OUT OF OFFICE

The ongoing pandemic has changed the culture of the office forever—for good, perhaps, and certainly for ill.

“Remote work…is not a cure for shitty management or a bad business model or a bad product. It is merely an organizing principle.” So write business journalists Warzel and Petersen, who investigate what has been happening to many organizing principles of corporate life in the last two years. Some of the changes have been decidedly negative. One example is that the CDC has urged commuters to travel in personal vehicles rather than on mass transit even though, as one scholar observes, there is no strong link between disease transmission and public transportation. In addition, with isolation and remote working, the boundaries between work and life, already fuzzy, became a blur. Corporations expect their workers to be available at all times, and workers deploy tactics such as replying to emails in the middle of the night, showing their devotion. Much of the authors’ argument, repeated a few times too often, centers on their insistence that it’s up to the workers to establish and maintain guidelines for keeping personal time safe and otherwise driving changes in corporate culture. Extending this, they urge reshaping business so that work is not the be-all and end-all of life, arguing that a healthy corporate culture would allow and encourage workers to devote time to community endeavors, self-care, education, and other matters not easily reduced to the bottom line. A flexible work life—with some days in the office and others at home—would improve cities by giving people access to parks and other amenities outside the weekend and by encouraging the formation of communities. Of course, write the authors, “organizations are naturally resistant to change,” and our current form of capitalism puts human considerations well behind financial ones, even if the pandemic showed us a different way to conduct our work lives.

A thought-provoking take on shaking up business as usual once the pandemic has passed.