Shirking From Home

The working assumption throughout the pandemic was that everyone would snap back into a pre-Covid way of working and living once it was all over. This would include resuming the commute and working five days a week. It’s now clear that assumption was incorrect. Flexible working and hybrid working—the terms matter and it’s a little messy how they are used, which needs to change—have come to represent the real and existential crisis facing work and the workplace. Although over half of jobs cannot be done remotely or even hybrid, the universal desire to have flexibility as an option has become emblematic of dissatisfaction across all sectors of work, which has become ground zero in the battle for fairness and equality for all workers.

The leader who wishes to get colleagues back to the office more will have to invest in a socially scientific understanding of dynamics around networks, collaboration, and innovation. Simply plumping up the cushions and installing better showers and coffee isn’t going to move the needle.

The following excerpt from Working Assumptions: What We Thought We Knew About Work Before Covid and Generative AI—And What We Know Now shows that the definition of what productive work is and how work culture can be successfully fostered needs to be radically revised. No, it isn’t the end of the water cooler, and no, it isn’t the end of growth, and no, it isn’t even the end of the office. But it’s the beginning of a new time in which place, identity, culture, purpose, well-being, and productivity occur against a new set of working conditions.—Julia Hobsbawm

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As a child I was quite an avid reader. I ate up all the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie books and the Enid Blyton series Mallory Towers, Secret Seven and Famous Five, but no matter how old I got there was one battered book I would pull down again and again: Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss.

I was gripped by the story of hard-working Horton, an elephant who ambles by a tree where Mayzie the lazy bird persuades Horton to (he imagines) briefly take over her job sitting on her egg, only to fly off and plan on not returning. The conceit of this story was incredible to me. A bad mother bird, so bad that a big fat boy elephant was better than her! And Horton was the most loyal, principled elephant. “I meant what I said and I said what I meant... An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent,” he says, through wind and rain.

Horton is rewarded: the egg hatches, not as a bird but an elebird with wings and also a trunk “just like his!” It is enchanting, but it’s also subversive: it imagines a world of job role-play, rather presciently. And it takes a pop, as you might expect from an American of Dr Seuss’ generation, at the idea of a working mother: in his other very famous book The Cat in the Hat, children are left alone all day to play, all sorts of havoc ensues, and the returning mother is characterized by a single image—half a silhouette in impeccable stilettoes, hat and coat, marching purposefully home after neglectfully not working at home.

The working assumption that women’s place is in the home has been replaced by a more widespread hostility to working from home, whoever is doing it. The culture war around the future of hybrid work and flexibility has become the main narrative arc to date of the story of post-pandemic work. LinkedIn, the social network for professionals which is proving to be a reliable source of opinion and data on a rolling basis, is alive with argument, counterpoint and datasets.

When I wrote my last book, The Nowhere Office, it was never an argument for no office—nor was it to forget that the majority of the world’s workers are not white collar at all. But it did point out that work was changing fundamentally whether people liked it or not, due to a coalescence of factors which had been bubbling up at work since the end of the Second World War. Covid was the proverbial tipping point, and hybrid working using the latest technology the manifestation of a desire to not “go back” to old ways of living and working.

That working assumption has broadly held. At least among employees. But out of it has come a battle about presenteeism which continues unabated. One of the most memorable phrases of the Covid pandemic was the one made by Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon in 2020 that working from home was “an aberration,” a sentiment which by 2023 had morphed into “shirking from home”, a phrase used by the British newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn (who, as I understand it, files his copy remotely). Phrases such as “get your butt into the office” or entreaties to stop being “lazy gits” have also been bandied about. Nearly four years later, you do not have to scratch the surface hard to find these views prevail, especially among male leaders of a certain generation. One utterly charming captain of industry told me at an awards dinner at Claridge’s, London, in the winter of 2023 that “as soon as the economy shrinks, people will stop all this stuff about wanting to work flexibly.”

Well, it’s the economy, stupid. Maybe he is right. Maybe this is the modern boss’s dream rather than dilemma, to force workers to scuttle back to old modus vivendi in order to prove they were right all along. Enlightenment? More like entrenchment. Assumptions based on fear, bias or ignorance and enforced by diktat seldom end well or as intended, but, of course, mud sticks.

