Not working from home

Next week I will reach the landmark of having spent 35 years working in an office. Except, obviously, I haven’t. For the last 16 months – the entire time I have been employed by my company – I’ve been working from home. Like everyone else employed to work in an office.

Actually, my anniversary is something of a fraud. In my previous job I worked from home more than I did company premises (partly due to relentless business travel); in the previous company it was mandated that we had to work at a designated corporate site for at least three days a week (mainly, we suspected, so control-freak bigwigs could keep an eye on us); further back still, my job evolved while in-post from five-days-a-week in-office attendance to only going in when it made sense. That was just in the space of five years. 

For some, technology and different company cultures have made working from home nothing that special, but I appreciate that over the last year or so it has been brand new for many. My fiancée, for example, is a primary school teacher and at one point in the pandemic found herself going into school in the morning to teach key workers’ children in person, and then coming home at lunchtime to carry on lessons via Zoom. I think she actually liked it, but would be the first to admit that that classroom provides a tactile engagement you can’t replicate over webcam. 

Office workers, on the other hand, may have found the culture shift to ‘WFH’ a different matter entirely, to the extent that it has been a sub-narrative of the entire Covid drama. In essence, it has marked the nominal end of ‘9 to 5’ and complaints about Tube delays and overcrowded carriages as worklife became conducted in pyjamas and gym gear. City centres became apocalyptic wastelands, devoid of people and their cash being spent in sandwich shops, coffee bars, shirt shops and dry cleaners. Even Marks & Spencer has cut back on formal workwear, completely eradicating suits from some of its branches in favour of the ‘smart casual’ uniform of the blazer-and-chinos combo (ten years ago M&S was selling five million men’s suits a year. Last year it sold only two million).

WFH may have been a change for office workers who’d never before been facilitated to do it, but many people - freelancers, for example - have only ever worked from their kitchens and are quite happy with the arrangement. But, while I might be self-impressed by my own forthcoming gold carriage clock moment, ever since IT departments started handing out access via VPN (which, apparently, doesn’t have anything to do with underwear), working from home while still connected to the corporate environment has been pretty commonplace. I can go back 25 years to the first time I brought home a laptop and hooked up to my work e-mail using a very slow phone line. It was a revolution in my living room, at a stroke untethering me from the generational convention of ’going into the office’ and all that entails.

Picture: BBC

Covid unpicked that convention, and a working environment and its dynamics so brilliantly captured by Ricky Gervais in The Office and films like Horrible Bosses, The Devil Wears Prada and Office Space. I’d forgotten about most of all that the other day when I made a trial run to my own office - for the first time. It was partly out of curiosity to see what it looks like and partly out of desperation to escape the knackered sofa that has been my workplace since April last year, with me increasingly sinking into its un-upholstered depths. It was a Wednesday but could have been a Sunday, such was the lack of anyone else on my floor. In fairness, it was August and officially the office was still closed to all but essential attendance, but it served as a reminder that throughout the pandemic WFH has pretty much worked, and that enabling people to sit in their gym wear and have time to do the school run has not been to the detriment of productivity. 

Personally, I’m ready to return - to the impromptu coffee machine conversations, the sight of people other than the postman, to the commute and the lunchtime trek to Pret for a boxed salad eaten with a pointless - literally - bamboo fork. I’m ready to escape the Teams meeting regime and the view out of the living room window and the hedge beyond it, the cat and Sky News’ presenter rosta for company  And I am desperate to spend my working days sitting on a proper desk chair once more. 

It’s still anyone’s guess as to what occupancy will be like when our office opens next week, and here lies the new reality. There will be colleagues who have joined us since lockdown last week and who have never been in the office. Some younger employees, especially those who joined from university, will have never been in an office working environment at all, and have spent the last 18 months perched on beds in houseshares or sat opposite flatmates at dining tables. Office veterans like me will attest to the professional and social development benefits of being in a vibrant workplace, where decision making is quicker when you can just walk over to someone's desk. On the other hand, living just yards away from your laptop has improved work-life balance beyond all recognition. So hats off, then, to my employer’s very clear message that the notion of presence is over. In-office attendance will be largely down to a combination of personal choice, functional need and management expectations. Even the idea of a formal start and finish time has been relaxed, enabling those with childcare responsibilities to manage that before travelling in and again later in the day. 

Our formal reopening on Monday – two days before my supposed anniversary – will not be a wholesale return to the office life we may have known, but a dipping of toes in the water. Gone will be the expectation of everyone clocking on at 8.30, thus requiring hordes of deskbound staff to cram into the same Tube trains at exactly the same time. Gone will be the expectation that you even have to be in every day of the working week. In fact, it’s all about working out what’s best for you.

