Is the “end of the office” a “women’s issue”?

Feature

Is the “end of the office”a “women’s issue”?

I asked readers to choose the topic of my next article. The votes were extremely close between the top two: ‘rebranding “women’s issues”’ and ‘the end of the office’. So I decided to combine them and ask: ‘Is the “end of the office” a “women’s issue”?’

First of all, is it the “end of the office”?

I like to remind myself that while we think of offices as a modern invention, they are in fact creatures of the industrial revolution. Offices were invented to house bureaucrats overseeing factories. The factories required all workers to be in the same place, at the same time, clocking in and out on a timecard, operating machinery on a production line. The office simply mimicked the factory, with rows of desks for clerks who worked the same hours as the factory workers, compensated for their time, rather than their output. 1 Innovations have followed, but the office has been slow to adapt. Electronic communication, for example, has been widespread since the 1980s, and yet, until this year, there we still were, calling and emailing each other from opposite ends of the floor, despite the fact that those same calls and emails were capable of reaching someone on the other side of the planet. Surely, the office was overdue for evolution?

Then 2020 happened. Knowledge workers have experienced more remote working since March than ever before. (Although, it is necessary to recognise that a lot of people are not knowledge workers and have had to bear the brunt of redundancy or battling their way into a fixed place of work.) Twitter announced that workers could work remotely indefinitely. 2 Facebook announced that half of its workforce could be working remotely within a decade. 3 Organisations with a big real estate spend will be thinking about how they can save money, especially as lockdown policies hit revenues. But while household names from Barclays to UBS have been musing about cutting their office footprints, few have rushed to end corporate leases - although disaster recovery sites that have proved largely pointless during the pandemic will be first on the list. 4

So not exactly the end, but change is afoot

Many commentators have been quick to polarise the remote working debate - home or office: which is better? The benefit of avoiding two hours a day of commuting (both in terms of time and expense) is obvious - not to mention avoiding the cost of feeding yourself in Central London rather than from your own fridge. But the disadvantages are also clear - arguably there is more value in face-to-face learning than distance learning and we miss socialising with (some of) our colleagues. Despite best intentions and many organisations no longer being on a ‘war footing’, many workers are logging in earlier and logging out later, flipping the script from working from home to living at work. 5 For those who have endured the interruptions of homeschooling or competing for desk space and bandwidth in a flat share, the return to the office is most welcome.

Extremes aside, most people want a bit of both and, in most cases, it is hard to see why organisations should refuse. The cat is out of the bag in terms of firms realising that their financial performance has not been overly hindered by 90% of staff working outside the office. Moreover, so many months into widespread remote working, it would take a truly gifted leader to persuade their workers that there is no place at all for remote working in the future of their organisations. What is done cannot be undone. Therefore, most organisations should see working remotely 1-3 days a week as the new normal.

Is it a remote-working revolution? More evolution than revolution.

It is the rapid and welcome acceleration of trends that were already in place. After all, let’s not forget how quickly even the most fundamental office policies can change with the right circumstances: before the heatwave of 2018, many workers would have worn a suit or equivalent to work every day for their entire careers (perhaps removing the tie on a Friday). Many organisations introduced a dress-down policy that summer and, upon realising that all of their clients did not fire them in a rage and the ground did not open up and swallow them, decided to keep it.

Might these changes lead to gendered outcomes?

Even in economies with a high proportion of jobs that are capable of remote working (45% in Switzerland or 37% in the US, versus 11% in Cambodia, for example), there are a lot of jobs that cannot be done remotely. Insofar as knowledge jobs create an ecosystem of other jobs, decreasing office traffic could have gendered outcomes in certain women-dominated sectors, such as retail, hospitality, reception, or cleaning. Some sectors will see men hit harder - security or taxi driving - while others are more evenly split - hairdressers and barbers or baristas, for example.

