Homeworking and the impending zombie apocolypse.

We've all seen the movies ... people roaming the streets, staring without seeing what's around them, disengaged from their environments, unreachable, following an internal mission without concern for you ...

Zombies.

OK, so home working might not lead to flesh-devouring monsters (unless you are single in your forties and on Tinder) but the other bits check out.

Here's how it happens.

1 - your employer for reasons of releasing real estate or global pandemic gives you the option to do your job without going to a physical office.

2 - all your work now lives inside your laptop.

3 - this is great! I'm not going to sit a home in my office space, I'm going to work whereever I like! [downloads phone app]

4 - people walking through parks, filling cafes, on public transport, outside shops waiting for their partner to buy shoes, visiting their grandma (or children) all focused on their devices trying to complete a 35-hour working week while also doing other things.

5 - shit gets normalised. No offices exist anymore.

6 - zombie nation.

I tried it. For years I had a really future-thinking job, working online only with an office-less organisation. I went surfing, I travelled in my van, I raised my kids - all while functioning as a senior consultant for online designs with companies across the world.

But, whatever my instagram might say, here is the reality.

1 - Wifi doesn't work and data is unreliable, especially when you are moving. 

    working online usually means being constantly connected - for cloud-based saving of documents, for communications with your team, for billing and time trackings. It's all online. Sat at home in your suburban office you might have a good boosted wifi to rely on, but in transit, in public spaces, in cafes and on beaches in the carribean, you might not get good service.

2 - Working remotely is working alone. Being alone is lonely and crushes your creativity and productivity.

I hated my commute when I did it. I was socially uncomfortably in teams and with colleagues. Leaving all that behind seemed like nirvana. But actually I was craving contact and that sense of having something in common. Sitting at an antenatal class, that comment about how design practices are being disrupted by pattern-languages is ... honestly just don't. And when the new timesheets were a pain, the cat didn't really seem to relate to my stress. There's a monotony about home working, and additional pressure from trying to self-stimulate (no, not like that!) to ensure you get breaks from tasks, think non-linearly and just have a life outside of your work tasks.

3 - Task-based working happens. You are no longer an employee but a completion monkey.

There is something about knowing they will have to look you in the eye and you know where they keep their milk that makes bosses at least pretend to care about their employees as people. I was pregnant at work. People could see that. They tended not to be too critical when I took more frequent breaks to go to the loo. Once you are removed from your colleagues (and bosses) you are just a machine that completes tasks. Complete them on time, great. Don't, trouble. It's really hard for managers to empathise with employees they can't see or hear. Work stops being a community and starts being task-based only. 

4 - Ultimately you need to put the people back in your life... that's expensive.

So, you never leave your home and family, you don't have any colleagues to relate to and co-create with, you are left without support of managers. Just find the wifi, do the tasks, log the time... Eventually you need to have people back again. Only now you don't have an employer-funded workspace. So you seek out company elsewhere. Eventually I hired a co-working space, which is fine as a freelancer (which I was) because I can write off the cost, but as a salaried employee - well you just end up paying for something you used to get for free. I imagine most people won't, so ... 

5 - Everywhere becomes a place of work. That's rude.

People are necessary, your employer doesn't supply them, co-working is expensive, so what do you do? To save going mad in corner of your own living room for the rest of your life, you'll probably go outside and find somewhere else to work. Most likely this is a cafe. Most likely it has a wifi (for free) connection that is trying to support other customers and the staff and business (#1), most likely those other customers didn't come to the cafe to feel like they were in an office (with stacks of paper, whirring laptops, one sided-business conversations rattling across the air), most likely the cafe owners have carefully created an environment that is calming, or fun - and they have budget for people to sit for no more than 1.5 hours and typically eat food. Only you are sat there, because the wifi is free, with 2 coffees, for 6 hours trying to get a days' work done. Or at least that's what I did. Service stations, train carriages, cafes, pubs, playgrounds. Everywhere there were tables (or benches) and wifi (yay! plugs!) I have made my workspace. And brought my office to where everyone else was trying to be not at work.

6 - You aren't really free. 

People used to go on holiday between days when they worked. And, unless you were the CEO of HSBC or the President of the UN, leave work and relax and play. You got paid when you were 'at work' and you didn't when you weren't, so you didn't work. But the 'freedom' to work when you want means that we are task-based employees, not time-based employees. It's on us to manage our time and workloads (although we can't manage our workloads). Work tasks keep coming, and without 5pm to create a cut off, the work isn't really ever done. So, we do it all the time. We take it with us wherever we go. We blur the lines. We take a leap and say 'I can go wherever I chose and my work will come with me'. We land in tropical countries and take up space in hotel lounges, still calling and emailing and shuffling our files. We stress about wifi, occupy tables near plugs, believing we are lucky to be here on this beach when other suckers are sat under striplights at desks. Only we don't ever look at the sea, because the work isn't finished and the signal fell down and the time-zone means early mornings and late nights. We no longer take breaks where we are free from our work to enjoy our lives, our work invades everything.

7 - Zombie apocalypse.

We are all burnt out from looking constantly at our screens, monitoring them to see what we need to do next, if we finished that thing yet, communicating through them with the only people who understand - people who aren't here around us. We are busy, so busy, but not in this space. We don't have time to look away, we are dependent on being present inside the digital world in our hands, our minds always partially attentive - even when we are with our children, our friends, our neighbours, our families, our lovers, our communities. Our work is not longer bounded by a building that we can leave - we have spread it out and smeared it everywhere, polluted even the most tranquil places with the busyness of business.

I no longer work online. I changed path. But that has happened at a time when so many are now moving into the lifestyle I once had. I wanted to share this so that it could expose some of the truths about our future society, open conversations about what can be done to avoid the zombie apocolypse.

Some of my thoughts are ...

1 - employer funded local coworking spaces.

As a part of your salary, in much the same way as employers contribute toward a pension, employers that require their workers to work from home must pay an amount to that employee toward the cost of a local coworking space. Local 'bubbles' present much less risk of infection and environmental degredation than huge centralised offices with people congregating from many areas.

2 - government investment in digital infrastructure.

Some of the behaviour is easily fixed by free, fast broadband for all. Call me a socialist (I'm not, don't be reductive), but I believe the economic benefits of providing every home and public space in the UK with a fast, centrally owned, serviced broadband connection are enormous, and far outweigh the set up and maintenence costs. Large companies could also be encouraged to sponsor this work.

3 - legislation

Guidance is fine, but there are currently no laws that govern the welfare of employees using digital services. Health and safety legislation could apply, but it isn't used. Serious understanding of how digital interation (and service design) contributes to public health is overdue. If employers risked being sued for negligence in providing digital work environments and management like they do for physical spaces, a lot would change fast.

4 - Grass-roots change

A lot of this is related to employees working in office jobs for large corporate business (or smaller ones). But honestly I believe that once people begin to experience the effects of homeworking for themselves, we are going to see a lot of change coming from the bottom up. People will make choices, just like I did, that affect what is valued in society, what is sustainable. My children are already learning that they can work at home because of the pandemic. They are already questioning the value of structured heirarchical institutions and understanding that they are supported, not by the structure or the institution, but by specific individuals working in that system. Digital life gives us direct access - to knowledge, to people. It crumbles the walls that have prevented people from interacting on their own terms. So I think most of what needs to happen is to facilitate that change, that growth, that is coming from the bottom and allow our systems and societies to evolve.