In the years before Covid I often found myself often people who worked in teams a simple question to open up a discussion about the maturity of hybrid working and collaboration practices: Where do you work?
The answers could be enlightening. People working for traditional organisations with traditional mindsets would answer in terms of the location of their place of work, or in terms of their industry. Others might talk in terms of workplaces, whether the office, the factory or sometime “home”.
Others would be more related to an industry or profession. There might be a few compound answers that actually transmitted a great deal of significance – “I work in accounting in The City” for someone based in London would mean working in the finance sector in accounting in the City of London. Although in recent years “The City” could also mean Canary Wharf, which is quite some distance from the famed Square Mile and somewhat confusing…
Then there would be a few more esoteric answers – to work in software (“I work in Excel!”, “I work in Visual Studio”) or to work in the confines of one’s mind.
Post-pandemic, it feels like these self-perceptions have changed.
Whilst the debate rages about whether people are working in the office or the home office, I get a sense that the physical location part of all of this is getting less and less important as people realise that knowledge work goes on in discussion in groups and in people’s heads.
Where those discussion groups are is important, but perceptions of what is In Real Life have changed profoundly. Groups flit freely between physical space, realtime online and asynchronous chats.
Where the minds are best situated to get the best from them, however, will I think be the bone of major contention for some years to come. Because if you use your mind to work it might well be working best in the shower or in bed in the wee small hours as much as it might be in an office block in a city.
mmitII 