WFH: WTF?

Can we design workplaces worth going to?

After what seemed like a lifetime spent trapped in my home office, but was really only a couple of years (!), I’m beginning to find my way around the planet again. Following a shockingly difficult couple of teaching semesters helping students who hadn’t had much experience with higher education in the before-times, I wasn’t quite sure that I would recover completely (1). I’m not sure that I have. I still spend moments staring into space in a semi-lucid PTSD haze, wondering what has happened to the world. A few days ago, I told both my wife and my sister that I really felt as though I had nothing left to say (2).

Novartis Campus: A wonderland of environmental psychology

In that frame of mind, it was sheer delight to be invited to Basel, Switzerland to visit what turned out to be a wonderland of environmental psychology at the campus of the pharmaceutical giant, Novartis. There, I was asked to give a talk entitled “places for inspiration,” a topic that made utter sense in that set of surroundings. It’s easy enough to dig up some information on the campus from the Internet, especially now that it has been opened up to the wider world, but it’s worth recounting some of my own experiences and observations.

The campus was constructed from a brilliant master plan devised by Vittorio Lampugnani. I found the design stunning. Green spaces are interleaved with magnificent architecture (David Chipperfield, Frank Gehry, Fumihiko Maki and Rafael Moneo, among others, were commissioned to design separate buildings). Each building, as one might expect, is unique, but somehow the whole collection lives together nicely, somewhat stitched into place by elements that can be found throughout. Many of the buildings feature interesting arcades, designed as strolling or dwelling places, some with tables and chairs. Though it’s hard to imagine going too far wrong on a parcel of land that perches nicely beside the Rhine, the planning that went into the placement of every tree, every walkway, every tiny meadow and garden, contributes to an environment that is brimming with possibilities, tantalizing ambiguities, and playful interrogations.

I can’t resist giving you a couple of examples. On my initial tour of the campus, led by Novartis architect Marco Serra and Nelly Riggenbach, Novartis associate director of engagement, I was shepherded into the back of a tiny building entitled “Bee Opera.” Marco suggested that we just sit inside the building and I could let him know when I was ready to leave. With the door closed, I observed a glassed-in honeycomb (sadly empty of bees at that time) and, above it, a screen that was showing a long scene from a Spaghetti Western. I became transfixed by that juxtaposition and found myself swept away in a meandering series of thoughts about the relationships between the things that I saw. Eventually, I experienced a eureka moment.  I decided that the connection was that, in Spaghetti Westerns, much of the plot is conveyed non-verbally, through nothing more than posture, gesture, and eye movements. I thought I discerned a connection between what I’ll call Spaghetti-talk and bee language, which is also rich with signification yet absent of words. I thought the idea was brilliant! When I became brave enough to describe my outlandish idea to Marco, he nodded sagely and said something with Zen like un-commitment like “in here, there are no wrong answers.” We continued to while away a delightful half-hour sitting in a compact, dark chamber, letting our minds spin and the conversation play out. It dawned on me that the real delight of the Bee Opera was that it promoted exactly these kinds of wildly playful and disjunctive thought patterns. I could have stayed in that tiny space all day, but I knew there was much more to see.

At another point in my tour, my energies were beginning to flag with the travails of jet lag, so I asked to spend a little time to rest and reflect. Imagine my surprise when I was led into another campus building only to find myself in a grove of birch trees whispering to me in the faint breezes of the building’s open courtyard. I’ve always been a sucker for birch trees anyway but finding them here, in the middle of this building, literally took my breath away. After a few minutes of listening to the trees, I was a man renewed.

As I said in the talk I gave that followed these experiences, I didn’t want to come across as a Novartis fan-boy, but I found it hard to imagine a more spectacular setting for a workplace. If it is at all possible for a setting to encourage inspiration and to promote creativity, I think that Novartis campus might be a signal example of how to do it.

I found the experience of Novartis Campus and all of its wonders at a very unusual time in my own life but also in the history of our understanding of the workplace, what it is for, and perhaps what it can be for. It’s no secret that following the protracted periods of working from home precipitated by the global pandemic, we are undergoing an extensive, sometimes excruciating, re-examination of the place of dedicated workspaces in our lives. Many groups of workers (most, really) have eschewed the return to such dedicated spaces (3), sometimes in the most militant terms. In my country, a serious labour dispute with our national civil service erupted into a strike where one of the major issues was the right to work at home. I’ve heard stories recounted of staff meetings erupting dramatically over questions about where work should be done. Even employees of the mighty Novartis, with its glorious design, struggled at times with questions about what workplaces are for.

