Ian Bogust Wants Us Back In The Office

But his arguments don't make any sense.

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

Ian Bogust, in Hybrid Work Is Doomed, make a series of pointless and misleading arguments that can almost be boiled down to this: Although people are productive working out of the office, management will force them back into the office because it serves the desires of lazy managers.

However, after seemingly making that argument, which I completely disagree with, he seems to abandon it.

So here is a blow-for-blow of his piece, with my comments interspersed.

Bogust, like many others, has gone back to the office: in his case, in the summer of 2021.

I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another.

Bogust only cites the time, not the full costs of commuting, like the myriad environmental impacts. These are never considered at all.

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Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone. But actually, it isn’t. Companies have been pulling employees back to work in person irrespective of anyone’s well-being or efficiency.

And we can't even try to do so? He proceeds to argue that return-to-the-office is inevitable.

That’s because return-to-office plans are not concerned, in any fundamental way, with workers and their plight or preferences. Rather they serve as affirmations of a superseding value—one that spans every industry of knowledge work. If your boss is nudging you to come back to your cubicle, the policy has less to do with one specific firm than with the whole firmament of office life: the Office, as an institution.

This, well, ‘reasoning’ is totally bogus. As we shall see, his use of the term ‘Office’ is really an alias for the desires of management, although he doesn’t want to say so. And the reasons for that will become clear.

The existence of an office is the central premise of office work, and nothing—not even a pandemic—will make it go away.

The purpose of business is to deliver value to customers, protect worker wellbeing, and develop a learning organization. The ‘Office’ is not a reason for businesses to exist, or for people to work.

What is an office, even? One answer: an institution that organizes labor, but does not carry it out.

Replace ‘office’ with ‘management": ‘management organizes labor, but does not carry it out’.

The office is the structure that makes work possible, a kind of mothership for productivity, centuries in the making; a place to construct and preserve a way of life.

At face value, this is total bullshit. But once you switch ‘management’ for ‘office’ is makes some sense, as a justification of management and the continuance of the bronze age, hierarchical management-versus-managees duality.

He makes the case for the ‘Office’ — again, management by another name, imposing values on all managees.

The office imposed these values on its workers, and workers accepted them—whether willingly, under duress, or because no other option seemed possible.

But he completely ignores the history of fully distributed companies, which have been a small percentage of businesses, but which demonstrated what is possible. And of course, what we all learned in the pandemic (which is not over).

White-collar workers “returned to work,” and to the office, in large numbers last year, at least for meetings or retreats—sometimes outdoors, often masked. This year, when mask mandates ended and infection data languished, more and more offices reopened, perhaps one or two days a week at first.

The link for ‘in’ in this paragraph is an article about Apple’s RTO plans published in September 2021, plans it has backed away from now. As of May, Apple is exploring a 'pilot' plan to get some people back in the office two days a week, but now will let anyone unwilling to RTO to continue to work remotely. Bogust seems to be throwing a bunch of evidence to support his claims about everyone heading back into the office, but it’s really not up to date, or even providing outdated evidence. The HBR link is advice about how to make the transition back more palatable, not evidence of a massive RTO surge.

Though less occupied, the office hadn’t perished; its demands were resolute. Workers who refused to return were headed for a fight.

Bogust includes no evidence from the contrary view, like Ramani and Bloom's Donut Effect, or companies that have decided to accept distributed work wholesale, like Airbnb, and so many others.

The office gives identity to office workers and firms alike, by imposing its practices across the workforce.

I actually find this offensive and condescending. Managees' identities are not defined by imposed practices. That's totally false.

That makes calls for flexibility much harder for the Office to adopt than workers may have thought.

Again, 'The Office' is an alias for management, who are a cadre of people, not architecture. However, Bogust omits the well-known desire of many managers for performative work, and the hunger for captive listeners in meetings.

Coders or graphic designers or accountants who work independently most of the time might not want to return to work, while their bosses, who have to coordinate those activities, may find it much easier to do so in the office.

Ah. Finally. ‘Bosses’, not ‘the Office’. Perhaps the bosses should learn how to coordinate others’ distributed work, instead of making an order of magnitude more people don the uniform, make the commute, etc., to make it easier for them to do their coordinating.

Bogust attempts to make a case for the history of the Office as a sort of claim of its legitimacy. But it’s weak sauce, and we can simply ignore it.

But then he returns to productivity.

Post-pandemic workers tend to lean on productivity as a rationale to avoid returning to the office, saying they feel no less productive working from home.

Productivity is only one leg of the stool: in fact, wellbeing (including the health benefits of not commuting) is probably the most consistent reason workers cite for wanting to work from home. Their productivity while WFH is simply another argument to make management shut up about pointless RTO.

As we near the end of the essay, Bogust reveals a different shading of his thesis, starting to undermine the case for return he’s been constructing.

Offices have never been about increased efficiency. Instead, the office has acted as a brake, slowing down a company’s mission to sell products or services. Haigh reminds his reader that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac lamented, in the early 19th century, the pointless waste of time that consumed the administrative professions. Balzac called it “slow and insolent,” useful “only to maintain the paper and stamp industries.” Two centuries later, not much has changed. The TPS reports and Workday forms persist, serving someone’s interests, though maybe not the bottom line. Many tiresome distractions have been tolerated because the Office needs them. The intrigue and plotting of office politics, the sense of importance or position afforded by a corner room, the holding of court in a meeting—these inefficiencies are not opposed to office life but central to it.

Is Bogust — or Haigh, who seems to be the originator of many of these dumb arguments — surreptitiously making a 'bullshit jobs' argument, or is he trying to position the bullshittedness of offices as some sort of good?

He then turns his attention to tech companies, ‘where the tools of remote work are manufactured, the Office reigns supreme’. But as I pointed out earlier, Apple — and many other tech companies — are relaxing their earlier efforts to get everyone back in the office. Still, he holds them up as advocates of RTO:

If the companies that design and build the very foundations for remote work still adhere to the old-fashioned values of the Office, what should we expect from all the rest?

One more dig at how the ‘Office’ doesn’t care about productivity, which is blatantly false.

[The Office, which means management] cares little for efficiency.

And then, this, totally from left field:

For you are an office worker, and the office is your home.

I didn't see that coming, and it undermines most of his argument, leaving us… where exactly?

I guess he is closing by saying even if you aren’t going to the office, and even if your work is totally remote, you are bringing 'the ‘Office’ into your home, and its effects will be the same, anyway. Which, again, is simply untrue.

There is a huge difference between working remotely and working at the office (and all that comes with it), and he simply tries to wave it away. My recommendation is to wave away these spurious arguments which seem unserious, at their core.

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1. I make the environmental case against back-into-the-office in Commuting Is Evil.