Post-Covid tech threatens the dignity of work

The lockdown fatigue we’ve all been suffering from has finally reached the consciousness of the corporate world. In its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google has warned that the pandemic “continues to create inherent productivity, connectivity, and oversight challenges.” At the virtual World Economic Forum in January, Barclays chief executive Jes Staley said that while productivity in lockdown has been “remarkable, I don’t think it is sustainable”. His colleague at JP Morgan, Mary Erdoes, agreed: “It will increasingly be a challenge to maintain the culture and collaboration that these large financial institutions seek to have and should have”, she said.

These admissions are hardly surprising at this stage in the saga. But they’re coming from two sectors – technology and commercial banking – which have done very well out of the pandemic. Worker morale is straining beneath plummeting revenues. The solution, as has been widely acknowledged, is to get people back into offices at least some of the time.

But you can always bet on a technological alternative to a common-sense idea. Virtual reality (VR), businesses and investors are telling themselves, will help workers reconnect online. In The Telegraph we hear from Mesmerise, a UK tech company preparing for a boom in the market for VR workspaces: a promotion video shows ghosts stalking virtual conference rooms and corridors, their detached arms and heads customised and manipulated by users. “When designing offices, people now look to increase the ‘collision coefficient’ that allows different teams to bump into each other and have casual conversations that can often spark new ideas”, says a Deloitte executive approvingly.

“Collision coefficients” are not the only element of office life to have been wonkified by tech enthusiasts. “HQs are finished: companies will cut their commercial office space by 50 to 70 per cent”, predicts Chris Herd, CEO of home-working consultancy FirstBase, on a Twitter thread last week. According to Herd, companies are preparing to axe verbal meetings and replace them with asynchronous messaging (why waste time speaking to your colleagues when you can ping them?); talent can be hired from across the world (why bother hiring someone you can physically meet?). “Doesn’t matter the size of the organisation, every company is dealing with the same thing.”

Whether these predictions reflect broad opinion among workers remains to be seen. The bigger story we are currently telling ourselves about the future of work, at least, is far too technocratic. Far from a commute being a mere “waste of time”, many of my working friends now try to simulate one to prepare themselves for the day. The communal spontaneity of office corridors, and at restaurants and public parks, has been lost, especially in city centres where the professions intermingle. A political journalist I spoke to recently says he would usually spend his days wining and dining MPs in and around Westminster. Now, like most of us, he just browses Twitter.

Even a partial return to the office won’t solve the next problem. Evidence from a Chinese study in 2013 showed that while home working seemed to improve productivity in the short-run, most chose to remain in the office when offered the choice. One reason was loneliness. The other, however, was less obvious: “lower rates of promotion.” Physical insiders will remain insiders to the social networks of the office. The fundamental dynamics of office politics – of informal networks and information – will not be grappled with over Zoom.

Nor has the wider question of work culture yet been seriously considered. US management consultancy VitalSmarts showed that “culture health” in some organisations had suffered from pandemic-related work isolation, with employees “less likely to respond quickly to colleagues’ needs” and focused “on their own narrow interests and doing as little as possible to avoid being fired.”

How far have soaring profits at commercial banks masked this sort of quiet deterioration in morale? Perhaps that is what Jes Staley was hinting at. Our year-long experiment in home working has made positive gains for the future. But let’s not allow these repeated government-ordered lockdowns – which have subjected our preservation of civil liberties to a crude trade-off – to make us utilitarians about our work lives too. We must restore the dignity of work. I suspect that the office ­– the way it structures our time, and our relationships – will remain essential for our creativity, cooperation and communal well-being. Techies hold back: the revolution will not be digitised.