CHAPTER 10

REINVENTING WORK

When, in 2008, long before the Covid-19 pandemic, I was put in charge of a Financial Times department, I decided to do things differently. I told my team I wasn’t interested in their dental appointments. ‘You don’t need to tell me when you’re going to your kids’ parents’ evening,’ I said. The team produced reports on different subjects, rather than daily news, and each project took a couple of weeks to complete. I said that as long as the reports appeared on time and error-free, I didn’t care where team members were working. I told them I wanted ours to be an adult department: people could take responsibility for their projects without being constantly monitored.

The team seemed delighted. Most carried on coming into the office at the same times every day. But one team member walked the dog in the morning, came in at mid-day and stayed late in the evening after everyone else had gone. Some team members occasionally worked at home. A few often did. The FT’s publishing system meant I could see exactly how far people had got with the reports they were commissioning and editing. They were always published on time.

While my team seemed happy with the arrangement, others were not. People from HR came to see me. These team members who were working from home, they asked, had their spare-room work spaces been health and safety-checked? Had they filled in the requisite forms allowing them to be away from the office? I batted the questions away; I hadn’t heard of these forms before. But the next people to express unhappiness were my own managers. Why, when they walked past my department, were so many of my team’s desks empty? How productive were these absent workers? Weren’t they slacking off?

I could see how productive they were, I said. The work was being done. The reports were being published. My bosses still weren’t happy. Why was I letting people work from home? I defended the set-up. I even explained Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, which we met in Chapter 1 – that you didn’t have to look over people’s shoulders if you trusted them. But it was all a step too far. My managers insisted my team had to come into the office every day. It was not enough that I knew what they were doing; I had to be able to watch them doing it.

All organisations have their hierarchies, and I wasn’t quite at the top of mine. I told my disappointed team that home working had to end. They had to get onto the train and come in every morning (although they still didn’t need to tell me if they were going to the dentist).

A little over a decade later, a coronavirus pandemic swept the globe and many organisations began shutting their offices to all but security staff. Everyone else should work from home, they said, and many governments enforced this. The HR form-fillers now seemed unfussed about home-office health and safety. With a killer pandemic raging, it was the corporate office that had become unsafe.

To Leena Nair, then-human resources chief at Unilever, as unwelcome as Covid-19 was, a rethink of how we structure our working day was long overdue. ‘I really believe our traditional models of employment needed a disruption,’ Leena, who has since been appointed CEO of Chanel, told an FT Forums meeting. ‘I mean, do we really have to work the way we worked for the last 70–80 years? Wake up in the morning, two hours commute to get into work, come back, work for 40 years of your life with the same employer? Those are now seeming so outdated. I’m excited by the thought of reinventing work, reinventing the models of employment, reinventing the workplace, and to every leader I meet from any institution – business, government, NGO – I say the same thing: it would be a wasted moment, if we wasted all this time, all the learnings.’

James Suzman, anthropologist and author, said that while it was tempting to view the pre-Covid way of working as having been there forever, it really only developed after the Second World War. ‘The surging into the city centres, the development of these huge corporate headquarters and so on: this is all a relatively new thing. Before then, and through most of human history, the boundaries between work and life would be much more fluid,’ he told the FT Forums meeting. ‘When you go through the long history of cities, you had entire neighbourhoods designated and associated with specific professions, where people intermarried, lived in and out of their houses. Boundaries were fluid and it produced a certain degree of community that extended beyond merely doing some commercial work together.’

So, in past centuries, we had a much greater intermingling of jobs and day-to-day life, where people would go just a few steps or streets to work – or work in their homes. It took the building of railways, underground trains and motorways, and the expansion of suburbs, to produce our recent pattern of mass-commuting into city centres for work.

Those city centres and office blocks were a dense system of people and services. Apart from the office workers themselves, there were the train drivers who took them to work and back and the rubbish removal staff and sweepers who kept the streets clean. Each office had its own ­microsystem, which extended beyond those who sat at computers and attended meetings. The newly vacuumed carpets and empty bins when you arrived at your desk the morning? That was the work of the cleaners who came in long after most of the office workers had gone home. The security guard who greeted you when you came in to work? They had arrived in the office even earlier than you, or had perhaps been there all night.