It won’t, however, be for everyone. A recent survey of American office workers by accountancy giant PwC found that WFH enthusiasm has risen throughout the pandemic, and that 41% of workers questioned in August wanted to remain at home full-time, a 12% increase from January. Even with July’s ‘Freedom Day’, Google mobility data - which tracks people’s location history - suggested that British workplace presence is just 40% of pre-pandemic figures (compared to 30% in the US and Germany).

Opinion in different business sectors appears divided over whether the return to the office should be made formal: technology giants like Apple, Amazon and Facebook have said that they would not expect employees back at their offices until January, while City firms in London have expressed a different view. Goldman Sachs’ chief executive, David Soloman has described WFH as an “aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible”, adding that it was “not a new normal”. Other financial services companies have adopted a hybrid approach, viewing the office as “collaborative spaces”, according to insurer Aviva, best used for creativity and innovation rather than rows of battery hens doing their e-mail. BT has said that WFH will not last forever, with the company’s HR director writing an official blog post yesterday stating that with the end of the school holidays it was time to return to the office: “Our offices will be the place our graduates and apprentices learn from more senior colleagues,” Alison Wilcox wrote, adding that BT’s sites also played a part in their “surrounding micro and local economies”.

The elephant in the Marie Celeste-like room, of course, is that COVID-19 hasn’t gone away. Employees at city locations will still need to commute, with public transport the prevailing choice. That means dealing with Covidiot anxiety, and the psychological stare-outs between the masked and the maskless on trains and buses. Office managers, too, will have made provisions by implementing polite conventions about wearing masks in lifts and providing socially-distanced desks. This might be mitigated by progressive policies not requiring mandatory in-office attendance, but as we head into the traditional cold and flu season, along with the start of the school term and an exponential increase in ’normality’, there’s nothing to stop the return to office life being thwarted by the Delta variant or other mutations. Some large corporate concerns have been understandably concerned about the legal risks of bringing people back to the office while the coronavirus is still on the lose, fearing the threat of legal challenges on health and safety grounds. 

There has also been evidence of in-office policies having some impact on loyalty. A survey of American workers revealed that 40% would consider changing companies if they had full-time office working imposed on them. Another thorny issue might be companies cutting pay for those who prefer to work from home full time - civil servants in the UK are facing the prospect of their London Weighting being removed, though this raises the argument that while the benefit hasn’t been necessary to cover the cost of commuting, someone has to pay for all that broadband and electricity that has been consumed by people working from home.

The months ahead, I suspect, will be more tentative than definitive. Time and personal confidence might be the determining factors as to whether a gradual return to the office is a trickle or a flood, or exactly how a hybrid approach manifests itself. While politicians push the idea of normality and freedom, it’s still too early to say exactly what “normal” is going to be. I had a taste of it last week with my day trip to an office, but despite the everyday regularity of sitting in front of a laptop, it was still an odd novelty, despite being a setting that I have known - mostly - my entire working life.

Are we ready to return to the office?

Picture: BBC

It is now six weeks since the UK went into lockdown and from a working perspective, everything is going well. On Thursday I’ll celebrate the first full month in my new job, one in which I have so far met only three colleagues in person - one, a few years ago, and my boss and his boss during my interview in February. Now I think of it, they were probably the last non-family members I had any real proximity to before everything came to a halt (delivery drivers dropping food at the front door, and the neighbours across the road clapping on a Thursday night don't count).

Since I came on onboard at the company everything has been done virtually, from my induction to the ramp-up of tasks and projects with my various internal “stakeholders”. As you can imagine, working for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, the IT has worked perfectly. The Skype calls, even when subject to the vagaries of home broadband (from another supplier, I have to confess) have proven almost as good as being in the same room as colleagues, and even though you don’t have to see the whites of their eyes - face facts, a good old phone call is just as good - it is strangely reassuring to see co-workers in their home habitats, like everyone else ignoring workplace dress codes and not worrying (too much) about hair roots showing.

This has raised the inevitable question: will we ever need to return to the office? In one of my former companies, working out of one of a select number of ‘hub’ locations for at least three days a week was deemed mandatory. In another, an incoming CFO once told me that the policy of proactively encouraging remote working in the firm’s vast and extremely spaced out US workforce (done partly to save costs and partly to encourage more socially sustainable working) might have to be reversed, and we should return to everyone working in the same place. For colleagues based out of homes as diversely remote as rural Massachusetts, the Nevada desert and, I believe, a part of Oregon that barely had electricity, this was clearly going to be a step too far. As word spread of a possible return to centralised working, CVs became refreshed rather sharpish. Now, anyone lucky enough to have an office job (or, indeed, still have a job), has been told to work from home. So, should it stay that way?

