Wednesday 9 October 2024 – Office Life

When I worked at Hammersmith & Fulham Council, I didn’t have a pass to swipe into the office.  This is because I never went in so never bothered getting one; the permission form signed by my manager to get one from Facilities Management remaining forever crumpled in my work bag should I ever find myself in the vicinity of the office in Hammersmith during that team’s lean working day of 10am to 12noon.  I never did.  Instead, except for occasional visits to partners’ offices and construction sites, I worked from home on my own, going a bit eccentric, keeping only my thoughts and a blog for company.

When I then started at Barnet, it was a bit of a shock to learn that they expected me to come into the office one day a week.  What the bleedin’ ‘ell for!?  On starting, I was booked in for a meeting with the Executive Director because, I was told, he liked to meet all new members of his directorate.  He seemed jovial enough, although a bit vacuous as one would expect of someone leading a directorate simply called “Growth”.  There’s far too much that comes under his remit to have much idea about any of his services, Economic Development notoriously the vaguest of them all (see Living the Dream), so the role of the Executive Director usually just requires having an air of superiority and shielding councillors from imposing their “ideas” on what his officers do and so having no input into economic development whatsoever.  So, he didn’t tell me what he or his directorate does or how I fit into his grand scheme because I don’t think he has one.  Instead, he asked me a few personal questions to get to know me and laughed inexplicably at some of my answers as if we were mates.  But, later, in a more serious tone, he did specifically ask me if I had been told that his staff were expected to work in the office at least one day a week.  He demanded this, he explained, because it was important that staff interacted in person to aid collaboration.  I simply told him I had been told without being too committal about whether I intended to comply but, he seemed happy enough with my answer and laughed inexplicably.  I doubt I’ll ever see or hear from him again, anyway, whether I come into the office or not.  However, my line manager, if nothing else ever compliant with what his seniors want, doesn’t go as far as tell me to come in but does email his team with his “movements” that week, including what day or days he will be in the office, as a nudge for us to reciprocate.

There has been a long-running debate this decade about the benefits of working from the office.  Two years ago, Jacob Rees-Mogg, then a Cabinet member in the Government, left notes on Government-headed paper on the desks of absent civil servants reading, “Sorry you were out when I visited.  I look forward to seeing you very soon.”  He was criticised by the FDA union for his passive-aggressive hectoring tone, but his justification for the need for civil servants to work from the office was that it is “very important for the taxpayer and British public that government is working properly and the estate is well used.”  Soon after, the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, made a call for people to return to the office following the end of Lockdown saying staff were “more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas when they are surrounded by other people.”

Earlier this year, Uber argued that in-person interactions can enhance career growth, and “optimal workplaces” can prompt the human brain into a more focussed state rather than be distracted by the sofa and fridge at home, in Johnson’s case as he admitted, spending “an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you were doing.”

Uber added that “Modern workspaces have more light, more room, ergonomic seating, focus areas and other elements to meet the needs of everyone's working styles."

I haven’t worked in an office at all since pre-Covid.  I don’t recognise the benefits to staff efficiency and collaboration that Reese-Mogg, Johnson and Uber describe.  I remember hot-desking because, it was argued then, office space was expensive and limited and there’s no reason why any one person should have a place dedicated to them whether they are present or not.  Desks were unkempt because, if no-one claimed any one desk as their own, who was supposed to up-keep them?  Plug-in monitor, mouse and keyboard were almost all faulty or missing in some combination on each desk.  Chairs were a mixed muddle of different states of repair and design, none of it one could comfortably describe as functionally ergonomic.  Milk, teabags and coffee were no longer supplied in council offices for staff after the Tory Government introduced austerity at the start of the 2010s and insisted councils make “efficiencies” so that we officers, instead of working, spent a big chunk of our time co-ordinating staff to buy milk, coffee and teabags every day.

Completely powerless to the whims of Facilities Management staff, fire alarm drills and false alarms were such a regular occurrence that staff had rituals about their time spent standing outside in muster point school playgrounds or carparks, having a regular posse, smoking and telling their mates to have them ticked off the fire marshall’s clipboard so that they could go shopping instead because no-one understood or cared how the fire marshall could possibly know who was or wasn’t in the building when the alarm went off anyway.

Pre-Covid, office space was provided very reluctantly by council managers, and corporate services seemed to go out of their way to make staff feel us unwelcome, unaccommodated for actually doing work and distracted as they possibly could. 

I also remember other teams being on lots of different floors, none of them marked so you couldn’t know where any particular team was situated and, in any case, your swipe card would normally only get you into your own section of the office or your own building.  If you wanted to talk to another team, you had to email them or, in even further-back-times, phone them.  The idea, for example, that you could wander onto the Executive Director’s floor and collaborate with him would have seemed ridiculous.  Yet here he was now demanding I do just that at least once a week for his, my and, ultimately, residents’ benefit.