But, in recent decades, it became harder for all these people to live close to their city-centre jobs. Housing became too expensive, not just for support workers, but for many of the middle-ranking, and sometimes even senior, office workers too. ‘People have been driven out of city centres by the fact that offices have actually inflated city centre values. People had to live further away and became miserable as a result,’ James Suzman said.

It wasn’t only office staff who were forced to live further away from their jobs. So were the people who provided goods and services to office workers, services like lunch. In 2017, the FT interviewed Valeria, a Romanian citizen from Moldova, who worked at Pret a Manger, the British sandwich chain. Valeria set her alarm every morning for 3 am. She lived so far away from her London city-centre job that her commute took an hour-and-a-half. Increasingly fewer Brits were prepared to take on this kind of life. Pret’s head of human resources said, in 2017, that out of every 50 applicants for a Pret job, only one was British.1

The result of the growing physical gap between home and work, James Suzman said, was that, even before the coronavirus shutdown, some organisations had started engaging in small-scale flexible work experiments (so my truncated version was not the only one). Then, when Covid-19 hit, the world was plunged into ‘a vast, unplanned experiment in remote working. And it has been surprisingly successful and we learned a great deal,’ he said.

What did we learn? That much of the work that we used to think had to be done in the office could be done over a video screen. Few ­benefited more from that discovery than Zoom, the online video platform. Harry Moseley, Zoom’s global information officer, said that the move to online communication had been apparent in many industries even before the coronavirus shutdowns. ‘Covid-19 has accelerated the trajectory we were already on. Look at how healthcare has changed, education has changed, financial services has changed, retail has changed,’ he told the FT Forums meeting. ‘Can people work efficiently, effectively and make a contribution from anywhere? The answer to that question is clearly “yes”.’

Once staff had had a taste of home-working, it was hard to persuade them back into the office. People had become used to seeing more of their families, which they often didn’t do before the pandemic. ‘When I go back earlier in my career, I used to be out the door at 6 in the morning, when the kids were still asleep, and then get home late in the evening and the kids were asleep again,’ Harry Moseley said.

As coronavirus restrictions wound down and offices reopened, some thought it best to allow employees to carry on spending time with their loved ones. Arup, the engineering and design company, put in place a policy called Work Unbound. Trialled at its offices in Liverpool and Queensland, Australia, it allows Arup staff to spread their working week over seven days, giving them the flexibility to take their children to school and help them with homework when they return. Arup staff can then get down to work when the kids have gone to sleep. They can take off an hour or two during what had been the normal working day to go for a run or swim – and then make up the time on the weekend.

Will Poole, an Arup manager, used the flexible working arrangements to see more of his partner, who worked shift hours in a care home. ‘We were ships in the night before,’ Poole told the FT.2 Andy Pennington, Arup’s ­Liverpool office leader, said that during the flexible-working trial, the company was ‘conscious that in letting the genie out of the bottle’ they would not be able to ‘put a stopper back in’. (So entrenched has the idea of home working become that a 2021 European survey found that 75 per cent of office workers thought it should be illegal for companies to force staff to work in the office.)3

Pennington told the FT that senior managers realised they had to set an example if the new arrangements were to work. ‘I purposefully pushed the boundaries so others could see what was acceptable. I have three kids, I can leave at 3 pm and do stuff with the family and then pick up [work] at 8 or 9 . . . We needed to show that if you chose to work in the evening or weekend, that was fine,’ he said.

Arup asked staff to come into the office twice a week and to plan their schedules around client needs, Pennington said, ‘to manage the concern that a deadline would fall just as everyone decided to take the Friday afternoon off together’.

But not everyone has found home working blissful. Surveying the possible office models – hybrid working, a couple of compulsory days in the office – Leena Nair said: ‘In my global job, looking at 150,000 people in 190 countries, I can see that one size doesn’t fit all. What’s true about China is not true about Brazil. What’s true about Vietnam is not true about India.’ Attitudes to flexible working often depend not just on the national context, but on personal circumstances. If you have large families sharing a house, in Bangladesh for example, ‘you do want to come into the office and you want to have some space where you can do some work’, Leena Nair said.

