Do Cities Dream of Cubicle Workers?

The pandemic has forced significant changes in how white-collar work is done and those changes have been in place long enough for us to think about the nature of work and how we want to work moving forward. Let me emphasize that I am talking about white-collar work here — office work, work that COVID has shown us can be done from anywhere effectively. I am well aware that for those not in these lines of work, the nature of work has not greatly changed. However, I think that the changes that can occur in the wake of COVID can benefit more workers than those who used to occupy offices and cubicles.

Finally, it’s about the nature of work itself. What is work in this context? How is it measured? Also, how important is supervision, hierarchy, verification, socialization — the culture of a company? In Dorsey’s 2018 announcement of company support for remote work, he specifically cited opportunities for employees to work better away from the office environment. Not to put a halo on it, but his context appears to be maximizing employee productivity and satisfaction. Google’s culture is specifically built around collaboration — something that is, again, arguably more difficult to achieve in a distributed workforce.

All of these factors — and more that may well have never crossed my mind — are involved in shaping how we will work post-COVID. It’s not just big flashy tech companies making these calculations either — it’s every firm, every business. And, as the NYT article shows, those choices will cascade across everyone’s life in ways great and small. For example, let’s say that remote work becomes the new normal and cubicle farms are a pre-COVID relic. How does that ripple outward? Let’s start with Manhattan. With only a fraction of the in-office employees to support, it’s not just office buildings left wanting. So too are the myriad service and retail workers whose livelihood depends on traffic from those now remote workers. Will they all shift to gig work like Uber and Doordash in the wake of stores and restaurants slashing their workforces or shuttering altogether?

Based on the above factors, I think we will see the rapid shift to remote work rollback to a large extent this year. Too many companies have too many assets tied up in onsite work for that to change, not to mention the ripple effect of those businesses dependent on commuting office workers needing them to commute. However, I don’t expect it to completely reverse itself. Workers who have the option to work remotely will likely take it up. Moreover, there’s an opportunity in this percentage change in how we work to change where we work as well.

If a worker prefers a more rural setting, they can have it and the jobs they desire as well — especially if the broadband infrastructure proposed by the Biden Administration comes to fruition. (Sorry, satellite internet. I have very bad memories of you from my days in IT support.) High-income work doesn’t have to be the primary domain cities anymore. That too can have a ripple effect all its own. The shift can happen in so many ways that it's hard to model or predict.

The bottom line is that a lot of the work that occurs in “cubicle farms” and the abandoned offices of Manhattan can be done just as well remotely. We’ve had over a year to figure this out and see it in action. The technology exists and, despite some hiccups and growing pains, it is working fairly well. The question remains do we want to go back to the way we worked before and, for many employees, the answer is a firm no. If that holds, it’ll soon be time to figure out how to better use commercial office space.

Published

Related posts:

tata ace rent in coimbatore. “tata ace rent in coimbatore” is published by Goods Taxi.

Over emphasized because without action, mindset is useless for getting results. Under, because people think it won’t do anything and is an excuse not to take action — The “just do it” crowd. So they…

I prepared a simple blog application based on Aurelia where users can login, logout, leave comments and manage their own posts. The model layer is built on top of js-data ORM and its…