The Momentous, Uneventful Day: a requiem for the office

By Gideon Haigh

Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office’s final triumph?

For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created electronically. At length, they returned to something approaching normality. Or had they glimpsed the normal to come?

In The Momentous, Uneventful Day, Gideon Haigh reflects on our ambivalent relationship to office work and office life, how we ended up with the offices we have, how they have reflected our best and worst instincts, and how these might be affected by a world in a time of contagion. Like the factory in the nineteenth century, the office was the characteristic building form of the twentieth, reshaping our cities, redirecting our lives. We all have a stake in how it will change in the twenty-first.

Enlivened by copious citations from literature, film, memoir, and corporate history, and interspersed with relevant images, The Momentous, Uneventful Day is the ideal companion for a lively current debate about the role offices will play in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925938708

Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh is an award-winning writer, described by The Guardian as 'the most gifted cricket essayist of his generation'.

Book preview

THE MOMENTOUS, UNEVENTFUL DAY

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist since 1984, and The Momentous, Uneventful Day is his fortieth book. His The Office: a hardworking history won the 2013 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.

Scribe Publications

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First published by Scribe 2020

Copyright © Gideon Haigh 2020

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

9781922310491 (Australian edition)

9781913348700 (UK edition)

9781925938708 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au

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CONTENTS

Author’s note

Introduction

1. ‘The busy hum of men’

2. ‘Today’s office is a wasteland’

3. ‘Your office is where you are’

4. ‘The Machine is much, but it is not everything’

A guide to sources

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Momentous, Uneventful Day arises from a book I wrote a decade ago. The Office: a hardworking history (2012) is a big, chunky, panoramic, and global history — my late friend John Clarke said it should come complete with an office to read it in. Unfortunately, it’s now difficult to obtain, but my interest in the subject is an abiding one, and the visit I describe in the opening paragraph of this book started me on this somewhat more concise and argued ‘requiem’ that confines itself to the Anglosphere and the last two hundred years. Should you wish to trace the story to ancient Egypt, or, you’re curious about office culture in Japan, Russia, India, France, etc, and are prepared to wait a bit, there are still print-on-demand and ebook versions of The Office available: https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-office-paperback-softback. And if you must know, for some are bound to ask, The Momentous, Uneventful Day was written mainly in my kitchen.

He was in love with his work, and he felt the enthusiasm for it which nothing but the work we can do well inspires in us. He believed that he had found his place in the world, after a good deal of looking, and he had the relief, the repose, of fitting into it. Every little incident of the momentous, uneventful day was a pleasure in his mind, from his sitting down at his desk … till his rising from it an hour ago.

– William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

All the dreams you used to chase

All the things you thought were great

Something’s missing, you can’t place

Smile’s missing from your face

Nothing here but empty days

But you don’t have the time

To think about why

You feel this way

You got to wake up the next day

For your

Office Life.

– Jreg (‘Radical anti-centrist Hyper-meta-post-post-modernist Post-satirist’ YouTuber Greg Guevara), ‘Office Life’ (2020)

INTRODUCTION

In May 2020, at the tightest point of the city’s first COVID-19 lockdown, I ran a furtive errand to the headquarters of a consulting firm in Melbourne’s central business district. It was intended as a brief visit for the collection of some work that happened to be on a friend’s desk. We met outside, looked each way down the deserted street, then passed by a somnolent security guard and communal sanitiser bottle into an empty foyer where lifts were clustered, doors agape.

Quiet makes one unusually conscious of one’s own noise: as a pass admitted us to the relevant floor, we muted our voices, trod warily. It turned out that we were not completely alone. A couple of other figures were distantly visible, on their own hasty missions. Otherwise, the scene was faintly disorienting. The lights were dimmed, the air heavy. Chairs did not sit flush to desks, as though their occupants would return momentarily; desks were still scattered with personalising marks and mementoes; upturned coffee cups remained in the kitchen’s drying rack; walls featured notices for abandoned functions and events. As we loitered self-consciously, my friend and I searched for the apposite cultural allusion, to encapsulate the sense of activities suddenly, mortally foreclosed. Pompeii? The Mary Celeste? The opening scenes of Double Indemnity, or the closing scenes of On the Beach? Unable to quite put my finger on it, I took a photograph or two. After all, it was a scene the like of which might not be seen again. Or maybe it would.

