Pat Kane: Let’s try to learn some enduring lessons about work from Covid

And when you’re installed, the patter and the blether spills over freely. From what I could hear, most of it is about recalibrating between the lifestyles people jerry-built for themselves during lockdown, and the looming bulk of a return to workaday “normality”.

Sorry: did you think there was going to be a New Normal? A different balance struck between work and life? Not if a phalanx of pinstriped bosses and Tory politicians have anything to do with it. Heid yins from Price Waterhouse Coopers to Google and Netflix have been trying to persuade their homeworking staff to get back physically into their old offices.

The consensus line (repeated by the UK business ministers Rishi Sunak and Kwasi Kwarteng) is aimed at younger staff in particular, who may (we are told) miss out on career-improving networking opportunities. You know, lessons learned at the feet of managerial mentors, vital bonding moments with team colleagues, that sort of thing.

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And if those juicy carrots don’t work, then the swish of the stick is becoming audible. Workers hired at big-city rates are being threatened with paycuts if they don’t scurry back to their cubicles or workstations. Ever helpful, Google has set up a workplace calculator for staff. It provides a precise estimate of how much their salaries will be docked, if they elect to spend more time communing with Tibbles and the laundry basket.

No doubt the elites are all reading the poll numbers. These show a mix of large minorities and clear majorities who don’t want to return to the five-day week commute-and-grind. Not too surprisingly, Glasgow came way bottom this week in a survey of UK cities, measuring how much staff had returned to their offices after Covid restrictions had lifted. (To make matters even worse, the return of consumer footfall was a little above the UK average. Shopping and workplace-shy! Viva Glasvegas!)

But zoom out to the global level, and it’s not much different. In July, Ipsos and the World Economic Forum surveyed 12,500 people in 29 countries, and found that a majority wanted “flexible working” to become the norm. A total 30% said they’d think about other employment opportunities, if the current employer forced them to go back full time.

The shifts are also generational. In the US, a Conference Board survey (quoted in the New York Times) showed that 55% of millennials “questioned the wisdom of returning to the office”, compared to 45% of GenX and 36% of boomers. In the UK, the research company Leesman found in June that 83% of employees thought they could work productively at home, compared to 64% who felt they were productive in the office.

Another study by Mercer showed that 94% of the employees they surveyed “reported that remote work was either business as usual or better than working in the office”.

I could go on and on with the opinion surveys. Let me be clear: the jobs most amenable to work-life flexibility are those which process information and knowledge, not those which require hands-on (or at least hands-near) care and service. And if city centre workplaces look like they will be permanently half-staffed, then there is an immediate economic challenge for the “lunchtime economy”, as it’s called (that Glasgow buzz requires footfall).

In itself, that’s an interesting challenge (more on that towards the end). But in the meantime: c’mon. Doesn’t Covid-era homeworking reveal to us something true about modern workplaces? Namely, that too much of it is about gaming the rules of each company’s culture?

As Ed Zitron in the Atlantic writes, digital homeworking can reveal exactly what work is actually being done, as opposed to “the appearance, optics and ceremony of work”. The underlying managerial justification may be “I like seeing the people I pay for in one place”, more than strict efficiency.

Comic writer Joel Gilby speaks for many when he voices this. “Come into the office! You get to have short-notice meetings with other people who keep getting pulled from one task to another without ever really completing any, then will be forced on the spot to think of a creative idea! Come on, this is fun! Someone’s going to microwave their lunchtime fish in a minute!”

What has hopefully been punctured by the Covid experience is the pseudo-community that much work constructs and invokes.

Why should you invest any more of your passions – indeed, your precious and limited time on this earth – into completing tasks that are tied to the competition of one enterprise against another, in a wastefully competitive and duplicatory marketplace?

Whenever I’ve encountered it, I’ve always found the corporate “culture” that tries to bind people to this process just nauseating. To quote the late and great David Graeber, it’s not just “bullshit jobs” that Covid has helped to reveal – as well as the essential jobs – but the bullshit in jobs also.

So what do we do then, to find a coherent way through these clashing tendencies? Once again this week, the city of Glasgow provides something of an ideal prism.

There has been some to-and-fro about the Council’s plans for a sustainable Glasgow of the future. In particular, there’s been heat around comments made by Susan Aitken, about communities in the district having to exercise more responsibility and self-reliance.

The (unfortunate) example given: do you clean up a backlog in rubbish yourself, or do you always complain about unreliable service? Charges of “SNP councillors revive Cameron’s Big Society” have strafed across social media.

I have my own beefs with the Glasgow plan (how does the aspiration to remain one of the UK’s leading “shopping” cities sit with a net-zero commitment?). But there is something about a self-managing Glasgow that could answer two things. Both the consequences of these post-workplace trends – what do we do with all these half-empty buildings? And a vision for “good work” which actually answers the “code red” warnings on climate, sounded by the IPCC earlier this week? It depends on who’s self-managing, and how they’re doing it. I stared at a wall of posters yesterday, in the gently humming Tinderbox cafe on Glasgow’s Ingram Street. It was full of the cultural and lifestyle hustle that people love about this city – everything from avant-garde shows to “ecoboxes” of stuff, from makers’ markets to high-quality rolling papers (the brand is called Lunacy, for your information).

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Where is the policy to ensure that these creators and makers are living in, and for, the city? What are the property regulations which could help transform acres of office space, tumbleweed currently rolling across their durable carpet, into “maker-spaces” of all kinds?

Why can’t we experiment with “vertical farms” (advanced agriculture in urban buildings), with design and repair shops, with freecycle establishments? Why shouldn’t Glasgow have an ambition to work towards provisioning its own material needs, following the standards set by Amsterdam and Barcelona?

Cities need “propinquity” to be vital, as the urbanist Richard Sennett once said to me. Propinquity means people near each other, being the conscience of each others’ eyes, creating possibilities by being involved with each other. This doesn’t have to mean five day commutes to the Workdrome, nor a slavish service class to make the grind liveable.

Who knows what eruption of the biosphere will chase us all indoors again? But at least let’s try to learn some enduring lessons from the chaos. As my guru Roberto Unger puts it: “How can we live in such a way that we die only once?” And what kind of work will best achieve that?