It is hard for me to remember now, but when I joined Ogilvy in 1988, to perform almost any kind of work, you had to be in an office.
This was where your post and faxes arrived. Your desk phone was where people called you. The office was also home to essential equipment. If you weren’t at your desk, you were probably in the basement queuing to use a photocopier the size of a small car.
Of the tasks and interactions which comprised the working week in 1988, 95 per cent were time or place dependent. Indeed, almost everything time dependent – i.e., all synchronous forms of communication – was also place dependent.
What has changed since? Technologically, almost everything; behaviourally, not much. Email is neither time or place dependent, yet people still battle on to crowded trains, only to spend the first hour of their day doing something they could do at home. With the advent of decent desktop video conferencing, many meetings are now no longer place dependent, yet people still commute five days a week. Today there is almost no part of office work which requires your presence aside from two still vital activities: planned face-to-face meetings and – no less important – random social interaction.
Of course, any two people will disagree about how essential close proximity is to effective teamwork. This varies greatly from job to job and, by temperament, from one person to another. But one thing has inarguably changed in the last 32 years: the proportion of one’s work which demands your presence has dropped from 95 per cent to significantly under 80. The reason this 80 per cent figure matters is that, once we all collectively agree to concentrate our time-dependent and place-dependent activities into four days of the working week, it leaves us room to be more flexible about where we spend the fifth. Similarly, if we all condense face to face activities into fewer hours of the day, parents may no longer need to juggle their careers with other responsibilities. And those contemplating retirement need no longer face a crude binary choice: either attend at set hours for 40 hours a week or else don’t work at all.
This partitioning is starting to emerge informally: British train station car parks are noticeably half-empty on Fridays, as more commuters work from home. But the practice could move from being a furtive convenience to a widely accepted norm. On both sides of the Atlantic, proposed legislation will help. In the UK, MP Helen Whately has put forward a bill which would require all advertised jobs to be flexible by default, unless a good reason was provided to the contrary.
But, aside from the employee benefits, there is another reason we should try partitioning our work, with different chunks of the day and week explicitly dedicated to different modes of interaction: quite simply, it is likely that, in aggregate, new technology may have diminished worker productivity by making the working day too scrappy. One unseen advantage of location-dependent work in 1988 was that the limitations of place provided focus: in a photocopier room you photocopied; in a meeting room you met. Now that we can do everything everywhere, we may lay waste our mental powers in too frequently shifting attention from one task to another.
To recapture this focus – while still benefitting from new technology – we will rediscover the value of limitations, but now it will be limitations of time, not place. Videocalls are for Fridays and Mondays. Emails are for Mornings and late afternoons. And, when in the office, don’t stare mutely at a damn screen – talk to someone. It’s what the office is for.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
