{"id":8752,"date":"2019-09-02T16:35:46","date_gmt":"2019-09-02T15:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/news\/2019\/09\/in-praise-of-the-office\/"},"modified":"2019-09-02T16:35:46","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T15:35:46","slug":"in-praise-of-the-office","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/news\/2019\/sep\/in-praise-of-the-office","title":{"rendered":"IN PRAISE OF THE OFFICE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n I’m a long-term fan of flexible working. I\u2019ve never been at my most productive before 10.00am and, following an afternoon lull, nearly always feel most alert and energetic from about 4.00pm to 7.30pm.n <\/blockquote>\r\n \r\n \t\t\t \t\t\t
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\r\n \t\tu003cdivu003eGetting away with these hours sometimes used to require a certain amount of guile (B, B and H were all early birds and not huge siesta devotees) but, generally, I’ve found that the ad industry is reasonably relaxed about your hours, provided you put them in.u003c\/divu003enu003cdivu003e\u00a0u003c\/divu003enu003cdivu003eThe new frontier for flexibility, however, isn’t any longer just about flexibility of time. It is also about flexibility of place. Not just when you put your hours in, but also where. This has many upsides in many ways, especially for new parents, but I also think it potentially has some unexpected downsides.u003c\/divu003enu003cdivu003e\u00a0u003c\/divu003enu003cdivu003eI was at a family do the other day that included a number of my son’s peer group in their early twenties. I was surprised to find that several of them, who had quite impressive-sounding corporate jobs, hardly ever went to the office. Instead, they were expected to work remotely from home. Did they enjoy it, I asked. Not remotely. In fact, they looked on quite enviously at the people in their companies who could command an office job.u003cbr \/u003eu003cbr \/u003eIt may seem a surprise that working in an office now seems aspirational, given how many grudging things are said and written about the place. Not least in the withering satire of The Office. The ad industry, too, has its own habit of disparaging our humble work abode, often advocating a more u0022hot-deskedu0022 future and new shape-shifting business models. Indeed, I remember an ad from BT (which, quite understandably, has a stake in a remote world) confidently predicting the end of the office altogether. And yet the skyline only seems to see more and more office blocks going up.u003c\/divu003enu003cpu003eu003cbr \/u003eSo why does the office stubbornly persist as our preferred work forum given the many valid alternatives that now exist? Why do these alternatives remain complementary rather than substitutional? There are a thousand answers. But two of them reside in Daniel Pink’s brilliant study on human motivation at work, which he distils into three key components: autonomy, mastery, purpose.\u00a0u003c\/pu003e \t\t<\/div>\r\n \t\t\r\n <\/div>\r\n \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/section><\/div>\n\n
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\n \n \n u003ch4u003eThe trouble with remote working in its absolute sense (and I realise there are many variations) is that it can only really satisfy our drive for autonomy. And autonomy on its own is a lonely place or, as The Eagles sang in Desperado: u0022Freedom, well that’s just some people talking \/ Your prison is walking through this world all alone \/ And not having the amenity of an office to fall back on.u0022 (I made up the last line.)u003c\/h4u003e\n <\/div>\n<\/section><\/div>\n\n
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\r\n u003cpu003eIn many ways, too much autonomy can actually restrict the opportunity for mastery and purpose. Most of what we learn at work \u2013 most of our mastery \u2013 isn’t formally taught and can’t be relayed remotely. It involves watching people in action, in meetings, in pitches, in argument, in agreement, in corridors, in pubs and in restaurants, in front of clients, in defeat and in victory. It is very difficult to get this training sitting at home in your onesie logged on to a webinar or video conference. Or, worse still, disappearing down the wormhole of social media, where the illusion of friendship and heterogeneity can, in the words of Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble), leave us inhabiting a u0022ghetto of oneu0022.u003c\/pu003e \r\n \r\n \t\t\t <\/div>\r\n \r\n
\r\n \t\tu003cpu003ePurpose, even more than mastery, is a collective and contextual endeavour. You know instinctively when entering a building whether there is unity of purpose and a true team spirit. Such an atmosphere is irreplaceable and hard-won. Not all offices can necessarily hit these highs, but they can all play a vital role in building a sense of common purpose and belonging. And, if they don’t, you can always have fun undermining the management that’s making a mess of things. Counterculture can become a purpose all of its own \u2013 which is really what drove most of the humour at Wernham Hogg, right down to the jellied stapler.u003c\/pu003e \t\t<\/div>\r\n \t\t\r\n <\/div>\r\n \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/section><\/div>\n\n
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\n Harold Kushner famously quipped: u0022No-one said on their deathbed: ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’u0022 Perhaps so. But this assumes decades of enjoying all the benefits an office brings. There may be a remote generation coming through who take a rather different view. \n <\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/section><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"template":"","categories":[191],"class_list":["post-8752","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry","category-agency-news"],"acf":{"author":"930","capability_ids":null,"client_id":null,"hero_video":null,"hero_image":"10904","meta-title":"In Praise of the Office","meta-description":"There are benefits of working with others.","social-media-image":null,"news_id":"191","related_content_title":"YOU MAY ALSO LIKE","relateditems":[""],"hide_related_items":null,"visible_on_home_page":"","websites_to_publish":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/8752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vccp.com\/singapore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}