For a start, social distancing and the lockdown have probably been a minor boon to corporate balance sheets, as the overheads of running office spaces have shifted to their homeworking employees, who are still paying for their normal household broadband and their utilities. A story in The Times on Saturday reported that Her Majesty’s Taxperson had seen a spike in homeworkers claiming tax relief on things like office chairs and printer ink, personal costs they’re now having to bear that would have otherwise been met by employers. As someone who, now, sits at a kitchen table on a vintage wooden chair which, while exceedingly characterful, is about as comfortable as an 11th century village church pew, the thought of ordering one of those nice, springy ‘David Brent’ chairs does sound like music to my benumbed rump, especially if I could claim 20% of the cost back.

Picture: Microsoft

If, then, it’s been proven so easy to have the corporate workforce work from their kitchens, living rooms and home offices, the old concept of hundreds of people amassed across the floors of corporate campuses seems strange to go back to. There are still cultural advantages to everyone working under the same roof, but the apparent success with which some sections of the workforce have switched to homeworking calls into acute question what long-term need there will be for great sheds full of desks. That, though being openly debated in the media, is still for the long-term. The noises coming out of yesterday's No.10 press conference were quite clear, that any easing of the lockdown won't happen soon as the government's five-point criteria for easing seem unlikely to be met, all the while the risk of a second and worse peak of COVID-19 is high. Despite this, a partial return to office working is being considered by the government, with defence secretary Ben Wallace this morning telling Sky News that there are "options".

Boris Johnson’s frankly remarkable recovery from the virus has no doubt injected some new vim into the Government’s plan for getting Britain back to work and restarting the economy. One theory is that any easing of lockdown might first allow construction workers back to building sites (though how two-metre social distancing would be maintained there remains to be seen). And then there are offices. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is believed to be looking at a number of proposals for the limited reopening of offices, including a ban on ‘hot desking’, canteens remaining shut, strict rules on communal spaces, and desks and workstations spread out to a minimum two-metre distance (adding another half a metre to the current average separation). There is even talk of a ban on pens being shared by coworkers.

But, then, how do you move several thousand people about office buildings? Who would be brave enough to press the lift buttons, let alone share a lift safely with others all trying to get to their desks for the requisite start time? Most office lifts I've been in at clocking-on time have been stuffed to the gills (and there's always one individual who has to squeeze on just as the doors are closing). Some have suggested staggered working even over seven days, rather than five, with shift systems enabling different employees in on alternating days. That might sound practical, but what would it actually achieve? And, still, for those people who have been instructed not to leave the house for 12 weeks “at least” due to health conditions, a return to the office may not be on the cards at all: it has been suggested that the government and its health and scientific advisers think that the most at-risk in society will have to remain in lockdown for up to a year, or however long it takes to produce a viable vaccine.

Even if we could go back to the office would we want to? A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times yesterday revealed that just 25% of adults felt safe about returning to work, a figure compounded by the continued opposition by a sizeable percentage of the nation to schools returning to normal. This would impact those who, even if they could wouldn’t be able to return to work while supervising home schooling. And, then, even if people were OK about going back, how would they get there? The insane scenes of overcrowded Tube trains in the early weeks of the crisis, as Tube services were cut but demand remained high, will weigh heavily on the minds of anyone remotely paranoid about claustrophobia brought on by the contagion.

For the foreseeable future, then, many offices will remain empty or at least sparse. This, the Financial Times discussed last week, will lead to corporate finance chiefs looking at their own bricks and mortar, glass and steel, to lower costs. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” Jes Staley of Barclays told the paper. “Maybe we don't need all the offices that we currently have around the world,” suggested another banker, while another said that his bank was already thinking about a new location strategy that wasn’t so city-centric. Tom Stringer, a corporate real estate manager in the US with the accounting firm BDO, also told the FT that: “In six weeks we’ve taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America and moved them to kitchens and living rooms and it’s been pretty seamless,” he said. “People are getting used to it. The stray dog or the kid wandering into the conference call is now accepted in corporate and governmental America.”

