Usually, I do not tangle with pronouncements by the editor of a paper I write for. Call it the instinct of columnist self-preservation. Still, a blast this week by this paper’s Dylan Jones enjoining work-from-homers to get back to the office — citing the perils of emptying out the capital’s restaurants, clubs and shops — rang a bell.
I have also just spent some time in New York, to find the office-scapes I had associated with buzzy activity looked like the opening episodes of the brilliant dystopian drama Severance. Vast corridors of white space, coffee machines harbouring ancient UHT milk and piles of free snacks awaited. Actual people: not so much. “Basically,” confided a co-snacker. “We come for the food — and then go home.”
Surely this must be different in the pulsating financial district back home — the dog-eats-bonus world of the Square Mile? I call a friend who heads a top M&A outfit in the City. “Don’t even ask,” he says edgily. “If we incentivise coming back, we disincentivise anyone who stays home. Legally, it’s a minefield.”
Subsidised commuting costs might be a secret weapon, as might specific day discounts for the hospitality industry
So I tweeted my carefully moderated view of the Jonesian requirement — namely that companies need to figure out a firmer idea of what the capsule week should look like, instead of pussy-footing around and deploying Nespresso and bad wine as ineffectual reasons to return.
My compromise, that even a three-in-five days requirement seemed like the golden mean was beneficial, brought some tart responses. The widespread view among irate Standard readers I heard from was that London transport was punitively expensive, commuting such a horror and eating-out prices so high that people would rather forget the socialising, and save the dosh.
Some of my respondents also hit the nail on the head more awkwardly than I had anticipated: “You talk about cohesion,” writes Lynsey. “Some other bugger’s at home and you spend all day on Teams anyway so it isn’t worth it.”
It’s a fair point — if we have instilled the idea that personal meetings disadvantage those working remotely, then why are we in our offices at all? One of the odder edicts of the Covid era was that “all” meetings should move online, when what most of those coming back to their physical workplace most want is to talk to each other without pixels.
Commuting costs loomed large, which made me think that if big companies can afford more subsidy, that may be their secret weapon in luring workers back. So might discount arrangements on Monday and Fridays for the hospitality industry to offset the phenomenon of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday attendance and the social deserts beyond.
I don’t think mandating people to return to the full-time office works, because labour shortages and social changes make that kind of “managed capitalism” impossible. Habits change and that is what urban life is about. Still, a lot of us are just trying to figure out the mixture between the cheery claim that we “save so much time” on commuting — and the lethargy that comes from sitting in a single room at home for the working day trying to instil your own lunchtime break and wondering what has become of the demarcation we missed between work and leisure and the elevating feeling, as Joe Jackson has it, of “stepping out”.
It reminds us there is still a value in co-mingling and serendipitous encounters. The longer we leave these, the odder they feel. No one talks on Zooms the way they do in real life. We say stuff like “to your point”, and “moving forward”. If we feel cross, we dare not say so — because on-screen interaction magnifies emotions, so we default to circumlocutions: “Let me frame this another way” and the nuclear option, “Let’s take this offline”.
We know by now that we have widely varying ideals of what city working life should be like and a new generation in the workforce who deem the desk-bound demands I grew up with absurd. I hear this — or rather, I hear two-fifths of it. Because there is something to be gained from hanging out with the folk you work with. Last week, I was abroad with a colleague, enduring a week of last-minute saves, averted disasters, time differences and finally, a project which came to fruition after we had survived on 7am bagels washed down with a bucketload of stress. At the peak of all this, I gave her hug and she said politely that this was kind of me. I told her the truth was different: I needed the hug for me. So we laughed our way through the jet-lagged grind and agreed on a recovery meeting at the nearest bar. Try doing that on Zoom.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico
