Summer is over, time to get back to the office?
When I started work I had my own desk. Even when I was a lowly systems administrator at Nixdorf UK I had a large desk with my own phone. A Z80 powered terminal and a laptop I’d “borrowed” from the repair stores.
A couple of years later I was on the team building the Sharp PC-3000, the third or fourth handheld PC (with the DIP team which designed the Atari Portfolio). On my first day I had to build my own desk: there was my space, there was the flat pack desk, I needed to put it together, it was almost a company tradition.
After graduation I was a programmer in an analysis team at Southern Electricity. My desk was always fairly clear and organised. Not as clear and tidy as Kerry’s – she could have won awards. But neither was it the big pile of papers that covered Murray’s desk. Occasionally a manager would question if his desk should be tidied but we knew it was his filing system. Other team members had family photos or certificates on their desk or mementos of visits to power station.
Above our desks were manuals both for the tools Рa complex set of VAX VMS manuals, DEC Fortran, Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, later Visual Basic. Hidden away behind one desk was an illicit kettle with a jar of instant coffee and tea bags. Although I kept a small cafeti̬re in my draws among my files. This saved us from paying 12p to the drinks machine which dispensed weak coffee and tea.
(And then there was the staff canteen, social club and even golf course!)
I mention all this to remember how offices and employers used to be. In those days teams sat together and your desk was your second home. A place you belonged. Today…
Desks are a lot smaller. Few people have their own desks, most hot-desk.
Hot-desking means teams don’t sit together. You sit with some random people you may never see again.
If you do have any personal belongings you either carry them in each day or lock them in a soulless locker at the end.
You carry in a laptop every day and carry it home at the end of the day – even if you never switch it on at home. (Maybe this is why everyone on the London Tube has a massive backpack these days?)
Desks don’t have telephones any more, nor do they have family photos, mementos and certificates, let alone files and manuals!
Each desk is the same and soulless. Employee space is a cost and employers have done everything to minimise it.
There might be a fancy coffee machine, and it might even be free, but its not yours. It is anonymous and likely serviced by minimum wage cleaning staff. Still, no need to arrange who’s turn it is to bring in milk.
Is it any wonder people don’t want to go to the office any more?
At the start of my career the office was a second home, your team a second family. Over the years companies have been “reducing the office footprint” and modern offices are clinical. If people want to stay in their own home, with their own family, is it any surprise?
Personally, I’ve had a office at home for a long time but I’m sick of it. I sometimes dream that someone will offer me a job working in an office 5-days a week with my own desk. Do such things still exist?
So, is it any surprise companies struggle to get people to come into the office? Companies have stripped their offices of the things that made them home and they only have themselves to blame if employees don’t want to be there.