The truth about the office

We need to understand why people hate it so much.

When I was a teenager and still lived at home with my mother, she would periodically burst through my bedroom door to collect dirty laundry, survey the grim scene before me and say, “You need to tidy up in here” or some variation. Week after week, it would be the same. Maybe some weeks I’d show willing by moving a stack of pop magazines from one corner to the other, but more often than not, I’d promise I would and then… I don’t know. Forget? Defy? Either way, we were at an impasse, despite Mum’s repeated efforts.

The calls to ‘get back into the office’ remind me of my mum’s fruitless appeals. This argument has been circling the drain since the very first covid lockdown was lifted, splashing front pages and troubling all corners of the opinion columnist arena. People feel really strongly about this, and much like my mum’s requests, the tenderness in the asking diminishes with each complaint. At first, there was almost a ‘keep calm and carry on’ vibe to it, but as time has gone by and workers seem ever reluctant to be asked “good weekend?” for three hours every Monday morning, the narrative has become almost threatening.

We hear a lot about what working from home means for our city centres – the danger to Pret’s profits was front page news during a particularly insane ‘back to work’ drive in 2021 – and the death of general office camaraderie. Working from home is, apparently, the enemy of ideas and career progression, harms trade and scuppers personal interactions, but while all that may be true, nobody ever stops to think why people don’t want to go back to the office. I imagine they’re too frightened to ask. Truth hurts.

Thanks to a credit-crunch era redundancy, I’ve worked more or less solely from home for well over a decade. It’s been fascinating to watch the rest of the world catch up and examine their own prejudices. In this death rattle of capitalism, working from home is seen as the loafer’s choice, something done in pyjamas, from a sofa overstuffed with ‘live laugh love’ cushions while This Morning burbles away in the background and a hangover gently fries your insides. I’m sure for many it is. Good luck to them. For me, it isn’t like that at all. But I don’t have a choice. I don’t get a couple of days in the office to touch base with reality, and co-working spaces are astronomically expensive and filled with people you were destined to hate, like your own personal Truman Show. It’s cheaper to join a private member’s club. Either way, I get showered and dressed, and never work from the sofa unless I’m ill when, really, I shouldn’t be working at all. I’m lucky to have the space in my living room for a small desk which was actually a kitchen table in a former life. It’s not easy: you need routine; you must set boundaries; you must learn to manage your time efficiently; and, yes, it can be very lonely. But it’s not hard to see why so many people who previously came into the office five days a week are so enamoured by the WFH setup.

The side-effect of covid that nobody saw coming is that it’s turned a niche benefit into a viable alternative. The grass didn't just look greener, we got to tread upon it, feel it beneath our toes, verdant and lustrous and cooling. People with children discovered that life is easier when you can pick the kids up yourself, that you needn’t miss the hallowed bedtime. There is definitely an argument for a commute acting as precious quiet solitude but, on the whole, it sucks. Because of rocketing rents and whatever, many live miles away from where they work, so you’re losing upward of two hours a day travelling in. There are sod all decent trains – in the north of the country especially – and only the cast of Crash ever got hard for traffic jams. The Tube stinks and now has the added frisson of horror that is a bedbug infestation. And when you get there, thanks to companies’ obsession with cost-cutting and downsizing, there’s every chance you won’t have a place to sit anyway, unless you remembered to book one under a hot-desking system that would rival the AI Escargot sudoku for complexity.

Then there are also:

• pointless meetings that take hours

• bosses asking ‘Can I borrow you for five minutes?’ before delegating their entire workload

• bitchy colleagues who never really got over being forced to leave school and finding themselves a mere goldfish in the Adriatic

• feckless workmates who spend all day asking for feet pics in TikTokers’ comments

• air-conditioning with only two settings: Marrakech in July, or Christmas on the Voyeykov Ice Shelf

• fire drills

• forced jollity

• your terrible attempts to appear nonchalant and aloof, yet flirty and available, whenever your office crush – who looks like a swagless Sloth from The Goonies but a total dearth of talent has elevated him to celestial hunk – walks by

• the office gossip who tortures you while you idly dip your peppermint tea bag into the tepid output from the alleged boiling water tap

• someone who eats your lunch out of the fridge

• another someone who leaves pass-agg notes on their lunch

• the person who always has a cold

• the racist/homophobe/person who’s “just asking questions”/conspiracy theorist

• the one who corners you in the stationery cupboard

• the colleague whose work you end up redoing because it’s so awful

• the obligatory ‘treats in the usual place’ email whereupon you’ll pretend that the weird sticky, flaky shortbread that Dean from Facilities brought back from Stranraer is delicious

• the printer’s uncountable neuroses

• the resentment when someone gets to leave early

• the horror of the toilets

• wonky chairs

• outdated, slow tech

• Graham in IT

• a feeling of utter stagnation

• an unspoken obligation to be at your desk past close of business

• the lighting, set to McDonald’s toilet specifications, that makes everyone look dead

• and, of course, the big bosses who pace the floor, delighted to see so many of their minions at their desks, before disappearing into their own office and closing the blinds.

Phew.

There’s much to be said for collaboration, and the benefit of spending time with other people outside your friend circle and different from you should not be underestimated, but the main reason people don’t want to go back to the office is they’re realising what a con it is. Not being there exposes how much of their time and energy is being stolen and profited from, how little agency they have, how underappreciated they are, how senior managers create drama and division to justify their own positions, and how they will – probably – one day collapse and die in that shabby and tired office kitchen.

The office has a valuable place in society and there are many jobs that can’t be done as efficiently at home. But right now the office has an image crisis. The world nearly ended; there’s no such thing as business as usual anymore. It’s not about avoiding work, it’s about finding a balance that helps us live a fuller, less regimented life. Why shouldn’t there be compromise, so long as the job gets done and everyone is treated fairly? Remote working isn’t new, the evolution was in motion before covid hurried us along. If the big bosses want to see bums in seats, it’ll take more than a few extra cushions. It’s time to have an honest conversation about what makes office working so unappealing.

Companies and columnists stamping their foot and calling the workforce lazy won’t cut it. Noxious work culture needs a close examination and nobody ever gave their best at gunpoint. Back to my teenage bedroom: every couple of months, my mum would break and karate kick her way into my ‘wankpit’ as she termed it, clutching two bin bags and warning me I’d had my chance and the tidying was now out of my hands. I could either help or she’d donate the debris to landfill. I capitulated, spruced the place up, filled the bags, but two weeks later… you know the drill. I never learned. I never changed.

Too late for me, I’m still a shambles, but the office can rise again, so long as we listen, and don’t repeat mistakes. But no, honestly, Dean, the shortbread was delicious.

This is the 100th edition of The truth about everything* which started out on Tinyletter back in 2017. Whenever you started reading, thank you, I appreciate it. 😘

I wrote a few easy tips for having a less horrendous autumn than necessary for the Guardian and Uniqlo. They sent me a free cashmere jumper and paid me, so do read it and tell them how much you loved it. READ NOW