The COVID workplace

We notice the big things in real time. We don't notice the very big things until later.

Workplaces are changing, maybe forever.

We have all heard the idea that fish don't notice water. They notice food and predators, because those are very important to their survival and they are in their environment. We presume they do not notice the water itself, though, because it is the environment.

William Shatner is in the news now. He is a robust-looking 90 year old, and if all goes well he is going into space, for real this time. William Shatner has an outsize role in my consciousness. Star Trek was the one scripted TV show watched by people I knew in the late 1960s. Groups of college classmates would gather together in living rooms and common areas to watch that one TV show, drink beer, and shoot the bull. Otherwise TVs were off unless a president was making an Oval Office announcement.

What we may not have noticed because it was too obvious was that Star Trek was a "workplace drama." The Starship Enterprise was a job site. The crew members were co-workers and the basis for the drama was the interaction of those fellow employees. Workplace dramas are a genre. Even people who watch very little TV can identify them: The Office, 30 Rock, Boston Legal, LA Law, Grey's Anatomy. The office setting is convenient for a TV show, with limited sets. An office puts people in close proximity, and give them a reason to interact, so we can see characters develop and stories unfold. Besides, workplaces are the natural place where our lives play out. Workplaces are an alternative family. Co-workers are people we interact with closely five days a week. 

What is happening right now, while the punditry is focusing on important things like a pandemic and Afghanistan and China and inflation and everything else, this office workplace family is going through a separation. It is mostly amicable, but it is a separation nevertheless. Maybe the family members aren't even drifting apart, even though the members might only rarely see each other in real life anymore. Or ever. Office work by professional, technical, management, and back office support is moving remote. It was "special" for COVID, supposedly temporary, but it is turning into the default. A lot of people seem to prefer it. Bosses, too.

People work connected electronically, not spatially. We don't have "workplaces" any more, except maybe for special occasions. We may be going through the cultural and workplace equivalent of water for fish. Our assumptions about "workplace" may be very different in a decade or two.

For three decades I went to the office to do my work as a Financial Advisor. Back about eight years ago, a couple of years before I retired, the company I worked for changed their opinion on working from home. Instead of it being essentially forbidden, it became enabled. The office established "remote access" technology which brought a version of the workplace desktop to a home desktop computer, a change that allowed Financial Advisors to do limited work from home. The unsaid message about remote access was that it was the exception. It was a fallback arrangement in case we were having a sick day, or in case of another 9-11 attack. That was then. Now almost everybody works remotely. Advisors have an office, and there is a branch office, but it is not clear to me why. The place is nearly empty.

There are a multitude of corollaries that flow from "going to the office." One is the nature of real records. The concept of getting things on paper has changed. In a face-to-face world, there were pink "While You Were Out" slips of paper. Now notices and assignments are shared electronically. In the COVID world a paper signature is inconvenient, so there is a work-around that has become common: Electronic signatures. The process is so simple that even elderly clients can manage it. The electronic record is now the "real" record. 

Video connection via Zoom or some equivalent system is now commonplace. People have gotten better at it over this year. People know how to mute themselves. Even the first wave of Boomers, now people in their 70s, have generally figured out virtual meetings. A board meeting of a dozen people might be more productive than one done in "real life," except that the very notion of "real" is changing. As with documents, the electronic version is the real one.

The distinction between hands-on work and virtual work exacerbates the giant fractures in American life that are coincidental with the partisan divide. Democrats are the party of college-educated office workers in cities, especially women--the kind of person most likely to be working remotely. The archetypal voter in the Republican base is a non-college educated person who works outdoors or in factories that make something tangible.  Fields are not plowed remotely, nor is oil drilled, coal mined, nor delivery trucks unloaded. Some work in the world is done by real people touching real things. The divide in political sensibilities between a female office worker in a city and a male working in an industrial setting was profound before COVID. This is one more thing widening the divide between the two groups.

Big changes take time to ripen. Possibly Americans will decide that they want to go back to the office, but the early indications are the opposite. People who can work remotely are choosing to do so.