The story has replicated itself across multiple business sectors where office-based working is commonplace. Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising industry veteran who now runs S4 Capital, told the Financial Times that he spends around £35 million on business property in a year. “I’d much rather invest that in people than expensive offices,” he said, adding stoically that he has found the new normal of working from home to be “energising”. However, as the lockdown goes on, others are getting stir crazy. The kitchen coffee machine is no substitute for a quick trip to Starbucks, the fridge no replacement for a lunchtime dash to Pret. There are those, too, who cherish the morning and evening commutes as opportunities to place a buffer between home and work life, to catch up on books or podcasts, or simply to spend an hour each way staring out of the train window and contemplating. This is hardly facilitated by a daily routine that mostly revolves around moving between the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the toilet and occasionally the living room.

Picture: Cisco

Skype, Zoom, Teams, WebEx and all the rest are, undoubtedly, great tools to be able see and hear your colleagues as if they were in the room with you. And it’s been well known for a while what a fortune these platforms save in terms of travel costs, not to mention CO2 emissions. But they do have their limitations. On Saturday we went up to a local golf course that has generously opened its fairways to the public to use for exercise, and I realised just how narrow a vista I’d grown used to during the lockdown. It may not have been a Mediterranean beach or the Lake District, but to see the widescreen panorama of blue sky and grass was enough to widen the stage beyond my laptop screen and the framework of our conservatory. I suppose it reminded me of the loss of freedom caused by the lockdown. That, in an office, I could just get out of my chair and walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question. To do that now - and bear in mind that I’m still getting to know the vast majority of people I work with - you have to intrude with instant messages, e-mail and, if it’s urgent, a phone call. Most if not all of my new colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of such impertinence, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t last. The bunker spirit appears to be strong, at least with whom I work. But having waited a long time to return to employment, I’m now at that stage of thinking when it would be nice to put on a suit and shoes and get stressed again about which train service SWR has cancelled today. No amount of looking up colleagues’ nostrils via poorly-adjusted laptop webcams can compensate for the social energy you only experience when you are a part of the ‘white collar masses’ assembled in a corporate office. Because there's more to the workday than simply completing tasks.

For now, the lockdown continues to be a great national experiment. The technology has not fallen over, and people are, for the most part, getting on with working from home. Even if the occasional dog barks during a Skype call, or a bored teenager drifts past the camera during a Zoom meeting, it seems hard to imagine that this would continue forever. People do, believe it or not, like to think of their colleagues as a second family, and even welcome being away from their main brood for a few hours each day - irrespective of whether it is conducive to productivity or not.

Goodbye Garry Shandling, half-man, half-desk

HBO

I sincerely hope the Grim Reaper is taking Easter off. Not wishing to be flippant, especially in this Holy Week - and one in which we've seen the very worst that humankind can do to itself - but since the beginning of 2016 the passing of entertainers who have meant so much more to people than merely authoring memorable songs or delivering superlative performances has been relentless.

Every time another falls, obiturists and commentators struggle, understandably, to say something new and original, a task made so much harder by the archly innovative nature of those we've lost this year. And yesterday we lost another one, Garry Shandling.

Perhaps you only know Shandling for just two of his achievements, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show: if so, you will have been blessed with having seen two of modern television's greatest game changers. That, I know, sounds like more of the same hyperbole, but for once it is valid.

The former of these two ground-breaking TV shows would probably have been the first most people outside of the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit would have known of Shandling. Pre-dating Seinfeld by three years, It's Garry Shandling's Show presented a similar concept, a sitcom about the stand-up comedy of its star, and focusing on male neuroses with more than a hint of Jewishness about it too.

What made Shandling's show so unique was that it was a sitcom where the borders between fiction and reality were never fully clear: set largely in an apartment which faithfully duplicated Shandling's own Sherman Oaks home, Shandling and his fellow cast members would frequently break the 'fourth wall' as they acted out scenes from the comedian's own hang-ups.

Addressing the audience in character wasn't particularly new: George Burns had done it many years before in his own sitcom, and Oliver Hardy had made the exasperated stare-to-camera a staple of his films with Stan Laurel, always to hilarious effect. But Shandling and co-writer Alan Zweibel found a new purpose in their show which ran from 1986 until 1990.

Two years after It's Garry Shandling's Show ended, Shandling hit comedy gold again with the unbelievably prescient Larry Sanders Show. Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show in May 1992 became far more than a major media event - it triggered the now-infamous battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed him (superbly chronicled, by the way, in Bill Carter's authoritative tome, The Late Shift).

To this Brit, until I visited America for the first time at the end of 1992 I had never really appreciated the cultural importance of US TV's late night talk shows. Chat shows in the UK were hardly zeitgeist-grabbing: Terry Wogan's show on BBC1 three nights a week often appeared to be nothing more than an outlet for publicists, rather than anything that would set the conversational agenda in workplaces the following morning. And while Michael Parkinson may have held the position of Britain's king of chat for his A-list interviews since the 1970s, there was little edge to them, even the more memorable encounters.