Our generation falls in readily with the chagrined proposition that we live in ‘end times’. It started with Fukuyama’s positing of the end of history; it continued with predictions, by various popular pundits, of the ends of science and of faith, of oil and of coal, of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe respectively. A looming end of globalism is a popular theme among opinion-makers; a comic book and television series has already embraced The End of the Fucking World. By this millenarian measure, the end of the office might seem a relative triviality. Yet when COVID-19 swept the planet in the first half of 2020, the possibility caught on with immediate force. Lockdown offered a foretaste of commercial and professional work occurring not under shared ceilings in lookalike cubicles but in the home, connected by the gossamer of communications technology. In the everyday run of events, globalism is experienced only diffusely. Nobody starts a conversation with, ‘So, reckon we should carry on with this globalism?’ But anyone can partake of, ‘How’s working from home going?’ Or: ‘How’s it feel not having to go to the office every day?

Answers to these questions were heard with surprising optimism. Australia accorded with global trends that found workers not just comfortable with remote working, but better off for it — and not merely for being freed from anxiety around touching infectious lift buttons or sharing viral coffee cups. An NBN survey of 1,000 respondents in April found that four in five had experienced an enhanced balance of work and life, and two-thirds expected to work from home more in future. A Bates Smart survey of 1,000 respondents in May found that three-quarters felt just as productive at home as at work, and more than half believed that at home they were ‘deep thinking’ better; only 12 per cent wanted to work full time in an office in future. Eighty-one per cent of those responding to The Guardian’s ‘Life After Lockdown’ survey in June agreed that employees should be allowed to work from home after the crisis. Morgan Stanley research reported in The Times in August showed only 16 per cent of workers surveyed worldwide pining for a return to the office full time post the pandemic.

Once the adaptable workers had allayed employer concerns about their at-home productivity, the C-suite offered even more positive global reviews. Google and Facebook, those glasses of corporate fashion, found the transition so seamless that they freed employees to work remotely until year’s end; Twitter, Salesforce, and Square extended this permission to ‘forever’. The trend had been set by social media businesses such as Buffer and WordPress, who in the last few years had already abandoned offices in favour of fully ‘distributed’ work. It helped, of course, that such employees were already fluent in the patois of Zoom video-conferencing, Slack instant-messaging, Google Meets, and Microsoft Teams. But the tools proved intuitive enough for most people, and the strangeness of conducting work through a screen that recalled the opening credits of The Brady Bunch abated relatively quickly.

With this, bosses began eyeing the low-hanging fruit of cost saving. Dirk van de Put, CEO of the confectionery and beverages giant Mondelez, spoke for many when he opined that ‘maybe we don’t need all the offices that we currently have around the world’. The most eager responses came from industries identified with big city footprints such as banking, finance, and insurance. With bases in more than forty countries, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman forecast a future involving ‘much less real estate’. Looking down from one of the biggest headquarters in Canary Wharf, Barclays CEO Jes Staley predicted ‘a long-term adjustment to our location strategy’, and wondered whether ‘the notion of putting 7,000 people in the building may be a thing of the past’. The implications for property developers were not far to seek. Predictions from 2019 that Australian CBDs would have to substantially expand office space were replaced by forecasts of medium-term vacancy rates as high as one-fifth.

Some individual thought-bubbles evolved into corporate speech-balloons. Interruption by remote work proved so minimal at OpenText, Canada’s largest enterprise software business, with 12,000 employees, that it decided not to reopen half its offices post-COVID. ‘Over 45 days working from home, we processed $2 trillion in commerce over our business network,’ said its CEO. ‘This is about having a long-term view of the kind of company we want to be and using this moment to build it.’

Nationwide, a widely admired ninety-four-year-old American insurance company with 32,000 employees, foreshadowed plans to shutter five of its nine offices permanently from November. Its CEO presented this as the culmination of years investing in remote-working capabilities: ‘Our associates and our technology team have proven to us that we can serve our members and partners with extraordinary care with a large portion of our team working from home … We’re technology-enabled, people-connected, and mission-driven. I remain extremely optimistic about our future.’ So were Dana Mattioli and Konrad Putzier of The Wall Street Journal, who panted excitedly that this was merely the beginning: ‘Many executives … point to the success of an unprecedented work-from-home experiment,