Why WFH Will Be Sabotaged

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History says during the last dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens (i.e., all of us) evolved in Africa. “Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviours that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments”, it goes on to say, helpfully.

Thus were societies born, and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle got formalised. You build a secure place for the community, house all the women and children there, colonising the gatherers. The hunters go far away from where the ‘gatherers’ are, and hunt. Hunting never happened close to where the gatherers were put up. If that did come to pass, the gatherers were moved further away, to a ‘safer’ place.

A hunter husband left home with a long, lingering ‘goodbye’ look at his family because there were equal chances of the hunter being hunted. The family and progeny must be protected, at all costs, from the perils that may befall the hunter. You talked a lot at home about your hunting exploits, but never ever hunted from home.

Since then, societies have always neatly and compulsorily separated workplaces from home. The twain, if ever, hardly met.

Inventions like the wheel and electricity further sanctified this separation. Then came the Internet and the mobile devices. Those of us living in this cursed Digital Age have had to endure the ignominy of work creeping into, invading and even taking over the ‘home’ space owing to these seductive technologies. All debates on WFH and Work-Life balance are, therefore, arguments thrown back and forth between using these sinister interloping technologies and maintaining the originally defined separation of Workspace from Home.

Even if WFH catches on in the short to medium term, it is likely to die soon, proving to be no more than a fad. Here are two reasons:

1.    Longstanding social mores are difficult to shake off. Especially if they have been widely accepted, and entrenched, across cultures, geographies and millennia. Cities were built around separated workplaces and homes, as were political and economic policies of all governments.

In the homo-sapient minds of 2020, the separation of home from the workplace is still deeply entrenched.

In Organisational Behaviour, we still define OCB (Organisational Citizenship Behaviour) as a distinct construct, very different from the other citizenship, and with its own engagement rules and methods. You as a husband and you as a foreman on the shop floor don’t need to have anything in common.

2.    No process/idea, including WFH, will catch on, or get full subscription, if it is seen as proposed and pursued by the Corporation.

For any change to stick, whether in life or at work, it has to be a bottom-up movement, sponsored and fuelled by the individual, or the employee.

Work timings/conditions, SOPs, hierarchy, automation, career paths, and even the HR department (originally called ‘Employee Welfare’) are some of the many organisational initiatives that are still struggling to take root.

The recent explosion in the size of the ‘gig’ economy is a good example of a movement embraced by the employee, and hence catching on fast. To be blunt, every initiative by an organisation has been seen by the employees as a conspiracy to make them work harder. WFH is no exception.

It is easy to see why corporations love WFH. Savings on infrastructure is immediate, but the grip they get on the employee’s time and productivity was never better. Every keystroke can now be measured, without apologies. It is easy to see why employees love this arrangement. No commuting, being around the family, and working at will (or so they think; the recent lockdown has shown that most people are spending more time at work than at home, while being at home).

Hunting invariably corrupts the Gathering space. Once the fog of technological smokescreens lifts, the truth will bite the employee at home.

Sabotage is a French word, born from ‘sabot’, the wooden footwear that weavers wore to work, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Faster, mechanised machines installed at the owner’s premises were the immediate attraction to workers who were, till then, toiling at homes on manual looms. The owners’ demands grew more and more stringent by the day, including time of reporting for work, and how much the worker needs to produce in a day. One day, the workers simply lost it. They removed their sabots and shoved them into the machines, wrecking all of them. The first ever act of sabotage at a workplace.

Sabotage at our modern workplaces is far more subtle. Watch out for ways in which our employees will hit back on WFH.