the “new normal” / unevenly distributed
By: Sarah G. Carpenter
Tags: Work From Home, The New Normal, 2020, Cultural Studies, Covid 19

It’s an understandable impulse, and –– if history and literature offer any indication –– an all too human one. (I have a friend who likes to say, “Let us consult the oracle,” right before he Googles something; it’s tongue-in-cheek, and usually Google isn’t so much predicting the future as collecting information –– but really, who’s to say that isn’t just what an oracle, preparatory to gnomic utterance, might do?) And sometimes that “checking the present for signs of the future” strategy pays off; if I head out for a run and see heavy clouds building in the West, I know to keep my route close to home instead of making this a long out-and-back.

But even the best analyst needs data, and my own prediction –– take it for what it’s worth –– is that management consultants are going to have a hard time getting a handle on the long-range implications of 2020’s Covid-19 office reshuffle because the one variable nobody can account for is the human element.

We can’t account for it because this is a “variable” not just in the mathematical sense (depending on the outcome you plug in for x, your solution after working the problem will change) but in the literal one: the human element varies from person to the next, from one workplace to the next. What one boss or office manager or human resources director considers eminently reasonable drives the next one up a wall; the strategies for sharing (and not sharing) space that work well to prevent crowded copy rooms among one group of co-workers become the grounds for a dozen simmering feuds within another.

The nature of the work any given office/enterprise does and the availability of the budget (for hardware/software) and technical expertise necessary to facilitate remote work will of course play their roles. Not surprisingly, the big U.S. tech companies shifted early to telework for many of their employees, and they have largely continued to operate with reduced-occupancy campuses even as their consumer branches have entered the Christmas rush. (Both Facebook and Google, for example, have extended versions of their early-pandemic telework policies into mid-2021.)

Besides the obvious advantages of having a workforce that is not being flattened by a Covid-19 outbreak, and one that can continue working under conditions of quarantine (remember that “quarantine” is what you do if you may have been exposed to the virus, and need to wait at home to see if symptoms develop; by its nature, “quarantine” is going to take out of circulation even more people than are actually infected), the emphasis on work-from-home policies in “Big Tech” makes a certain amount of branding, as well as practical, sense. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, for example, are all pushing various products (both hardware and software) as means for other companies to enable telework and enhance remote-work productivity, so presumably they have the tech and using it as part of their work-from-home strategy allows them to demonstrate that they trust it and use it themselves: a form of free advertising. But I tend to suspect the early, widespread, and –– so far –– long-lasting embrace of remote work in the tech sector is also partly a result of the personalities involved, especially but not exclusively in the upper levels of the decision-making hierarchy.

Jack Dorsey, of course, has famously given his blessing for Twitter employees to work from home “indefinitely”; so far, Twitter seems to be holding good on that promise, which may lead workers in tech and other industries to question whether similar accommodations might be made for individual employees’ health and personal circumstances even after one or more of the highly anticipated Covid-19 vaccines becomes widely available. There is a lot to be said for the humanity and even the practicality of this approach (people able to take reasonable care of their own health and personal needs are likely to be better, more efficient, sharper employees), even as offices also have to deal with the reality that, in most industries, you do kind of need somebody to show up on a regular basis and turn the lights on –– for the production of material goods that cannot reasonably be manufactured off-site, and for those few pesky meetings that really couldn’t have been emails.

And then you have the rather abstruse reasoning offered by my ex-husband’s employer, which announced last week that they wold be –– not recalling telework employees to the office, mid-pandemic –– but making major changes to their current work-from-home structure, on the grounds that “we want you to feel like you’re at work.”

“We want you to feel like you’re at work.”

The ex was not a particularly forthcoming guy even when we were actually married to each other (he listened, supportively, to a LOT of rants, but rarely went on one of his own), so I’m a little hazy on the details. The one that stands out is, I suspect, the one that explains why I know anything about the situation in the first place: The employer now requires not only that each telework employee have a designated Home Office, but that the employee photograph this setup and submit the image for management’s review and approval. It isn’t clear what steps management intends to take if, say, somebody’s leaking roof or squalling infant strikes them as insufficiently office-appropriate. More to the point, I strongly suspect that Management does not have an answer to this question, either; instead, the approach of my former spouse’s employer is reflective of the uncertain, largely unregulated, ad hoc (re)fashioning of digital/virtual workspace rules, in circumstances complicated by unequal access to infrastructure and under conditions which demand that decisions be made quickly, often on the basis of incomplete data (consider, for example, all that we did not know about the risks of airborne vs. contact transmission in mid-March 2020, when many U.S. schools and businesses were scrambling to convert to digital operations almost –– or in some cases literally –– overnight).