The Company Wants You Back in the Office – RESIST!
If the situation was hopeless, the propaganda wouldn’t be necessary
After scrambling hysterically to implement remote working for most of its office-bound staff in 2020, at a cost of untold millions, the corporate superstructure is now sheepishly trying to coax its rank and file back to their desks. Whether or not you have a corporate desk job, you’ve likely heard the chatter around ‘Return to Office’ as it has been cheerfully branded. You’ve probably seen the subtle propaganda here and there in the mainstream media masquerading as thoughtful, neutral analysis of the ‘conundrum’ facing many employers in the post-Covid paradigm: How to incentivise workers to return.
This is where it gets interesting and amusing.
The company where I work has recently decreed a 40% return to office – two days per week, minimum. Part of my role as a writer in the communications team is to sell this idea to my fellow worker bees. The HR folk have been very keen for me and my colleagues to dream up ‘creative’ ways of getting people excited about the Return to Office.
Much to my chagrin I obligingly came up with some concepts to help peddle this immensely unpopular new policy. One of my themes was: ‘We’re not going back to the pre-Covid office’. In other words – two days in the office per week is still a whole lot more flexible than five days. The unspoken message here is of course ‘Hey, it could be worse, some companies are making their employees go in for three, four, or even five days! So count your blessings.’
You won’t believe what happened next.
One of the HR ladies replied with a snippy critique of my creative proposal, saying: “You make it sound as though being in the office is a hassle which gives a negative connotation to returning. This makes it seem as though we are having to twist people’s arms to convince them to come back, as if there was previously a choice… I think it needs to be a more direct message: This is what is happening, rather than what feels like we are asking permission.”
I was both amused and irritated by this. So, on the one hand, you feel we need a marketing campaign to persuade people to come back, but on the other we can’t use persuasive language as that makes it sound like we’re asking permission, and we should just tell everyone that THIS IS HOW IT IS.
If it was a simple as telling everyone that THIS IS HOW IT IS, then there would be no need for marketing and communications push to make people more amenable to the idea.
The machine has shown its hand here – we have them over a barrel.
‘You make it sound as though being in the office is a hassle’… Uh, YEAH.
While it may be hard for the enthusiastic bangle jangling HR ladies of the world to understand, most of us love working from home for the simple reason that it gives us a huge amount of our lives back. For those who have no life outside of work, the Return to Office may well be cause for celebration and excitement, but for most of us all it means is: increased travel and food costs; more time spent buggering around with shaving, ironing, hair and makeup; and fewer hours in the day for life admin and self-care, which when working from home can be easily knocked off in bite sized portions between bursts of work.
We don’t want to return to the office, at least not more than one day a week for a catch up and a banter with our work mates. Beyond that, we’re not bloody interested.
The companies know this, but despite having found that productivity did not fall off a cliff when we went remote – on the contrary in some cases, my workplace among many experienced an increase in employee engagement and a corresponding bump in output – they want us back regardless.
This regression to the 20th Century group think corporate-industrial-educational model of bums-on-seats probably has a few drivers, not least outmoded, unimaginative boards of directors and senior executives who can’t fathom the ability of the individual to regulate their own workday outside of the great mirror glass and Formica hives of the CBD.
But there is perhaps a more nebulous reason underpinning the sea change in corpo babble these past twelve months. Remember when lockdowns were still popular? Working from home was seen as a glorious and progressive leap forward, and my job back then chiefly consisted of extoling its virtues – an easy sell, if ever there was one. But the sentiment has recently done a 180.
I think the machine fears a loss of control. I think at a base, instinctual level, the top tier dislikes the liberation that WFH has granted its minions and, being largely comprised of sociopaths, it now wishes to rein us all in again, back to the stables, the pens, and the cages, where we can be properly monitored and supervised.
This impetus naturally trickles down into the echelons of middle management where the bangle janglers and the Bill Lumberghs of the world enthusiastically take up the mantle of Return to Office, as well as the corresponding battle cry, collaboration, community, and connection – what JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon refers to as “rubbing shoulders with a colleague” – apparently it’s good for company culture and idea generation.
I’m fortunate my manager is not one of these types and, like me, he sees huge value in being able to work from home. But the higher ups certainly want us back in our pods.
So I’m being instructed to write glib corporate propaganda extolling the benefits of COLLABORATION!
Hmm, collaboration you say? So, we get fewer sleep ins, we must start paying commuting costs again and standing on smelly overcrowded trains, ironing our shirts, completing lengthy daily beautification regimes for the benefit of people we largely don’t give a crap about, and making contrived small talk under florescent lights with said people for eight hours a day? BUT we get to collaborate? Well, I’m sold! (said no one ever).
