It’s 11am on a Tuesday morning early in 2025. We sit at the dining room table with our laptop unfolded, waiting for the Teams call to start. As we wait, we glance around the untidy room: wondering whether to buy a rug from John Lewis because our feet feel cold, or to buy some new pictures for the walls since we’re fed up looking at that hipster Brutalism poster, or hoping that Tesco won’t arrive with a grocery crate in the middle of proceedings.
Once the Teams call starts, our minds turn firstly to the latecomers, the folk whose connection has dropped, then to the meeting agenda. But as the call drags on, we start to play Bullshizzle Bingo, waiting for someone –
To reach out,
or to push back;
to suggest taking it offline,
or accept that it is what it is, and we are where we are;
to leverage our expertise in order to manage expectations,
so we do some horizon scanning, then see the view from 30,000 feet –
and finally, after taking a straw poll, we commit to the plan on the paper.
Eventually, we drift into a micro-revery on whether the death of the office has been exaggerated. In the age of flexible working, home working and co-working, have we forgotten what the institution of the office meant during the 20th century? Covid-19 left swathes of Grade B office buildings lying empty, then co-working spaces opened in the backs of coffee shops, and for a wee while, Wework offered beanbags and pool tables and even taps dispensing free beer.
Now there’s a push to get people back into the office. Jamie Dimon, the big boss at US bank JP Morgan summed up his feelings about remote working and video conference calls recently –
“A lot of you were on the f------ Zoom ... and you were doing the following: looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an a------ the other person is, not paying attention, not reading your stuff. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness – it does.
“When I found out that people were doing that – you don’t do that in my goddamn meetings. If you’re going to meet with me, you’ve got my attention, you’ve got my focus. I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people. It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision-making.”
As we know from feature films like The Wolf of Wall Street, profanity and foul language go with the territory when you deal with American bankers, but perhaps Mr Dimon has a point. Maybe remote working and work-from-home-Friday will be dumped, and employees will end up back at the office five days a week. Good for workspace designers and office fit-out companies, perhaps, but less flexible for employees.
Meantime, I bought the attached images as part of collections of old photos for pieces which I wrote in another magazine. Most shots were published, whereas this handful were left over, but they’re too good not to share. The feeling of places left behind by time is enhanced by the antiquated technology, and it underlines how the accelerating pace of change continues to change the way we live and work at an ever more rapid pace.
The office environment here would have been alive with people talking like Huw Weldon does in 1960’s arts programmes on the BBC – plus the clatter of comptometers, typewriters, a telex machine and the ticking of a Gents of Leicester electric clock above the door. Each workstation comes with the latest technology: a push-button phone, Selectric typewriter, Rolodex card file, and of course an ashtray. Whereas, here we are today, with all the CGI software that money can buy, and desks full of screen.
So, why wouldn’t you want to return to the office?
