If you want a vision of the future of work, look no further than the Campbell family. Half the Campbells are part of the new wave of white-collar homeworkers, able to earn a crust wherever they like: from an office, cafe, or even bed. The other half are stuck in the old world, on shift and expected at work when their boss says so.
Rose is 25 and works in digital advertising. Since the pandemic, she’s rarely been into the office. It is a seller’s market for people with her skills – job websites are filled with advertising posts. Rose’s boss wanted her back in the office, but she threatened to quit and find work elsewhere if she had to come in every day.
Her boss capitulated and now she is only in once a week for big team meetings.
Rose’s dad, Patrick, worked in public relations but quit during pandemic. “It just dawned on me,” he says, “how bloody awful the office is, so I took a package and left.” Patrick is now self-employed. Most days, he works from his attic.
He earns slightly less than before but says he has never been happier.
His wife, Kelly, is a teacher. Her working life hasn’t changed – going to work means going to school. Their other daughter, Suzanne, is still at university but works part-time in restaurants on zero-hours contracts. Like her mum, she comes to work when she
is told. This average Scottish family shows just how rapidly work is changing … for some. We’re at the beginning of a moment that’s being defined as “the nowhere office”: a trend which sees mostly white-collar workers, often in creative industries, jettisoning old ways of working post-pandemic. They are either in companies relatively relaxed about staff working from home for part or even all the week, or freelancers able to work wherever they please.
The “great resignation” lies at the heart of these changes. Millions across the West quit their careers during the pandemic – often opting to retrain for dream jobs, or downsizing for happiness. In London, due to white-collar concentration, half of all employment is now either based at home or is “hybrid” work, where staff go into the office a few days a week. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the figure is about 20 per cent. New research shows hybrid working is more popular in Scotland that anywhere else in Britain.
A recent poll of UK corporate leaders by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found increased remote working led to better customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and happier staff.
In the West, 75% of global companies have now introduced hybrid working in some form. Scholars of social trends say what is happening to the world of work now is as seismic as the invention of “the weekend” during the Industrial Revolution.
Julia Hobsbawm has been described as “one of the foremost thinkers” in Britain when it comes to running businesses. She is chair of the Workshift Commission at the leading think-tank Demos, and heads Editorial Intelligence, a company specialising in networking and “social health” within industry – in other words, how to make workers happier, healthier and therefore more productive.
Hobsbawm is the daughter of the acclaimed historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was a world authority on industrialisation, capitalism and socialism. She has just written The Nowhere Office, a new book investigating how the way we work is changing. Unlike her father – a lifelong Marxist – Hobsbawm is unashamedly “pro-capitalist”.
However, she believes the changes now affecting the workplace will make life better for workers, while also improving productivity and profits. Hobsbawm has also advised UK governments.
Office revolution
THIS moment we’re in, she says, “is seismic for the white-collar workplace. It’s no exaggeration to say it’s the biggest workplace experiment in 100 years”.
There has been nothing so radical as the rise of hybrid working and homeworking – which Hobsbawm groups together under the umbrella term “nowhere office” – since WK Kellogg (the Cornflake king) experimented with six-hour days in 1930 to improve workers’ lives and boost productivity.
Hobsbawm draws parallels between the post-pandemic revolution in the world of work and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Both are moments of “reset”.