The Rebellion vs The Empire

The acronym debate rages: WFH v RTO.  [Work From Home or Return to Office]. As a friend said at lunch this week, it's almost like "another dimension to the culture wars".

Liberty-equality-duvet, versus to the tyranny of the commute and the humdrum office.

It is The Rebellion vs The Empire, the remote planet outliers living the dream on Alderaan, while the menacing Death Star looms: with Vadar-like CEO's issuing RTO mandates: ‘get on board, or we'll destroy your world!’

I've followed the ‘future of work’ story deeply since 2020, even writing a rather sententious missive back in Sept 2021 to a senior colleague, saying that the adoption of "smart working" (at that point rocking up to the office once a month) was "a fundamental strategic decision that we should not stumble into".

With different political winds blowing, the US is climbing back aboard the death-star ("or else", viz Amazon in 2025] while in the UK, Civil Servants are increasingly working from the suburbs, with job security and fibre broadband.  But both the US and the UK are wrestling with 'hollowed out' town centres: ‘donut cities’, as if described by Estragon in Beckett's play, where “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.” Maybe RTO's will help, but if not, what plans for our inner cities? This and other challsnges for part of a widening debate - a future of work dichotomy, that I don’t think will be fixed by policymakers, but will become a pivotal leadership issue for CEOs and their top teams, as they wrestle with falling productivity, lower engagement and faltering talent retention.

In the UK, hybrid, remote and flexible working is wildly popular.  Now that statement alone covers a huge spectrum of patterns, modes and nuance, but my concern is mainly focused on the remote dimension: being mainly apart, independent, elsewhere.  Remote may be popular, but that doesn’t mean it does no harm. I have written before that the predominance of remote work risks being like smoking in the 1970's: wildly popular, considered to be cool, but with long-term unforeseen harms.

I fully expect the comments to flow, with the myriads of well-being and other benefits that remote work provides.  Many commentators, researchers and consultants on here riff wonderfully on the remote “upside”.  But I would offer instead, not a business view, but that of an eminent sociologist.

Pierre Bourdieu said: “The existence of connections is not an natural given, or even a social given…it is the product of an endless effort at institutions.”  If our great employers do not prioritise the importance of creating and maintaining social capital, then it would seem, in the UK at least, that governments will not either.

And you? The Rebellion or the Death Star?    [Join the debate and other movie analogies are available]