In the US, however, the late night talk shows held a commanding presence in the TV schedules, partly due to Carson's legacy. They were prized properties for the networks, maintaining affluent demographics up long after their recommended bedtimes with their formula of hosts' monologues, celebrity appearances, banter with sidekicks and wacky stunts. This was much to the delight of premium advertisers who paid healthily to associate themselves with the late night pack.

Carson had, in the words of Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson (who took on his own show - The Late, Late Show) been "your best pal and uncle and dad rolled into one", but with a cheek and a subversiveness. Letterman, more so than his rival Leno, took that cheek and subversiveness and added a proprietary brand of wiseass cynicsm. "The only person I ever watched was Dave," wrote Ferguson in his memoir American On Purpose. "He was funny and bitter and I got the feeling he secretly (or maybe not so secretly) despised showbiz." That was probably more than just at the core of Shandling's Larry Sanders.

The Larry Sanders Show was never meant to draw on the late night war of 1992, but its arrival on HBO in the midst of conflict in the August of that year was remarkable in its timing. The added spice was that Shandling had often filled in for Carson and was even considered at one point to be another potential replacement.

More than a quarter of a century on, the Sanders show is still - and should be - considered the standard by which any other satirical sitcom should be measured, and its legacy looms large in so many great shows that followed in its wake - The Office (in all its international incarnations), Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Thick Of It and its American cousin, Veep, Extras, Episodes, Alan Partridge - the list goes on.

Perhaps this is not surprising: spend any amount of time around the entertainment business and you will encounter its paranoias, its hang-ups, its narcissism and its insecurities, all of which Shandling captured so brilliantly with Sanders and his entourage on a fictional late night talk show.

Much like his mostly-self portrayal on It's Garry Shandling's Show, Larry Sanders took another angle on Shandling himself, now supplanted into Hollywood's morass of vanity and insecurity. The difference, though, was that The Larry Sanders Show wasn't focused entirely around Shandling's character - in one episode memorably and sycophantically described by producer Artie (the exceptional Rip Torn) as "like one of those goddamn creatures out of Greek mythology: half-man, half-desk."

Many of the wickedly funny plotlines spun from Sanders' on-screen sidekick, the relentlessly dim Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Supporting characters also took on prominent plot pivots, played by then-up and coming comic actors like Janeane Garofalo as acid-tongued talent booker Paula (succeeded by a pre-24 Mary Lynn Rajskub), Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham as smartarse head writer Phil, and Breaking Bad/Better Caul Saul's Bob Odenkirk as Sanders' reprehensible agent Stevie Grant.

Everybody on The Larry Sanders Show possessed egos that were easily inflated and dangerously fragile, starting with Shandling's own character and his self-popularity obsession and, on occasion, the size of his arse. The delicious irony of this, however, was that Shandling and his co-writers regularly used The Larry Sanders Show as an opportunity for celebrities to willingly send themselves up. David Duchovny - then in the throes of his original X-Files fame - often appeared as a guest on the fictional Sanders' show displaying a barely-concealed homoerotic attachment for the host, an attraction that hilariously made Shandling's character even more unnerved (Shandling would later appear in a semi-spoof episode of The X-Files, Hollywood AD, alongside Duchovny's then wife Téa Leoni).

From Jennifer Aniston to Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin to Henry Winkler, and Warren Beatty to Warren Zevon, very real stars lined up to appear on the show, as much a testament to Shandling's creation, given that these same stars would simultaneously be appearing on the promotional circuit of all the for-real late night talk shows of the day.

Garry Shandling may have started out as another Midwest shuckster plying the LA comedy clubs, but over the course of the 12 years that he made It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show, he carved himself out as one of Hollywood's sharpest observers. Credit, of course, shouldn't go entirely to him - there were co-writers on both projects - but when you look back on them now, they were both of their time and ahead of their time.

As the real late night talk shows can often be accused of, American TV is often formulaic. Neither of Shandling's most memorable creations could be accused of that. Even if his subsequent acting career didn't ever plough such rich furrows, these two shows will ensure a prominent place in TV's hall of fame, reminders that right before the 'golden age of television' came along, with heavyweight, earnest and deservedly-praised 'must-see' shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad, one slightly nerdy, stereotypically neurotic Jewish comedian from Chicago broke through barriers and accepted norms with two hysterical shows that will always be regarded as nothing but genius. No more flipping.