We should remember, too, that the benefits of flexible working did not fall equally on everyone during the work-from-home period. People involved in healthcare, retailing, delivery, street cleaning and many other sectors couldn’t work at home at all. There was little flexibility for them. And even among those working at home, old patterns persisted. Who, during the coronavirus lockdowns, did the housework and took care of the children? According to a survey by King’s College London, women in the UK said they spent seven hours a day on childcare, while men said they spent five hours.4 In other parts of the world, it could be more unequal still. But the great coronavirus shutdown still changed people’s ideas of what they wanted from work – and many decided it was time for a bigger change than organisations had seen for years.

WHO’S THE BOSS?

In office meetings before the pandemic, it was clear who the boss was. All eyes were on the most senior person in the room. They sat at the head of the table, or in the middle of the long side of the table. They never sat, say, two seats from the far end of the table. They had to be able to see everyone in the meeting – and everyone had to be able to see them.

Video meetings changed all that. Everyone’s faces appeared on small tiles. No tile was bigger than any other, unless you changed your video setting to ‘speaker view’, which meant you saw a big picture, not of the most important person but of whoever was speaking, or whoever made the most noise, even if they just cleared their throats or dropped something on the floor.

Unlike around a conference table, there is no natural hierarchy on a video call. All Zoom boxes are equal; it is not clear which are more equal than others. Some attempted to rectify this. FT columnist Andrew Hill wrote: ‘In Japan, reports suggested hapless IT technicians tried to preserve online the intricate norms of corporate rank, to give chairs and chiefs more prominent boxes on screen.’5 It didn’t work. It is possible to ‘pin’ a video box, so that someone important appears more prominently, but that is more suitable for a speech rather than a meeting, which is why pinning is best for online conferences. Bosses who pin themselves for meetings will not get much of a discussion going.

Video calls upend hierarchy. Not only is there no ranking of the tiles on a screen; not everyone sees them in the same order. Even the boss can suffer a wi-fi failure and suddenly disappear, possibly because they are calling in from a second home secluded in deep countryside.

There is also less formality online. If business suits and ties had started to vanish from the office before the pandemic, video meetings made that disappearance final. The only appropriate time to wear anything other than open-neck on an online call was a virtual fancy-dress party. Office suits, anthropologist James Suzman told the FT Forums meeting, were a form of armour, ‘that physical symbolism of work and status’ and, with the pandemic, the armour was gone.

Alongside the casual clothes, video calls provided an insight into people’s lives: their homes, their children, their pets, their having to get up for a delivery at the front door. ‘People cease to be these two-dimensional characters of the office. The person who was this ruthlessly ambitious person in the days when we were always simply at work actually turns out to be very human, very alive, very real and much more sympathetic. So, I think it’s all round a good thing. And it’s what I see as a long 50-year historical aberration, the way we separated work and life,’ James Suzman said.

There were some attempts before Covid-19 to end the separation between the office and the rest of life. There was the ‘bring your whole self to work’ movement – the idea that you should not have to be something different in the office and elsewhere.

In 2018, FT columnist Pilita Clark reported on job advertisements that were specifically searching for people who were ready to bring their whole selves to work. ‘Northrop Grumman, the big US arms seller, was advertising for a weapons manual editor to join what it said was a culture that “thrives on intellectual curiosity, cognitive diversity and bringing your whole self to work”. KPMG’s ad for an economic analyst insisted “we want you to bring your full self to work and truly maximise your potential”. Over in Australia, the Southern Cross Austereo broadcasting group was hunting for a radio journalist who it vowed would be given “everything you need to bring your best self to work”,’ she wrote.6

Arguments in favour of the ‘bring your whole self to work’ idea include that people should not have to hide their sexual orientation in the office or their cultural background. But Pilita Clark argued that, while the acknowledgement of diversity was welcome, it was not necessary to bring ­everything about yourself into work. ‘I have worked with a lot of innovative, clever people who never cared to talk much about their personal lives. I was perfectly happy to think they behaved differently at home than at work. I suspect they felt the same about me,’ she said.

