‘Zoom, zoom, zoom….we’re going to the moon’. Well, not quite, just back to the office - tentatively, anyway - but after 14 months of working from home and meeting online, then resuming our commute, returning to HQ, and seeing colleagues - gasp - in the flesh, may well have a whiff of adventure about it.
For some.
However nostalgic we might have felt about our daily commute and office ‘repartee’ back in the dark days of seemingly terminal lockdowns - now, as the ‘road-map’ out of dodge draws us ever closer to that place it seems not so many of us are keen to return there after all. In fact the majority of UK office workers are in no great hurry to ditch the loungewear, dust off their suits, and get back on the bus.
What’s happened? Have we just been too long away from the fray? Do we simply need to decompress, reacclimatise, and remind ourselves of the way we were? To get back amongst the ‘bants’? Or has something irrevocably shifted in our mindset and potentially our culture?
For sure we’ve learned some things since March 2020. Removed from the orthodoxy of the traditional (archaic?) parameters of ‘9 to 5’ and given the autonomy to redefine our own working days we have risen to the challenge, and some. Working from home we've proved is not, as the old tease once had it: 'shirking' from home - rather it’s being ultimately responsible, properly industrious, and genuinely productive...albeit occasionally in our pyjamas. What’s more, having the room - indeed, having the option - to walk the dog, stick a laundry in, even close our eyes for 20 minutes in the course of a working day and still accomplish the greater part of our to-do list has been liberating and empowering...and really rather nice. Who in their right mind would choose to swap it all for rush hour and a supermarket meal deal?
Of course none of this would have been possible or true without tech. It may have its detractors - I personally wouldn’t mind if I didn't have to engage in on-screen communication ever again (never mind a TV camera putting on 10 pounds, surely the computer version adds at least as many years) - but without Zoom and platforms like it, how would we have managed, really?.
Once a solution we resorted to only occasionally, online platforms became the linchpin of organisations of all shapes and sizes during the pandemic, allowing us to simulate real life interaction when real life and the rules contrived to separate us. Where possible, everything went virtual in the name of keeping the wheels on business: fundraising events that once took place in ballrooms, exercise classes that happened previously in gym halls, Cabinet briefings and team meetings, job interviews, leaving dos,...you name it - we did it online.
So reliant did we become - do we for now remain - upon such technology, that Zoom saw its revenue rocket by 1260% to $2.65billion in the fiscal year ending January 2021. How prophetic was that brand name! Oh to have had a crystal ball in December 2019...
But digital life ain’t real life. Where’s the impulsiveness in a Zoom invitation, the nuance in a computer image, the big picture...the magic, the truth?. Yes, technology has been convenient, it has enabled us immeasurably, but the casual exchanges, the informal conversations, the spontaneity, the freedom to speak one’s mind in the moment that real life interaction both generates and requires if it is to function optimally simply cannot be in the online world.
Sure, Zoom has given us some laughs along the way - the Italian priest delivering mass in cartoon sci-fi headgear, the Texas lawyer appearing before a judge in a virtual courtroom with a kitten filter on his face desperately reassuring his Honour: “I’m here live, I am not a cat,” the communications executive realising after the event that her backdrop in a board meeting included knickers drying on a radiator, gussets ho (actually that didn’t make the media, that was a friend of mine) - but these have been laughs at human error, our own infallibility, and it’s that very humanness, that spirit, that energy, which the digital world, no matter how much it facilitates, can really, ultimately, only confine.
So, going forward - as they say in the office - what to do? It could be that the hybrid model being mooted by many employers save the most draconian corporate bosses (Barclays’ CEO, Jez Stanley has called remote working, ‘an aberration’ to be corrected ‘as quickly as possible’) is where we will eventually find ourselves and settle. Combining both remote working and office-based toil, and getting to reap the rewards of both could be a happy legacy of this pandemic. Could we by dint of accident - if a global health crisis can be described as such - have found our way to the holy grail of work-life balance that has for so long eluded us?
Who knows, is the answer. Our global community is not yet out of the woods, and even if here in the UK the full, final lifting of all limits on social contact is beginning to feel almost tangible, ‘hands, face, space’ remains the mantra of the day. Uncertainty may not prevail quite as extreme as it once did, but it still lingers and whether it comes back to haunt us or not, we know it’s out there.
One thing’s for sure... when it comes to how we work, and how we need to be in order to work - at our best, at our happiest, at our most creative - the picture is a human one. In fact the words of the Texan lawyer echo with a truth that speaks for us all:
“I’m here live - I am not a cat.”
Image by Annie Spratt.
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