From these memories, I have a bad image of working in the office.  But Uber goes on to say that, “…the pandemic's lengthy pause of office work gave companies the chance to think critically about how their spaces are designed. It provided the opportunity to experiment and create spaces designed for creative work, collaboration and more.”

Other than being invited to one fleeting Management meeting at LBHF and my job interview in my final days working there after my job was deleted, both for which I had to text my manager and the interviewer respectively to come down to reception to let me in, I literally haven’t been in an office this decade.  Perhaps they have changed.  Perhaps Barnet has reimagined how their office is designed for staff to be efficient, creative and collaborative and they want this great space to be well used.  Perhaps my colleagues want to collaborate and show off how professional they are to develop their careers.  Perhaps everyone else wants to be exposed to an open, dynamic office space with their colleagues, throwing ideas around and supporting the younger generation still learning their trade.  I was excited to return to the office.  They make it sound pulsating and that I have been missing out and going a bit peculiar spending too much time with my own thoughts (see everything above).  After my meeting with the Exec Director, I was buoyed by my managers wanting me to collaborate with others to deliver better services!

The Office US: The fire drill muster point because, instead, working from home and walking very slowly to the fridge for cheese is a terribly inefficient use of time.

“We are all here on Earth to help others”, WH Auden reminded us; “What on Earth the others are here for I don’t know.”  Twelve weeks into my employment, I came to the office for the twelfth time.  Today, three security guards stopped me as I walked into the office because my swipe card/staff ID had twisted round on my lanyard around my neck and facing into my chest.  There are electronic gates just past the reception desk that slide open when you swipe your card and a fourth security guard standing by it watching staff coming and going.  You can’t get past reception without your staff ID.  Still, one of the guards grabbed my card, still attached to my neck, to see my photo ID.  Taken aback by this obviously unnecessary invasion of my personal space, I asked him what he would have done if I came in the other door?  The “other door” is about two metres from the revolving doors through which I had entered the lobby but, separated by large potted plants and a wooden latticed screen, enters into the public restaurant which leads straight through to reception and the security gate.  There are no guards on that door as members of the public wander vaguely around the café and reception lobby just behind the three guards facing and guarding the revolving doors only.  He looked at me blankly.  Not seeming to comprehend but satisfied with my photo ID as he compared it with my face as he pulled it closer, inches from his own, he let me past without replying.  What on Earth they’re there for, I don’t know but my first interaction of the day did not seem to make any sense never mind benefit anyone.

My sketch of the reception lobby of the office.  When I entered the revolving doors (the left yellow arrow), I was accosted by three security guards (blue circles) stopping all staff entering those particular doors and demanding to see our staff swipe cards.  You can’t get past the security gates (red barrier) into the main part of the office without swiping through anyway.  And there’s a security guard on the security gates anyway.  What’s stopping me, I asked the security guard, coming in the door to the café (the green arrow), and walking straight through to the security gates to use my pass to get in without first showing my pass to use my pass to get in?  He didn’t know, didn’t answer and didn’t acknowledge me.  Good collaboration colleague!

Through the security gates and behind reception is the lift lobby and stairwell.  When I worked at Haringey Council on the sixth floor, I usually took the stairs to avoid the crowds using the lifts.  Here, I work on the fourth floor and my instincts are to do the same but the whole point of coming in is to enjoy interacting with people and spend less time on my own.  I had before never really appreciated how slowly people move in the workplace.  Wandering idly to the fridge to hack off a small piece of cheese has got nothing to do with it.  People sidle slowly into the lift so it takes a while before everyone is in and settled.  The last person in stands in between the sliding doors, facing inwards, so that the sensors won’t let them close and he doesn’t notice or care.  With no-one to tell passengers to “mind the doors” like the driver on the Tube, when the lift doesn’t move for some time, people start to shuffle and the door-blocker realises something is amiss with where he is standing so he shuffles slightly again, not necessarily into the lift, the way he is facing, but speculatively and slightly in each direction until the doors eventually start to react.  People get out on each floor, including a few for the first floor.  It doesn’t occur to most staff to walk up one flight of stairs but, instead, to tolerate and add to the crowds and painfully slow progress of the lift.  Most seem not to notice the doors opening on each floor because most are not facing it, or notice what floor they have reached, and there is a slow beat before people realise they’re at their destination before slowly shuffling off.  I would have been on the fourth floor if I had taken the stairs long before I do when taking the lift but it is because I want to mingle with these sheep-like people why I have commuted all the way to the office in the first place, so I remind myself not to wince.

Like with showers and facing the wall/shower nozzle, American cinema has made us believe that people face outwards, attentively towards, and away from, the door in a lift.  Not a bit of it!  In offices around London, we stand in all different directions looking at each other with our faces very close, not looking at whether we’re blocking the door, when the doors open or what floor we’re on.  It makes for very slow progress.