Did the great working from home experiment change all that? Having exposed their lives on Zoom, do people now feel less fussed about bringing their home lives into work? It probably comes down to personal preference. Not everyone revealed all on video calls. Many created virtual backgrounds, rendering their out-of-office lives as opaque as before. Not everyone felt they had a home they wanted to expose. One regular Zoom contact of mine always had a gorgeous sea view as his background. I knew it wasn’t real because he lived in southwest London. But he confessed one day that he used it because he and his family had such a small home that he had to work in the utility room next to the washing machine, which he didn’t want appearing on his video calls.

Just as some managed not to bring their whole selves to Zoom meetings, so many will continue to keep their real selves out of the office. We all have different privacy settings. Perhaps not all that much changed, after all, when people worked away from the office. So, too, the longer-term effects on office hierarchies of the work-from-home period will take years to play out. Older ways of doing things have a way of reasserting themselves. Bosses may be keen to regain the authority they had; many are still not fans of Theory Y and of trusting people to get on with their work. But, in the meantime, many employees have taken their own action: they have decided that not only do they want a change in the way they work; they no longer want to do the job they had at all.

SO LONG, FAREWELL

In late 2021, a new phrase started appearing on consultants’ websites and in magazine articles. ‘The Great Resignation’ was the title of a report from HR adviser Korn Ferry. ‘Companies that are used to losing a few employees a year are seeing turnover rates of 20 per cent or even higher,’ the report said.7 Unprecedently large numbers of US workers were resigning from their jobs. In each of the six months leading up to October 2021, 2.5 million US workers quit their posts. This was higher than in any month since the US Government started tracking resignation statistics in 2000, Korn Ferry said. In the UK, FT economics editor Chris Giles wrote that, in the third quarter of 2021, ‘Brits were telling their employers to shove it at record domestic levels.’8

One of the reasons for this mass resignation is one we have already discussed: people had got used to seeing their families – and either liked the experience or couldn’t afford to pay someone to look after their kids. ‘Millions of parents, a large class of workers, have been working from home, which has allowed them to do their roles without needing childcare. A return to the office may mean these workers have to decide between a job or taking care of their family,’ Korn Ferry said.

Workers who were resigning weren’t necessarily doing it because they had found a better job, Korn Ferry said. Many were doing it because they didn’t fancy the idea of going back to the way things were. Possibly they were tired of long hours. Or perhaps they now wanted a different way of living and working. ‘This level of quitting is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better,’ Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic magazine in October 2021.9 As Thompson pointed out, it wasn’t just highly paid, high-status workers who were resigning. ‘Nearly 7 per cent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month,’ he wrote.

As lockdowns eased worldwide, many countries experienced high job vacancies in the hospitality and food sectors. Other industries saw people reluctant to sign up, or walking out. There has, for example, been a worldwide shortage of truck drivers for years. Delivery drivers played a crucial role during the pandemic, ensuring the supply of food and all the goods that people bought online. But as the coronavirus crisis eased, many drivers thought there must be a better way to live. Aliaksandr Matsiash, a ­Belarusian, joined Baltic Transline, a Lithuanian company, as a driver in 2021. ‘But after two weeks of training, followed by 13 weeks living in a truck based in the Netherlands — all for a mere €2,470 — the 30-year-old quit,’ the FT reported, quoting Matsiash as saying: ‘It’s not a normal life for a human. It’s like a prison, it’s not a job. You do it like a zombie.’10

The UK was particularly badly hit by worker shortages as the coronavirus restrictions lifted, not just because of people leaving their jobs but because of restrictions on EU workers coming to the country after Brexit. Employers struggled to recruit truck drivers, fruit pickers and care workers. In the construction industry, the FT reported that to do a home renovation in Brighton, on England’s south coast, ‘builder and architect Phil Wish had to dredge a plumber out of sick leave, press gang his brother-in-law into labouring and do the wiring himself.’11

It wasn’t just the hospitality and construction industries that couldn’t find staff. Professional services firms were also struggling to fill posts. ‘This has meant accounting, consulting and law firms are increasingly fighting over the best available candidates, with a similar picture in financial services and the technology industry,’ the FT said.12

