Normal Now, Baffling Later
Every workplace convention looks inevitable while you're living through it. Typing pools and the smoking section both made sense to the people doing them. Plenty of what goes on in an office now will read the same way in fifty years, and some of it is strange enough already that people complain out loud and then keep doing it. The useful test is whether you could explain the practice to somebody who had never seen it. Here are 20 that would be hard to explain.
1. Travelling At The Same Hour As Everyone Else
Millions of people leave home inside the same narrow window, which guarantees the roads and the trains are at their worst exactly when everybody needs them. The congestion is a direct product of the schedule. That schedule comes from a start time most of the jobs no longer require.
2. Open-Plan Floors
Walls came down so people would talk to each other more. A 2018 paper measured two companies before and after the switch and found face-to-face interaction fell by roughly 70 percent, with email volume climbing to fill the gap. The layout survived the finding.
3. Printing A Document To Sign It
A file travels electronically for days, gets printed so somebody can make a mark on it with ink, then gets scanned back into a file. Nothing about the signature is more verifiable for having been on paper. The paper exists so the ritual has somewhere to happen.
4. The Necktie
The necktie descends from a scarf worn by Croatian soldiers in the seventeenth century and has never done anything since. A strip of silk knotted at the throat was mandatory in offices where nobody could say what it was for. Grown adults were sent home for not wearing one.
5. The Annual Review
Everything a person did across twelve months gets compressed into one meeting and one rating. The rating often has to fit a distribution decided before anyone looked at the work. Then everybody agrees it was unhelpful and schedules it again for next year.
6. The Fax Machine
The UK government had to ban the NHS from buying new fax machines in 2018, by which point more than 8,000 were in use across hospitals in England. The deadline for removing the rest was March 2020. Healthcare and law kept the technology going decades after every other industry dropped it.
Stanislav Staritsyn on Unsplash
7. The Communal Fridge
Shared food storage with no ownership rules produces theft and signage. Somebody writes a note in capitals about a yogurt. The note stays up long after the yogurt situation has resolved itself.
8. Tapping A Badge To Prove You Came
Entry systems log the moment a body passes through a door, which has never been the same thing as the work getting done. Managers know this and check the logs anyway. The measurement is easy, so it wins.
9. Reply All
A button that sends your message to everyone sits beside the button that sends it to one person, and the two look almost identical. Companies run training sessions on the difference. The training has not worked.
Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
10. The Thermostat
Office temperature standards run on a thermal comfort model built in the 1960s around a 40-year-old man weighing about 70 kilograms. A 2015 paper in Nature Climate Change found that model can overestimate women's metabolic rate by up to 35 percent. This is why half a floor wears cardigans in August.
11. Sitting Down For Eight Hours
The chair was the default for a century, then the standing desk arrived and got sold back to the same people as a wellness purchase. Plenty of them now live permanently in the sitting position. The thing causing the problem was a job that doesn't move.
12. Hot Desking
Companies removed assigned seats to save floor space, then asked everyone to come in more often. Arriving early turned into a way of securing a desk rather than a way of starting work. Personal belongings live in a locker or a bag.
13. The Meeting Nobody Cancels
A recurring slot gets created for a project, and the slot outlives the project by years. Everyone in it privately suspects it could end, and nobody wants to be the person who suggests it. Calendar software makes creating one effortless and deleting one socially expensive.
14. Email Legal Disclaimers
Several lines of legal text attach themselves to every message, including the ones that say thanks. They instruct any unintended recipient to delete what they've received, which is not something a sender gets to require of a stranger. Read by nobody, appended to everything.
15. Lunch At The Desk
Eating over a keyboard while continuing to work became the standard version of a break. The break exists in the schedule and gets skipped by the person it belongs to. Nobody asked for this and it happened anyway.
16. The Desk Phone
A handset wired to one location, assigned a number printed on a card, sitting next to the phone already in the person's pocket. Voicemail collects on it unheard. It stayed on desks for years after the calls stopped coming.
17. Unlimited Time Off
Removing the number from a time-off policy gets presented as generosity. With no number, nobody knows what counts as reasonable, so the safe move is taking less than you'd have been allocated. It also means no accrued days to pay out when you leave.
18. Billing In Six-Minute Units
Law firms divide the hour into tenths and account for every one of them. A phone call becomes 0.2 and the day gets reconstructed in a shape nobody experienced. What the unit rewards starts to shape what gets done.
Camilo Rueda Lopez on Unsplash
19. Looking Busy
Hours spent appearing occupied are a real cost that nothing measures. People learn to time their departure against their manager's and to keep a document open that suggests activity. The performance is the part that gets rewarded.
20. The Corner Office
Status was allocated by proximity to windows, with the best daylight going to whoever was most senior and least likely to be sitting at a desk. Everybody else got the middle of the floor under fluorescent tubes. The whole hierarchy was legible from anywhere in the room, which was the point.
