Should We Kill the Office?

Do people really want freedom from their offices? Or is it the only place that lets people be themselves

Dilbert, the comic character inspired by creator Scott Adams’ personal experiences, works in an office that is a treacherous place. Top management is a band of rogues. The HR is villainous. Colleagues are weirdos. Meetings cause sudden death. The cubicle is the traumatic fate of the middle class. Dilbert is funny. Once it was funnier. When it was more accurate. Today, the office has changed.

The Management wants employees to be happy and it has realised that employees are happier teleworking, operating from home or a remote location. It decided, rightly or wrongly, that people want freedom from physical offices; that they prefer poring over spreadsheets and presentations in pajamas, rather than Oxford shirts. Such modern offices, with new revolutionary thoughts, are now coming to India. Several multinational companies, which implemented policies like hot-desking (come anytime you want and sit anywhere) in other countries, are bringing such concepts to India. But now people are asking a question that Dilbert would have never asked—is the office such an oppressive place, really? Or is it just that commitment-phobic creative types who do not like being confined to time and place, have given a bad name to the office through their literature, commercials and comic strips? Doesn’t an office offer its occupants much more than just employment?

Men like Jaspal Rekhi don’t waste time plotting their escape from the office. They love it. His career and the traditional work culture of the offices where he worked has marked most of the important decisions in his life, including his marriage. Eight years after he met Gauri on a corporate bus in Delhi and married her, they have a baby boy, and he has risen to become the head of eHR and eLearning at More, a brand of Aditya Birla Retail. “Every morning, as I walk into my office compound and see the sign More, I feel like I’m part of something,” he says. Rekhi’s view of the office is probably shared by millions of post-liberalisation Indian workers for whom a corporate career and the cubicle that comes with it, the attendant perk of bonuses, and other value additions, is a matter of pride, a realised aspiration. Indians have only just begun to enjoy multi-cuisine cafeterias, just begun to justify the expenditure on expensive work wear, accept the necessity of a workbag, even enjoy the weight of a laptop as a badge of success. If there’s no office, what’s the point? For 32-year-old Bhumika Tewari, her office is also about the excitement of an entirely new sort of enterprise: multiplexes. At work, the cinema programming head of Fun Cinemas gets to watch every single new film in the market. A workday is spent deciding which movies play, where and how many times; meeting schedules involve surnames like Bachchan and Khan. She has done everything from teach ushers the importance of keeping their heads bent while showing customers to their seats to test the different sorts of popcorn.

The LA Times recently reported on the latest innovation in US work culture: digital nomads. They’re office workers who work anywhere and everywhere, from coffee shops to parks, and those who want co-workers gather in public places and work with strangers, talking and collaborating with folks from different industries and organisations. But even while sitting on a park bench, using a wireless modem, all those people are bound by deadlines, targets and schedules. Some people feel that if you have to work all day, it is better to go to the office than the office coming to you. Twenty-eight-year-old engineer Rajiv Maithani says that as long as he has to work for someone, it’s nicer to have clear divisions between home and office. He has used his firm Globallogic’s flexi-time and work-from-home options, especially recently when his first child was born. “I had clear targets and assignments, which had to be completed when I was at home,” he says. “But after a few days you want to get back to office or you’ll stop enjoying both.”

When teleworking first took hold as a concept, many predicted it would herald the death of the office as we know it. But it didn’t. Because a significant aspect of office life, and the part that makes up for the bad toilet and substandard coffee, is the social interaction it enforces. Four years ago, author Chandrahas Choudhury chucked a desk job he hated in favour of beginning his debut novel, Arzee The Dwarf. “I didn’t have the temperament for the office,” he says. “I hated the dullness of it all.” But spending all his days on private pursuits like reading and writing made it difficult to meet people, so Choudhury had to do some deft social re-engineering. “I found new channels,” he says. “I basically rode off my friends, and made more of an effort. Writers are thieves of more than just words.” Then again, Choudhury is a friendly sort of guy. For folks unlike him, an office space is a source of comfort, a place where social ineptitude is largely forgiven, where family idiosyncrasies can be temporarily forgotten, it is a place which, Rekhi says, offers “an opportunity to exchange brain power with people who think alike”. Everything about his co-workers, from where they live, to the religions they practice, has shaped and moulded Rekhi’s worldview. “I have eaten newer things than what I grew up with, and I understand the passion of my Muslim friends, and the belief of my Christian friends.”

The notion of occupational freedom is so romantic that people who prefer the structure of an office begin to sound like worker ants. But a competent corporate set-up is good at making people forget the large organism they are part of. In hyper-organisations like Citibank, which after firing more than 20,000 people was still left with tens of thousands that could run the financial supermarket, a man in the highest grades of the company is still one of a few hundred ‘senior’ people. But each person’s task is so specific and result-oriented that it is difficult to see anything beyond the plot of your own division, sub-division, or branch. Rekhi is one of the thousands too, and he resents the worker ant simile, “Unlike family, you choose your workspace, and you take something from it just as it takes from you.”

Rekhi’s father was a civil servant, his mother a housewife; the small family flourished in a South Delhi colony till his father’s retirement, when they moved to satellite town Gurgaon.

At 39, he says his life’s real education came from his career, business trips, and corporate social events. From his first taste of Chinese food to that chance sighting on the bus, every facet of his life has evolved and matured with a happy complexity because of his job, and the people he did it with. “If I didn’t have a place to come to every morning, and people to work with, there’s so much I would have never learned.”

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