Red pill or blue pill?

In some ways, the desire to work from home is perfectly understandable. Commuting can be hellish. Organizing our intertwined work and personal lives when we have children or other dependents to take care of, and even going through the daily travail of making our personal appearance showable exacts a toll that many of us might prefer to do without. But why now?  the technology for us to be able to work remotely has been around for quite some time. I can’t remember when I made my first Skype call, but the software has been around for decades. Email and the Internet has been around for even longer. So, it does seem rather curious that until we were forced to stay home, it never occurred to us that we could, or at least not as a permanent way of working. Maybe it’s nothing more than human nature: we don’t know what we don’t need until we can’t have it.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what the workplace was for in the first place, at least in the so-called knowledge industries where the main products are ideas, designs, words and images. There is a good deal of arm-waving about the magic of interaction, the serendipitous encounter (4), and the warm buzz of inspiration that comes from rubbing shoulders with work buddies. But unless these benefits eventuate in a tangible outcome, like a fatter bottom-line, they can be hard to quantify. So, workers voice their suspicions that employers are using a set of moving goal-posts with the intention of getting employees back in the corral at whatever cost. Employers despair at finding ways to convince their workers that it is in their own ultimate best interest if the company as a whole thrives as a vibrant, creative, leading-edge enterprise. Sometimes in the WFH debates, it seems as though nobody has a clear sense of what’s at stake.

At this point, if you know my work at all, you’ll recognize that I’m talking a little bit out of my hat. I’m not an industrial psychologist or a captain of industry. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the business world. But what I do understand is the power of setting to influence human behaviour and I feel pretty sure that if our workplaces are such repellant places that we would rather strike than endure them, then something is wrong with them.

To toy with a well-worn cliché, if you built it and they didn’t come, you built it wrong!

What I’m brooding about this summer, among other things (5) are the key ingredients for a workplace that encourages patterns of thought and activity that might make it successful—and not just in the bottom-line sense but more broadly than that—a workplace where people are more likely to have fantastic ideas, feel inspired, enjoy themselves and perhaps even experience better health, especially mental health. My ideas are still so infantile that I’m not going to write them down yet, and I have no illusions about how many other people are thinking about the same problems. But I can’t resist a challenge and I think this one is important. Honestly, I think that what’s involved is a fundamental re-think of the entirety of our lives, rather than the part of it that we spend trying to “make a living.” (6). But today, now that I’ve teased it a little, I want to go in a different direction.

The Analog Experience

Recently, I stumbled on an article in the Washington Post about what journalist Hope Corrigan described as “analog trends.” These trends, which she says are on the ascendant, include things like vinyl records (old news), film cameras, snail-mail correspondence, and physical books. In the first sentence of her article Corrigan says “sometimes it’s better to be inefficient.” Fair enough. These kinds of analog practices certainly are inefficient compared to their digital cousins and, as she points out in the article, each is prone to interesting errors (7). But what struck me was that each of her examples referenced a real, physical artifact: a piece of stuff. During the pandemic, I fell into the habit of writing letters to friends and family the old-fashioned way, with stamps, envelopes and hand-delivery by our trusty Canada Post letter carriers. What appealed to me about the letter-writing was that there was an intimacy about a letter coming directly from my hands into the hands of someone I knew. I’m sure that it was a reaction to the fact that so much of my life at that time was taking place digitally that I felt myself losing touch with the real world and this was a way of gaining a foothold on it. (8)

As I read this article, it occurred to me that one might also describe an attraction to real places, as opposed to the digital simulacra that now form the centrepieces of so much of our working lives, as an “analog trend.” Except that I’m not sure that I see that trend. Instead, I see much enthusiasm for a new generation of collaborative tools for workspaces that facilitate working from home. This morning, I was regaled with online advertising for a nifty device that has microphones, speakers, and a camera that sits in the middle of a conference table, swivelling around to focus on whomever is speaking, enabling unimpeded views of faces whether one is in the room or logging in remotely. But I’ve seen and used these devices. I’ve experienced the dispiriting lack of connection with a colleague who is only present to me as the unblinking eye of a camera. I’ve been the face on the screen on the wall, stripped of access to so much information that I feel more like I’m watching Netflix than participating in a meeting, as I flail my arms with impotent futility trying to be heard and losing out in the lopsided competition with the beautiful choreography of live, human interaction among the in-person attendees. But it isn’t just the clumsy nature of digital interactions in meetings, and the odd disregard, at least for a psychologist, of all of the richly textured content of the meeting, as if all that mattered were the words that are spoken during the meeting. It’s also everything else about place that gets left out of digital workplaces.