Suddenly, workers were in a position to call the shots – to decide who they wanted to work for and under what terms. It meant some could reinvent themselves. They weren’t leaving work altogether; they just wanted different work. ‘Becoming a real estate appraiser in the US normally requires dozens of hours of specialised training. But Roland Statulevicius managed to land a job in February with nothing more than a certificate from an online course,’ the FT reported in July 2021. Statulevicius had lost his job with a car dealership in Chicago before the pandemic. But companies were desperate to hire people like him, even if they had minimal relevant experience. ‘That means people looking for work hold more bargaining power with prospective employers than they have in decades,’ the FT said.13

So, how should employees respond to the ‘great resignation’? US ­President Joe Biden had a simple answer. ‘Pay them more,’ he said in June 2021. ‘This is an employee’s bargaining chip, what’s happening.’14

Pay, training and promotion opportunities do all matter. But, rather than trying to earn more, some employees decided not just that they would like to work differently, but they wanted to work from somewhere quieter, greener, sunnier or cheaper. Looking at how San Francisco’s tech workers had responded to lockdown, The New York Times reported in January 2021: ‘They fled. They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida.’15

Looking at similar trends in Europe the next month, the paper said: ‘In the reverse of the old song, the question now is not how you keep them down on the farm, but how you dissuade them from moving there for good.’16

‘Can people work efficiently, effectively and make a contribution from anywhere?’ Harry Moseley asked at the FT Forums meeting. ‘The answer to that question is clearly “yes”. The other part is your employers have also realised that they can be geographically agnostic when hiring people.’

Facebook (now Meta) announced that its staff could work from anywhere, even abroad. But there was a catch. If wage rates in their favoured location were lower, workers should expect their pay to be cut accordingly.17 Other US companies also offered remote working with lower pay if workers moved somewhere cheaper. Google said the pay of anyone who worked remotely would be adjusted depending on location. ‘Someone living in Stamford, Connecticut will be paid 15 per cent less if they work from home, unlike someone who works from in New York City, for example,’ the FT’s Sarah O’Connor wrote.18

Organisations and their staff will need time to re-evaluate their relationship with each other: what pay would make it worthwhile for people to take on punishing work, whether it is the hard physical labour of picking fruit or the excessively long hours of working in a corporate law firm? Or is it, perhaps, that no amount of money would make it worthwhile, and that people are looking for something more in their lives and their work?

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

Viktor Frankl, a young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist, had a visa for the USA and so had the chance to leave Austria after the Nazis invaded and began their persecution of the Jews in 1938. But he chose to stay to care for his parents. He, his mother, his father, his wife and his brother were deported to concentration camps. He was the only one to survive.

During his time in Auschwitz, often freezing, starving and struggling to remain strong enough to be selected for labour rather than death, Frankl continued to reflect on the question that had absorbed him for years: what made life worth living?

After his liberation, he returned to Vienna to become professor of psychiatry and neurology at the medical school, and produced a best-selling book in which he said that what drove people was not money, or sex, or fame, but the search for meaning.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote that people could find meaning even in the most desperate circumstances. Throughout his time as a prisoner, he found meaning in the hope that he would one day be able to reconstruct the academic manuscript that had been taken from him when he arrived at Auschwitz.

The meaning that people found in their own lives, he wrote, was down to them and could change from day to day or even hour to hour. To ask what meaning people should find in life was like asking what the best move was in chess. It depended on the stage of the game, the position of the pieces and who the opponent was. But there were largely three ways in which people could find meaning. One was by ‘creating a work or doing a deed’. A second was through ‘experiencing something or encountering someone’: nature, beauty or love for another person. A third was through ‘the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering’, as he had done in Auschwitz and as others have done by finding meaning while living through illness, tragedy and loss.

For many leading more prosaic lives, meaning can reside in relationships with family, friends or deep interests. And it is no surprise that people look for it at work. We spend so many hours of our day and years of our life working. We hope, when it ends, it will have meant something.