‘You make it sound as though being in the office is a hassle’… Hell yes, it’s a hassle. It always has been, only now it’s even more of a hassle because the cost of living has increased by 40% or more for most people while wage growth has completely stagnated. So not only are we expected to sacrifice more of our time to The Company, but we’re now also expected to exchange this time for a diminished remuneration package.
It wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to warn the corporate world that extending their employees the benefit of WFH and then attempting to withdraw it again at the very moment people can least afford extra expenses such as commuting would go down like a lead balloon. After two years or more, very few workers will adopt the position that the HR ladies are shrilly espousing – that working from home was never an option pre-Covid, it was just a temporary privilege, a necessity to keep everyone safe! And this is just a resumption of normality. No, sorry Karen, but this is our new normal now. Remember that? The New Normal? Not so keen on that one anymore, eh?
Even before Covid I personally had been saying that my job could be better done from home for years. It’s a pity it had to take the biggest scam in history to finally bring it about, but now we’ve got it, we’re not going to give it up that easily. Return to Office? Nope. It’s s bum deal.
The companies know this, but they can’t admit it, so they ask their comms guys like me to weave a treacly web of weasel words like collaboration, community, and connection.
It's like Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
And the band plays on.
The good news is no one is buying it. Certainly, there are a handful of mindless shills who drool and clap their hands when they read my propaganda, but most folk can see through it, thank God. And thus, an interesting form of civil disobedience has emerged.
You’ll see it around 3pm on the days when we’re in the office – people start drifting away. People also won’t show up for work until 10am or later. And some days when they’re supposed to be in the office, they’ll just work from home citing one domestic impediment or another.
I’d like to see if companies have the balls to do anything about this in the long term, or whether the whole culture has changed irrevocably. I hope it’s the latter.
Corporations are in a tough spot. Due to the economic woes created by the disastrous lockdowns and the money-printing that paid for them, many companies cannot afford to incentivise the type of devoted desk-bound minions they want and have been relying instead on ‘flexible working arrangements’ to lure in recruits.
I hate to burst my HR lady’s bubble, but essentially, we are indeed ‘asking permission’ to bring workers back to the office. In case you hadn’t noticed, labour force participation is at record lows. I don’t know where people are going or how they’re surviving, but they’re choosing to drop out of the workforce. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and WEF puppet Jeremy Hunt even pleaded with Brits recently to re-join the workforce.
Who’d have thought? You attack people’s standard of living and treat them like feudal peasants… and they start opting out of the wage slave system! This means there’s now a labour shortage, and that means the corporations must take what they can get.
And that means they’re going to have to take people who are not interested in sitting in an office all day long.
They can’t just fire us all because there’s no one to replace us. And they can’t offer more money in return for more compliant drones because the economy is so screwed. We have them over a barrel.
To be sure, our position isn’t unassailable, and the situation could change. But as a workforce, as a middle class that has been consistently shat on for the past 40 years, we currently have somewhat more leverage than has traditionally been our lot, despite our stagnant wage growth.
We must take the wins where we can, and I for one absolutely intend to continue working from home as frequently as possible, for as long as possible, and if you also work for the man, I encourage you to do the same if you can. In the current labour market, the greater the proportion of any workforce that actively or passively resists these moves, the less inclined management will be to enforce the unpopular policies – they know it will lead to attrition, and recruitment is expensive, were there even a sufficient pool of workers to draw from.
I may be compelled to hold my nose and write snivelling entreaties to my comrades, but I do so with a happy contempt for this machine which clumsily believes itself capable of humanising itself with awkward appeals to collaboration, community, and connection.
Do you take us for fools? Yes, you do, don’t you. Well to hell with you.
I get all the collaboration I need via video calls and one day in the office per week – it’s more than enough. I get all the community I need from my friends and family, likewise with connection.
And I take exception to the bloviations of millionaire CEOs and their Patrick Bateman underlings glibly extolling the huge value in ‘rubbing shoulders’ with one's colleagues. For those on seven-figure salaries with stock options and a Ferrari in the garage, I'm sure every day spent swaggering around one’s fiefdom and ‘rubbing shoulders’ with one’s admiring subjects is indeed a great time.
In their psychopathic hubris they fail to see that for most of us, the time we got back in our lives working from home was a blessing to which you can barely attach a dollar value. They fail to see that we care not a jot for them, nor for The Company.
This is the problem with psychopaths, they’re blinded by their own bullshit. But it’s also their weakness and we should exploit it. Make all the right noises and clap when the applause sign comes on but undermine their system at every turn. Comply only insofar as you must in order to survive. Take your liberties where you can and frustrate the propaganda with carefully placed subversion every chance you get.
This is but one battlefront in the war against the machine, but it’s an important one. Working from home gives us the time and mental energy to develop our independence and strengthen ourselves for the struggle that lies ahead – and these two commodities, strength and independence, are both crucial and priceless.