When I’m in a real place, I can walk around, choose where to look, what to touch, where to go. I can get a sense of a place from its soundscapes, the texture of the floor, the design of the furniture, the smell of the air. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. There’s no substitute for actually being there.

No less significant is the fact that I have to get to the workplace (9). The building where I work is not pretty. It’s an old, inexpertly designed Brutalist building, and it’s no secret that it has seen better days. But I’ve been going to that building either in a car or on foot or on a bicycle for decades, and there’s something about the broader context that frames the experience. By the time I take a seat in my office or stand in front of a class, I’ve been primed by thousands of sensory details, the memories that they trigger (both good and bad ones!), reminders of who I am. I’m stitched into that place. To suppose that this could all be replaced by my tumbling out of bed in the morning and into the chair in front of my computer screen is to ignore so much of what makes genuine experience. But just as much, it suggests how much is at stake if we miss the opportunities that the seen and felt world provides for enriching all of our experiences, including our work lives.

When the pandemic began and we were locked down, people like me were scrambling to find ways to make ourselves useful. We mustered for endless webinars to contemplate the new state of the world and what might happen next. I remember proclaiming more than once that I thought that perhaps the best thing to come out of a tragic episode in human history and the loss of millions of lives might be the recognition that trying to get “back to normal” might be both a horrible error and a huge missed opportunity. But I didn’t mean, nor did I expect, that our future trajectory might see us leap into a screen-based technological future that seemed to forget so much of what makes real life real: the tactile experience of real, lived spaces. I wanted to make better places, not eliminate them entirely! I’m not suggesting that this is what has happened, but I do think that the risk is there. Along with an appreciation for all of the benefits and efficiencies of online connection and collaboration, I hope that we can also hold on to the pleasure and power of the analog experience of place. There’s so much at stake.

What I’m reading

Full confession here that, along with a long period of work-shock as I returned to teach in-person classes with students who themselves had had their lives thrown into chaos, my habits of writing and reading lapsed seriously. I can’t remember a time when I’ve read less than I have over the past year. Now, back in the saddle, I have been trying to alternate non-fiction “work-ish” books with novels. The most remarkable book that I’ve read since I was last here was Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. For reasons related to my writing above, I’ve been thinking a lot about our relationships with settings both built and natural, perhaps even more than I usually do. Often, prompted by conversations with friends, family, and students, my thoughts turn to indigenous perspectives. So I was already primed, perhaps for the content of this magnificent book, which combines science, nature and spirituality in a way that defies easy description. Read it.

What I’m eating

Earlier this summer, I had the great joy to be able to spend a few days in my beloved London, city of my birth. When I’m there, I tend to gravitate to the comfort foods of my youth. Here’s one of the best plates of fish and chips to be had there, at a place called Fish!

Clang Associations

(1). I’ll spare you the grisly details and save them for my diary, but suffice to say that the toll to mental health and normal experience (whatever that is) exacted by the pandemic beggared belief. It still does, in many ways.

(2). I should note that their responses were remarkably similar, replete with snorts and rolls of the eyes as they pointed out that I had just spent thirty minutes explaining why I thought it was that I had nothing left to say.

(3) It will never be wrong to insert a caveat here reminding us that many workers simply lack the freedom to work from home. You can’t make cars, administer emergency medicine or feed the world from behind a computer screen.

(4) This just refers to the fact that when we go to physical places to work, we are more likely to stumble into people we don’t work beside and then exchange new ideas. Essentially, the watercooler effect.

(5). My wife recently sent me a funny tweet (remember those?) where someone characterized the academic as someone who impulsively agreed to a new project every two weeks until they died. Close to the bone, my beloved….

(6) Interesting to think about that phrase, which suggests that the main prerequisite to “living” is earning money. “Earning a living” is even worse, isn’t it?

(7) This argument reminds me of something that I’ve written about before, supporting urbanist Richard Sennett’s claim that good cities need “friction.” When things (or people) rub against one another, the fracture lines of agency are highlighted. We are reminded of our independence and our will.

(8) Another related impulse I had was to take up stone-carving. To the relief of stones everywhere, I did not follow up on this.

(9) We aren’t wrong to bemoan the horrors of the commute and nobody can blame us for wanting to avoid a soul-sucking journey from the affordable perimeter of a city to its central business area. But the source of these problems is elsewhere. In many ways we’ve been doing cities badly for a very long time, and we’re only now achieving a glimmering understanding of how to make things better.