The Office

Over the years I have been part of a number of different teams, and a whole range of different office environments. My low moment as a team leader has to be at a church I was at in Winchester some years ago was when one of the team likened me to David Brent.

Do you remember The Office? It was a groundbreaking sitcom that first aired in way back in 2001 Ricky Gervais as David Brent, heading up an office in Slough.

The company was Wernham Hogg, and ostensibly they sold paper, but very little really seemed to go on. And spinning it all was this guy David Brent. It birthed the term mockumentary because of its fly on the wall reality. I loved it. My wife couldn’t watch it because it was so awkward and so close to home (maybe she felt I was too like David Brent and didn’t want to face up to the fact).

Over the last year working from home has become normal. The need for people working from a central place – the office – which for so long was an assumption, has been called into question.

People seem to get a lot more work done at home. Without the water cooler distractions, banter and other things that seem to distract people from shifting their to do list. The office sometimes gives semblance of productivity whilst not actually encouraging work to get done efficiently.

And then there is the environmental impact – all those journeys now not happening.

And what about freeing up the time spent travelling? For some their commute is over an hour. That is 2 hours a day won back. 10 hours a week. Could the 4-day week be a reality if everyone works from home?

In so many ways the Covid crisis initiated and accelerated change that we had been talking about for years without making any headway. The biggest of these changes was a shift to working remotely and meeting on zoom. From what I have just described about the benefits it sounds like a universally positive shift, but as is so often the case, scratch beneath the surface and the situation isn’t quite as clear cut. Reports of the death of the office have been greatly exaggerated.

So is the office dead? Remote working – often from home – has meant more time for many, less commuting, and much more efficiency without the distractions of the office banter and endless meetings that drag on and on without a clear purpose. Many have realised just how much more work they can get done when separated from all the shenanigans of the office environment.

But now the novelty of all this has receded many of us are realising that working from home and meeting on zoom isn’t quite the solution we thought.

How many of you out there have used the term zoomed out recently? Communicating online in this way is very tiring, and many of the non-verbal communications we take for granted are lost when we speak via a screen.

And I spent some time chatting to a friend last week who is a therapist, used to working from an office. Now he’s in his basement meeting people on zoom. What he finds hard is the human connection of his colleagues – the opportunity to wander out from a session and share how it went – celebrate breakthroughs and commiserate when it didn’t go so well – the little debriefs that enabled the team to process and give and take support. Now he shuts his laptop and goes to make a cup of tea on his own, with no-one to share with, and it’s tough.

The managers sense a great money-saving opportunity by shifting the majority of the work out from the office and online – but at what long-term cost to the team?

And whether the work is counselling, finance, legal, marketing or whatever – if it suits working from home then will we see offices closing? And what will this mean for city centres and all the industries built around people commuting into an office, doing their work for a day and then going home again?

In all the advantages and disadvantages to this scenario, once again I am struck by the very human need for relationship. We need to be together. Zoom, facetime and the like are brilliant – especially if we have friends and families living apart from each other – but nothing beats human contact.

When God created Adam he said it is not good for man to be alone. A profound truth about human beings, with many layers of meaning. We are created for connection. Maybe that’s what drove us to work in office environments, more so than the work demands? TS Eliot wrote that a poem’s meaning was just the hunk of meat that the burglar throws to the guard dog to keep it occupied while the poem works its real magic on the reader.

Maybe something similar could be said of the work of an office? Maybe the work is what keeps us occupied to enable the truly valuable mix of human interactions to take place?