And it continues to stick to women.

As economics professor Claudia Goldin, who became the first female economist to win the Nobel Prize in 2023, has shown, women reached heights of employment, but a pay gap has persisted, as have the effects of what is now known as the “motherhood penalty.” I attended a conference entitled “The Implications of Remote Work” at Stanford University in the autumn of 2023 and one of the most memorable papers showed that a bias against women persists not only when they work but when they work flexibly. Show someone an apparently empty office and say it belongs to a man and they make a very different working assumption (he’s out at a meeting) than if you assign said office to a woman (she’s not working because she’s not in). At the end of 2023, when it was clear that the arguments over flexible and hybrid working were not abating, Erin Grau of workplace consultancy Charter wrote an article in Fortune headlined “Flexible work is feminist—and women won’t return to a system that hasn’t served them well to spare the feelings of powerful men.”

It’s clear that the assumption that women who work and have children are inconveniencing their co-workers or bosses is being weaponized by arguments that flexible work is somehow selfish or inefficient or both; and that the real beneficiaries of those who can afford to return to old models of presenteeism are unlikely to have caring roles, with their inherent limits on old model “always in” flexibility.

This isn’t to say that flexibility doesn’t have drawbacks and inequalities. But the argument that every woman who wants to work flexibly is de facto a modern-day Mayzie the lazy bird is to be resisted.

Think Global, Act Local

Dr Seuss had one thing right in Horton Hatches the Egg: he painted a picture of a world of global travel (at one point Horton is hauled across oceans to become an exhibit showing a man-elephant minding a she-bird’s nest).

Jobs have never been more transient or more transportable than now. “Talent Mobility” has become a buzzword within companies, with research showing that a third of global CEOs want to “reimagine their global rotations.” What this means is that the corporate world, and American corporations are some of the world’s largest employers outside of America, are constantly moving teams around the world. Those teams of course are in different time zones, which has given rise to the wonderful phrase “time zone adjacency.” What does this mean in practice? Even if you are in your office, you might be in a meeting with someone halfway around the world. At least some of you will be attending remotely, even if you technically work from an office.

Ironically, the globalized model of managing jobs, of managing HR, of managing how hybrid works out has increasingly come to require local, iterative, customized solutions. There is no longer one size fits all when it comes to managing workforces. I think this is amazingly exciting and important, but I can see how it throws a spanner in the works of an entire generation of leaders brought up on a globalized standard—from the MBA to off-the-shelf solutions with names like “Agile.” If I sound sneery it’s because I am. There is nothing wrong with creating models or applying them, but that only goes so far. Emerging challenges require innovation, reaction, responsibility.

There are plenty of good leaders doing this, by the way. Companies from Atlassian to Salesforce, from Patagonia to Panasonic are embracing true flexibility. In Japan they call their flexibility policy “Work Your Way.” My friend and mentor Charles Handy, author of many business bestsellers with glorious titles like The Empty Raincoat, says, “We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.”

The reality is that everyone serious and reasonable in leadership is doing their level best to iterate as they should, workplace by workplace, industry by industry, and not to try and impose a top-down model which is in itself an outdated working assumption about what success looks like. The corporate world is littered with the corpses of leaders who did not listen on all sorts of things. The BlackBerry, Blockbuster and Kodak are all examples of twentieth-century companies which rode huge technology waves and then did not embrace new times.

The leader who keeps failing to read the room on workforce flexibility looks Luddite. It’s as simple as that.

This battle between those who believe that flexible working is a combination of disloyalty, inefficiency or lack of work ethic, and those who believe that a new adaptive way of working has presented itself which should be taken advantage of is a particular shock to the American way of work, which has always been always on, and which has flipped since the pandemic from a live to work ethic to the precise opposite: work to live.

It is possible to have a foot in both camps. There are people who recognize that flexibility is about personalization by workplace, by team requirement, by deadline, by job. Nevertheless, the hostility to the notion of working flexibly remains, usually with men of a certain age in a certain kind of industry. Not all men, it should be said: the viral video of 2023 was the speech Andi Owen, CEO of MillerKnoll, gave to her executives telling them to leave “pity city” and “just get the damn $26 million” target.