One reader, writing to FT agony uncle Jonathan Black, director of the University of Oxford careers service, asked a question that preoccupies many. The reader was a tax accountant at a Big Four firm. The work was ‘interesting and pays well, but I wonder when I come to the end of my life, will I think what I did with it was worthwhile?’19

Many have decided, both before and after the coronavirus pandemic, to change their jobs in search of something worthwhile. Lucy Kellaway was one of the FT’s star columnists, writing articles that punctured CEOs’ pomposity and jeered at their jargon. Then, after more than 30 years, at the age of 57, she startled her readers with a column announcing that she was embarking on a new life – as a secondary school maths teacher. Not only that, she had set up an organisation, Now Teach, to persuade other high-flying professionals – bankers, lawyers and accountants – to do the same.

Her fellow FT columnist Gideon Rachman, hearing her news, expressed the incredulity of many of her colleagues. ‘Let me see if I’ve understood. You are leaving a job you are good at, where you get money, praise, freedom, glamour and flexibility. You are swapping it for something that is less well paid, difficult, has no freedom, no glamour, is intensely stressful and you may be rubbish at it. Or am I missing something?’ he asked.

Lucy Kellaway’s answer was: ‘For me, the thought of starting over, learning something that is new and terrifyingly hard, is part of the point. So is the thought of being in a staffroom with colleagues who are my children’s age. But the biggest thing, which readers may find hard to swallow given my entire career has been based on ridiculing others, is that, for my next act, I want to be useful.’20

What Gideon Rachman and others were missing was that Lucy was in search of meaning. Like the tax accountant writing to the FT’s agony uncle, she wanted to be able to look back at her work and think it had been worthwhile.

Other newly trained older teachers wanted the same feeling, and outlined their stories on the Now Teach website.21 James Neophytou had an IT career at PwC and IBM in Africa, the USA, India, the Middle East and Asia, reaching the position of executive partner. ‘At 52, I had reached what I had considered to be a decent and rewarding level within the company, but I wanted something more,’ he said of his decision to become a maths and business studies teacher. John Richardson became a maths teacher after a 35-year international business career. ‘In my 50s, I was yearning for change and wanted to give something back,’ he said.

People like Lucy, James and John are in a fortunate position: because they have had long and lucrative careers, they are well-off financially. The jump into teaching may be challenging and tiring, and ultimately meaningful, but it is not going to leave them hungry or homeless.

Erin Cech, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, worries about less well-off people trying to do the same. ‘There seems to be this sentiment that, “security be damned, we’re trying to find meaning”,’ she told the FT’s Andrew Hill.22

Even if the job change works financially, Andrew Hill warned that there were other risks. He said that ‘younger recruits’ conviction that they will find autonomy and self-realisation in their jobs creates unrealistic expectations. Like the first argument between a couple who married in the hope of endless happiness, the first boring day at work, balancing the books or fact-checking a share prospectus, can come as a shock. Worse, young workers may blame themselves, overcorrect by throwing themselves even more ardently into their work and start burning out.’

These are all valid reservations. But, as Frankl pointed out, people can find meaning even in the least advantageous situations. Yes, it is easier for those with a secure pension to embark on a new career that makes them feel more valuable. But some in relatively poorly paid jobs discovered during the pandemic that their jobs had meaning too: the corner grocery store owner who managed to source hand sanitiser and toilet paper for the local neighbourhood when the big supermarkets had none; the postmen and women who looked in on elderly customers when delivering the mail; those who volunteered at vaccine clinics, checking people’s temperatures as they arrived or taking their details. As Viktor Frankl said, the search for meaning can change every day and in different situations. People find it in all sorts of places.

What about leaders? Where do they find meaning? Once again, that is like asking what the best move is in chess. Each leader will answer in their own way. But if, as a leader, you can look back on a career of providing decent jobs, of serving satisfied customers, of providing a workplace in which people felt valued, of having given those who worked with you the opportunity to find meaning in their own work and lives, most would happily settle for that.

FURTHER READING

I have recommended Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to many people. Almost everyone not only found it an inspiration, but bought copies for family and friends. Frankl’s slim book rewards each re-reading.

Lucy Kellaway’s book Re-educated, describing her career change (she ended up teaching economics and business studies rather than maths), is as entertaining as her many fans would expect, while being candid and clear-eyed about the trials and rewards of becoming someone new.