Workplace and the reinvention of human
By: Roohid Novinrooz
Tags: Work Life Balance, Pandemic, Human Behavior, Work, Workplace

Work doesn’t happen in one place and it’s unrealistic to see it in total separation from personal life. Hence, one should not abide by decisions that simply put office and home in two ends. The situation came as a result of the pandemic have realised the opportunity of carrying out our work in various locations. We have started rightfully contemplating the boundaries to this flexibility, repeatedly asking ‘why not’ and ‘what if’. The situation also gave some of us the impression that work merely happens on computers. The significance of computers is simply undeniable in the work we do, as well in our productivity and inventiveness. Our start and end of the day are becoming synonymous with starting on and shutting down our computers. So, yes so much of the work is done on computers. But it’s also important where the computer is when it’s utilised for your work. I’m not short-cutting this to corporate policies and data security matters. Such subjects are just subsets of the bigger picture I am drawing here.

There is a relational context that must be understood in people’s practical engagement with their environment. We are in it with the presence of mind, insofar as our body is engaged — equally and inseparably. Let me borrow the description from the social anthropologist, Tim Ingold:

our body isn’t a passive “device whose role is to receive information to be ‘processed’ by the mind”. These relations develop from within — in complete interdependence. “We do not act upon it; rather we move along with it. Our actions do not transform the world, they are part and parcel of the world’s transforming itself. As that is just another way of saying that they belong to time” (from the Perception of the Environment).

Imagine how we leave our marks of presence on almost everything around us. Or maybe simpler, imagine the opposite: houses and offices without us, this landscape of things and built structures devoid of stories or agenda, programmed for nothing, no one to watch and no one to attend to — simply devoid of time. What is a printer when no printing or sofa when no sitting… And of course I haven’t forgotten about Internet of Things in my little poetry. IOT is there not because devices suddenly miss each other and need to communicate with themselves, but precisely because we define a purpose for it and demand it to make sense as humanly as possible. Same principle applies in everything we deal with and every place we dwell.

Screenshots from an old video game called Glider, where the gamer impersonates a paper airplane to move around the domestic objects, at the mercy of air currents from ducts and fans. You can find out more about it here and here.

Computers, being the extension of our body and mind, harbour a great deal of our work. But they are not the workplace in its entirety. They are the mediator of our perceptions as we carry out the tasks in the work environment. While it is important to have the right software, network access, and IT skillset to run any specific task, it is also important where our laptop is placed, the position we are sitting/standing, the light and air quality in the room, having good noise around and avoiding the bad one, feeling healthy (not too hungry, not too drowsy, not too busy) and many more contextual conditions to run the task in hand. The conditions can be explained in terms of general effects, rather than tactical actions that result in calculated outputs. For example, the effect of ergonomic workstations is tangibly perceived as a health and productivity booster, but it’s not measurable to the scale that applies to all office workers in all work environments.

Office worker and work environment are complementary terms: each implies the other, alternately as figure and ground. Only the basics are pre-determined; the genetic makeup for the office worker and the building design for the work environment. The rest is mutual act and influence that cuts through the emergent interface between the two. The development of one is intertwined with the conditions of the other. That is why this very shift towards remote working becomes crucial in understanding how the psychology of work is evolving for the office worker — both in individual and collective (cultural) stance.

The key is habit memory, the way we do/perform as we live through our ‘working’ moments. Our gestures, body movements, daily rituals, and all little encrypted behaviours in our work environment have evolved around the sudden displacement of our workplaces. By all means, we have ideas and mental models of how we used to work in the office, as well as how we ‘should’ work in any particular environment. But only parts of these propositions are conceptual projection (image memory). Most of what we know about our workarounds is unspoken embodied knowledge that is continuously evolving with the reality in which we dwell.