Workplaces are changing

The following is an excerpt from the Better Workplaces chapter of Design Is a Job, the Necessary 2nd Edition:

Workplaces are changing.

Workplaces have changed before, obviously. Sometimes change is a slow, steady, barely noticeable evolution. Sometimes change feels like a kick. The time we’re in right now, as I write this in August of 2022, feels like a kick. And as much as we talk about how the pandemic has changed things (and of course it has), in the case of the workplaces where folks like you and I tend to sell our labor, I think a more honest statement might be that the pandemic has exposed the rot.

And while I am loath to use the word opportunity in close proximity to the word pandemic, change in the workplace tends to come about as a response to crisis, and I would consider the pandemic, as well as our response to it, a fucking crisis. So, possibly, by the smallest sliver of margins, the pandemic is an opportunity to clean out some of that rot.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who’s been working from home during the pandemic (as have a lot of privileged people, myself included). That morning she’d gotten a message from her company’s CEO that it was time to reopen the office. They had a plan for slowly integrating back into the office a couple days every week, increasing that number over time, until eventually everyone was present in the office full-time. This is the same method we use to cook lobsters. The message from the CEO contained words like mandatory and non-negotiable.

She was understandably anxious about returning to the office. The pandemic isn’t over, and the idea of being in closed conference rooms and cubicles shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans wasn’t great. The fact that the email didn’t contain any information about testing or vaccination status or any safety protocols didn’t help. Basically, it was time to go back to the office because the CEO said it was time to go back to the office.

I asked her what she was going to do and she told me she wasn’t sure. She then added that she loved her job, she was “fucking good at it” (I can vouch this is true!), and she just wanted to work.

I’m sure you’ve heard similar stories, or you will soon, as the call to “return to work” will come in waves, followed by the latest variant, followed by another call to “return to work,” and so on and so on. These stories may or may not be compounded by having children, partners, and immunocompromised folks at home.

And this is all happening because management wants a “return to normal,” back to a time that was very reassuring to them, a time where they knew how to operate, a time where signing a twenty-year lease on a huge space was fiscally sound, a time that worked out pretty fucking well for them because they understood the rules—mostly because they set them.

But like I said, workplaces are changing, and they have changed before. What I left out, however, was the most important part: every time a workplace has changed for the better, it was initiated by the workers.

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