The fourth floor has been “imagined” to be a communal space.  It is different to the banks of hot desks that were in Enfield’s Civic Centre and, on first inspection, does look like a much nicer place to work and support collaboration.  There is a bank of six desks equipped with monitors and keyboards, breakfast bar desks and tall stools along the windows with power points, and a large empty table except for power points that can seat about ten around it.  There is a small glass-walled cubicle in the middle of the office for impromptu breakout meetings for two or three colleagues and a large, bookable conference room dominating one side of the office.  And, most innovative, are small one-person booths, like a telephone booth, with a bar stool and ledge so you can sit there and do a Teams meeting on your laptop without disturbing everyone else.  There is also a kitchenette with instant coffee sachets, teabags and milk supplied but, unfortunately, no apology from management taped to the wall saying that they now realise that they were incredibly malicious to take this simple necessity away from staff for a decade and an enormous waste of officers’ time, and therefore money, to organise or go forage for their own.

I have since found that the newly imagined and designed office isn’t really an improvement on the bad old days, though.  First of all, the milkman has been truly made extinct by Austerity and so there is no-one to deliver it to offices each morning.  Therefore, the milk in the fridge is longlife and undrinkable, even a little bit in your tea.

When I plugged my laptop into the power socket on the bank of desks, it was some time before the person sat opposite me asked if my laptop was charging.  I looked at the power indicator and realised it wasn’t; the power points don’t work.  I also couldn’t plug my laptop into the desktop monitor and keyboard because the USB cable is missing.  Hot desks may have been re-named “communal spaces” but they still have no owner and so no-one to report IT faults, and the IT department is certainly no better than the dysfunctional mess that officers are used to.  So, when something eventually stops working, it stays not working.  IT atrophy is a permanent state for public corporate services no matter how well intentioned the new design of offices.

Whether or not I’m physically present in the office, all my meetings are still arranged on Teams because, just because I’m in the office for that one day that week, that doesn’t mean everyone else I meet is, so all meetings stay on Teams.  I mean, I think they're not in the office, but there’s no way of knowing where in the office, if they are, they might be to find out.  I have a meeting that afternoon where I am presenting the Employment & Skills plan for Brent Cross Town regeneration to the senior Planning team as well as the Assistant Director for Brent Cross Town, so I do need a quiet space to do it.  This is the same for everyone, so all the booths are being used.  In the breakout cubicle, a woman has set herself up for the day, secreting herself away to work in isolation despite the whole point of not working from home is to work alongside colleagues and, one would think, to allow colleagues to use the breakout space to have meetings and collaborate, but she has thoughtlessly ensured that this is no longer a resource.  The large conference room seems to constantly have people in it, but there are seven smaller meeting rooms on the third floor that I could use that I can book through the Outlook calendar but, when I go through them, they are all already booked.  Not just for an hour each for, for example, a meeting between colleagues, but most are booked for half or the whole day so that people can sit in them and use them as their private office for the day away from the rabble in the open office.

So, for the meeting, I quickly prop myself up onto an available breakfast bar-style desk near the door to the lift lobby to do my presentation.  Wow, was that a mistake!  As I’m talking into the laptop, people are constantly coming in and out of the door with it slamming on its fire door hinges every time before one staff member comes in to talk to a colleague but, instead of going over to his desk, decides it’s better to hold the door open and shout down the corridor.

Barry!

BARRY!

WHERE’D YOU WANNA GO FOR LUNCH?

Oi, BARRY!

As I’m presenting, I can see my image on the Teams window wincing every time Barry’s attention is demanded.  I want to turn round and shout back, “if you want to talk to Barry, walk over to him and don’t shout across the office”, but I’m trying to concentrate on my meeting.  And, this is the problem.  When I worked at Enfield pre-Lockdown, when WFH, and certainly Teams meetings, weren’t really a thing and “going to work” actually meant showing up to the workplace, the office space was so begrudgingly provided and furnished that it was never going to be conducive to productivity and I would find a quiet spot away from my team, usually in the staff restaurant, to sit all day.  Now that there is a genuine choice where to work so much so that managers (and Government) have felt the need to argue that the office is a positive space and more productive than working from home because it is important that we are in physical proximity to each other and the office space should allow us to work in that manner, no matter how well designed the office layout, like with the top deck of a London bus, there are always enough troglodytes, like the woman in the cubicle, the meeting room block bookers, security guards, IT support, lift door blockers and Barry’s lunch companion, that do not know how to conduct themselves in a public or shared space, to ruin it for everyone else.

Reese-Mogg was passive-aggressive because, like his nanny, he wants people to be at his beck and call and threw a tantrum when civil servants in his department weren’t there to serve him.  Boris Johnson may just be a dilettante.  Lacking energy and being easily distracted by a small piece of cheese may be a problem specific to him.  After all, Leonardo da Vinci worked from home.

A more cynical take was that Johnson and Uber just wanted workers to start commuting again to pay for the trains, taxis and buying their lunch at Pret a Manger and our managers simply want their painstakingly reimagined workspaces to be well used and dynamic.  If so, they would do better instead to reimagine who they recruit.