But within those knowledge jobs, what might the increasing normalisation of remote working and the blending of work and non-work lines mean? The great hope is retention. While it may sound silly to set it out in these terms, the prospect of taking it in turns to fit the school run and bath time in around work for a few years suddenly feels more attainable - and may feel more true to one’s values than having to choose between paying someone else to do it (not that the ‘outsourcing’ option is financially viable even for many dual-income couples), one partner giving up work to do it, or not having children. The prospect of having a garden - presuming that those excruciatingly expensive areas within a stone’s throw of major business districts are beyond budget - but with a long commute only 3 times a week rather than 5 is also a lot more palatable. (I like to imagine that firms could even capitalise on this and cut down on prime London real estate in favour of satellite space in St. Albans, since everyone lives there anyway.) Improved retention could help to slow the relentless pace of corporate careers and to forge leadership identities that are compatible with caregiving responsibilities. If we are going to live into our nineties, it is really necessary to make partner in 7 years? Or to exit the workplace for good in our thirties?

However, the accompanying fear is that, although working remotely and flexible start and finish times should empower all workers to maintain time for themselves and enjoy more sustainable careers, the perceived advantage of those who choose to spend the maximum amount of time in the office will remain. The fear is that we will end up with a two-tier system where facetime still offers an irresistible reward… As usual, these dynamics need not be fundamentally gendered, but as far as workplace policies impact caregivers, and as far as caring responsibilities fall disproportionately on women’s shoulders, there will be gendered outcomes.

But things are getting better!

The distribution of unpaid work in families is evening out. A Better Life Lab study found this year that while a greater proportion of women respondents were undertaking different categories of childcare in every case, the gap between women and men was sufficiently small that it would be remiss to overlook men’s growing contribution. For example, while 94% of women make meals and feed their children on a daily basis, so do 76% of men. 6 This is not surprising if you consider that onebreadwinner-one-homemaker families only account for 25% of working families - the rest being dual-career or single parent. 7 (It was unclear whether the research was counting working families without children, which is a shame because research suggests that 18% of women in the UK have not given birth by their 45th birthday - and one presumes that a similar proportion of men have never raised children - and their experiences should not be excluded.) 8

So is the “end of the office” a “women’s issue”? No.

It is an opportunity for leaders to embrace the changes that have been slowly bubbling away in their organisations and suddenly accelerated by unprecedented circumstances. To maintain momentum, leaders must listen, collect data and formalise change with policy - even if it is experimental at first. Policy change could be small, such as writing down the ‘unwritten rules’ to fetter bad behaviour (like asking for calls at 07:00) and encourage the good (like a ‘no meetings on Fridays’ rule). But it could also be more visionary, and the first policy on that list should be true, properly paid, shared parental leave. Even dual-income, domestic-labour sharing partners will find that if only one of them spends the vast majority of the first 12 months of a child’s life with their child, it will set the tone for the next 18 years. Shared parental leave avoids this issue and, moreover, as more men experience the process of securing approval for leave, creating cover plans and navigating re-entry, organisational processes will improve for everyone. 9 Finally, those needing to cut down their office space, but only by a small amount may wish to consider repurposing a floor into a subsidised child-care space. Schools are only open 39 weeks a year after all. ■

1. 2020, ‘Covid-19: is working from home really the new normal?’, The Economist.

2. Paul, Kari, 2020, ‘Twitter announces employees will be allowed to work from home ‘forever’’, The Guardian.

3. Koran, Mario, 2020, ‘Facebook expects half of employees to work remotely over next five to 10 years’, The Guardian.

4. Thomas, D et al, 2020. ‘The end of the office? Coronavirus may change work forever’, Financial Times.

5. Jacobs, Emma, 2020, ‘Remote work: how are you feeling?’, Financial Times.

6. Dowling, Daisy, 2020, ‘A Way Forward For Working Parents’, Harvard Business Review.

7. Ibid.

8. Petter, Olivia, 2017, ‘Childless women are on the rise, latest study reveals’, The Independent. 9. Bass, D & Tastad, C, 2020, ‘The route to true gender equality? Fix the system, not the women’, World Economic Forum.

Helen Broadbridge

Helen Broadbridge

Member of the Westminster & Holborn Law Society EDI Committee and Tax Solicitor