When I work in the office (the canal flashing down to my left, to my right a desk of conversations that veer between fascinating and deadly, it being part of my job to lean in to catch the former before they dissolve) a piece that might take a morning to finish at home will here be stretched long into the evening. It’s 3pm and the sky is the colour of an infected eye, and the fluorescent lights are more noise than lamp, their hum a soundtrack to the soundtrack – the wet coughs, booming meetings, clickering keyboards, a deep existential drone.
Phones don’t ring any more, instead desks vibrate with neighbours’ texts, and our large water bottles teeter on piles of books, and Post-it notes uncurl themselves from computer screens, and I love it. I do, I love it – the ways we cobble ourselves into unlikely families, the moaning, the tea. I used to love it because I felt legitimised by coming to work, a real person. I liked the ceremony of putting on a little outfit and swishing into town, swiping my office card, checking my pigeonhole. I got older. The novelty wore off, but still, I liked my colleagues and the work and felt increasingly grateful to be doing something I enjoyed. The headaches weren’t great. The lights, the commute. One doctor suggested I wear “a visor” at my computer, which is not a possibility as unfortunately I have a reputation to protect. A visor! I would cluck back painkillers at my desk, and return home vaguely sunken, but still it was almost a whole life.
Then, of course, Covid, and we cobbled together computer stands out of old magazines and built ourselves Playmobil offices in the corner of kitchens. Working from home was elevated to WFH – we watched our faces flickering in the top corner of meetings and it was like meeting ourselves for the first time, an experience that was not entirely pleasant. Returning to the office after those pandemic years felt almost almost like a treat. Then time, again, passed and now we are here.
Across the world, major corporations have announced policies insisting their employees stop working from home and return to a five-day office week. In the UK, Asda recently said it intended to “cut hybrid working as part of a business restructure” and Amazon that it would order staff back to the office five days a week from January. Civil servants, too, were informed that they would have to spend at least three days a week in the office (despite the new government’s Employment Rights Bill, which aims to strengthen access to flexible working). This news comes at the same time as a survey by the Office for National Statistics found that people working from home, unsurprisingly perhaps, gained almost an hour a day from not needing to commute, and got almost half an hour more rest.
Even now, all these years on from lockdown, when I stand in the train carriage, I still marvel sourly at the fact of a commute – the wet bite of time it eats from a day and a paycheck. Other benefits of working from home include improved mental health and a smaller carbon footprint and the fact, too, that you get to see your kids grow up. The new policies were met with backlashes from employees who signed petitions and sent open letters to their CEOs, with some even going on strike. Last week, when the chief executive of Starling Bank demanded thousands of workers go in more frequently, many resigned.
Like many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we wear, and with large things, too – how we relate to each other, for example, how we consume and, crucially, how we work. But what seemed to happen, and very quickly, was that people rushed back to try to make life exactly as it was before. There was a panic to fill the empty office blocks, to repopulate the Prets and very little incentive to use the imposed pause to look around at what could be improved and what we’d got terribly wrong. I sound like a child saying this, I know, but what if the office blocks became affordable flats instead? What if we learned one single lesson? The rise of hybrid working was one of very few silver linings to the pandemic – that reach for an elusive balance and acknowledgment from employers that their workers were human beings, too.
When we do go into work, we take that humanity with us – that’s why, in part, we can lean into the “teamwork”, enjoying the change of scenery even as our “productivity” sometimes wobbles. Talking to a freelance friend about the downsides of home working, he said the only advantage of an office is that when something horrible happens (he described in detail a cheery Zoom call in which he realised halfway through he was being fired) it doesn’t happen in your bedroom. There’s nowhere to go home to, you see, after that.
As much as I enjoy my trips into work, even I can see the efforts to send everyone back are foolish at best, at worst, unimaginative. Working from home isn’t perfect, but it feels significantly less imperfect than returning full-time to the office. The fact that these great creative minds have still had no better ideas suggests that, rather than profit, these policies are all about power.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Instagram @evawiseman
