Julia Hobsbawm - The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future

Office centricity is over.

Tobi Ltke, CEO Shopify, on Twitter

Imagine you are holding a snow globe in your hand and the object inside is not a place you have been to on holiday or a festive bauble but a representation of where you work. What does it show? Your home? A laptop? A driverless car? For the professional class (which in advanced economies makes up over 40 per cent of the workforce) there is no single obvious image to encapsulate working life any more. Thanks to the internet and automation it could be a smartphone or it could be a makeshift desk under a tree.

It is unlikely to be at least full time an actual office. At the centre of works new snow globe is not a place but a person, whose working life is being shaken up more than at any point in the last hundred years. The Nowhere Office reflects the impact of shifting tectonic plates which were grinding away before Covid-19 happened: technology and its relationship to humans, flexible working what we now call hybrid working but also bigger philosophical arguments about the meaning of work itself. As the legendary American social historian Studs Terkel put it in his epic study Working : Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

The world of work was already quite sick before the coronavirus took hold. According to the American Institute of Stress 83 per cent of American workers suffer from work-related illnesses. In South Korea the working week was reduced in 2018 because of Gwarosa or death from overwork. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy $1 trillion every year.

The pandemic lifted the lid on a desire to work differently, or less, or with more worklife balance. We can see the impact of this in every metric around work: from The Great Resignation in which millions of American workers resigned en masse and the one in four workers who now imagine they might quit or switch jobs, Truly we are nowhere near where we used to be in the middle of Nowhere.

Wherever we end up, working life has been due for a shake-up for a long time. This book attempts to see through the snow blizzard of changes engulfing the world of professional work and to imagine positive changes that could be made to improve it as the post-pandemic world begins to settle.

The Nowhere Office is office life but without the formal fixtures and fittings we took for granted before the pandemic. It sees a role for the office, but a very changed one. Instead of a single fixed place or schedule, it envisages a mobile, hybrid world which uses HQ offices wisely for certain functions and not for others. It is a new era in professional work which blows away the cobwebs of a stale working model of management and presenteeism and replaces it with a fairer and more functional system that works not only from the top down but also across an organisation.

Snow globes have been around for roughly as long as modern office life (about a hundred years) and while there have been some changes, from glass to plastic, from water to glycerine, from metal shavings to soap flakes, the fundamentals object, snow, transparent case remain. Their enduring popularity is simple. They connect us emotionally to two things: the fixed permanence of something we want to keep and the fluttering flash of change and disruption. Humans love both certainty and distraction. The movement of the beautiful flakes swirling around transfixes us but we also like to know where we stand. In the end the snow globe always settles back, but this time the base itself has shifted. This moment is therefore both exciting and uncomfortable. The Nowhere Office represents the moment when those professionals working in business and organisations the teacher, the technician, the PA, the CEO, the executive in HR, the consultant, the IT expert, the employee, the employer, the freelancer realise that something fundamental has shifted and that their own snow globe can be reset. That work has been stuck and that change is needed.

The Nowhere Office is a new beginning in the story of the office if we choose to make it so.