from having my carcass weighing it down for the entire working week). It would be false, though, to pretend that liberation is fully in sight. A return to five-days-a-week office working may never happen. My company, wisely, has adopted a policy of continued work-from-home for most, and is certainly not encouraging a resumption of full occupation on the floors of its HQ. Generally, the mood music is clearly a discouragement of office working for now, sensibly, given that we’re not out of the woods yet. 

In his press conference yesterday, Boris Johnson was typically chipper, looking forward to supping a pint in a pub which, for some, is the sum total of their liberation ambition. For others, it’s hugging an elderly relative again, or even seeing a relative for the first time in months. I’m up for all of that, with the added goal of getting into the swimming pool again next Monday for the first time since December. But beyond that, I’m strangely covetous of anyone who’s been able to continue going to work during the lockdown. Indeed, it’s got to the point where I can’t watch Line Of Duty's Steve Arnott in the AC-12 office without thinking what a lucky git he is (even if the BBC's production team has notably socially distanced everyone). 

Picture: BBC

Last week’s briefest of excursions into Central London, visiting a place of work I’d only previously been in the once (and that was for my job interview), felt like a tantalising experience of freedom. I know we all eventually get to loathe the daily commute - and I know I probably will, once some semblance of full normality comes back - but my somewhat humdrum train journey last Thursday, with a short walk to the company's building, made me feel like Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Apollo 11 lander. More liberation was to come as, after collecting my badge, I bought lunch from the nearby Pret A Manger and sat in the mild midday sunshine, like every other office worker would do, before heading back to the Underground station for the journey home. I was only out of the house for a matter of four hours, but it left me near-giddy with satisfaction. 

Entire sitcoms, films even, have been made about commuting and office life, but on this one Thursday it had become an unrivalled and welcome novelty. I shouldn’t, though, get my hopes up too high. “This virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future,” Professor Chris Whitty said, cheeringly, during yesterday’s Downing Street presser. And he’s right. The ‘direction of travel’ for some time has been that we may be wearing masks and socially distancing for a long time to come. The vaccine rollout has been remarkable - I’m looking forward to my second jab next Saturday - but for all the upbeat talk of economic life reopening again, we’re still a long way off 100% vaccinations, and other aspects of normality, like foreign travel. Boris, yesterday, defiantly maintained faith in his “roadmap”, adding that he saw nothing in the the present data that made the government think it would deviate from it. But that's not without gloomy predictions from SAGE experts which have cast doubt on any return to full normality by 21 June, with further evidence suggesting that any premature relaxation of the lockdown rules could spark a fourth wave of the virus.

Business has been mixed on where it stands on the return to normality and, in particular, office working. In February, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called working from a home “an aberration” and vowed to correct it “as quickly as possible.” Others in the finance sector have echoed this sentiment, citing the need for collaboration that can only be achieved by sitting side by side in an office. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is going in a hybrid direction, adopting a flexible approach that would enable its 22,000 staff in the UK to divide their time between office and home working once restrictions are lifted. Employees will also have better flexibility in choosing how their working days are structured, with the ability to choose start and end times, and even work more hours from Monday to Thursday so that they can knock off early on a Friday. Such revolution reflects the fact that many companies and their leaders have come to realise, over the course of this last year, just how much working culture resembled battery farming at times. For every CEO who wants to see staff back at their desks, there are plenty who see it fraught with risk, resigning themselves to the fact that the sight of desk-bound employees, sitting cheek-by-jowl has long expired.

You could even say that more forward-thinking executives have seen the light, concluding that WFH has worked for a year, and many employees have said that a commute that constitutes little more than bedroom-to-kitchen-to-home-office has been a boon to wellbeing, especially for people previously juggling their work travel with things like the school run. Not surprisingly, technology leaders have been most open to the continuation of remote working, despite being the most likely to preside over working cultures that benefit the most from face-to-face collaboration. Some, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have even started talking up the possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality technologies. This, though, is reflective of the somewhat idealistic thinking in Silicon Valley. 

The reality, I suspect, is going to be somewhere between these poles: the liberation has only just begun, and even then, only slightly. What you and I might remember of going to work from before the pandemic may, yet, remain a distant memory. On the other hand, as organisations like mine discover that projects we’re working on might benefit from being able to shout across a desk at someone, we might start increasingly find ourselves swiping in and out of a formal workplace, sitting on an actual chair at an actual desk. From this end of the last 12 months, I know what I’m looking forward to.