Have you seen Severance? If not, I urge you to cancel all evening plans and commit to binge-watching it for the next week.
I’m not a PR for Apple TV+, or not a paid one at least, merely an optimist who believes the creators of this multi-award-winning show may have gifted mankind one of the best series of all time. It’s still early days, we’re only ten episodes in, but Severance could be proof that high-concept, done well, is unbeatable viewing. Apple certainly has a great deal riding on it: the new season’s budget was reportedly $200 million. And though the data are hard to come by, Apple TV+ is apparently watched less in one month than Netflix is watched in a day.
What’s the premise of this show I’m running the risk of overhyping? It imagines a sinister corporation, Lumon, inventing a brain implant that can bisect the consciousness into a working ‘innie’ entity and a social ‘outie’ entity. There is no crossover. The innie knows nothing about their non-working self – whether they have families, friends, hobbies. The outie knows nothing of their innie’s work, with the implication that the assignment is so secretive this precaution – though voluntary – is necessary. It is during a lift down to the office that the chip switches between the two selves.
This would require a level of job commitment unfathomable to most people in Britain today. Even getting people into the office from 9 to 5 is a struggle. A growing number are neither in work nor looking for it, with some 9.25 million now economically inactive. And our productivity was estimated to be 1.8 per cent lower in the third quarter of last year than the same quarter in 2023.
The Labour government, with the support of unions and other vested interests, appear convinced that the solution lies in the total rejection of Severance-style bifurcation of work and life. They want even more flexibility, for employees to choose when, where, and how they work – regardless of the costs it may incur to their employer.
Yet research suggests productivity drops when staff work remotely, with a 2023 MIT and UCLA study, showing an 18 per cent decline when comparing office workers to those at home. Previous Stanford analysis had reported an average drop of between 10 and 20 per cent.
And whilst surveys should always be taken with a fistful of salt, here are some recent findings: 80 per cent of hybrid workers watch TV while doing their day job, says an outfit called TonerGiant. One in 10 workers say they regularly take a nap when WFH, according to a survey by Reign Storm. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal reported on a new trend of white collar workers doing two ‘full-time’ jobs remotely.
Nowhere are the dangers of this ‘employee-is-king’ attitude more apparent than in our public sector, where productivity is now 8.5 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. Going back further, private sector productivity is around 50 per cent higher today than it was 30 years ago, whilst output per person in the public sector is about the same as it was in 1996.
Correlation is not causation, but when employee productivity is on the slide, surely the boss ought to question whether their working practices are fit for purpose? In 2023 a study showed a third of those in the employ of the state were hybrid working. Occupancy at many government department buildings was still around two-thirds last autumn. Nearly a third of councils allow staff to spend three days a week at home. Labour and the Tories only demanded that civil servants show up 60 per cent of the time.
For a fortunate few, unfettered flexibility works. In the death-of-offices versus nothing-will-change debate, it was always the case that some staff could stay home, dodge the commute, manage their own schedules, and see their output increase. But this legacy of the Covid pandemic is becoming pernicious, and the argument that ‘workers are more productive at home’ is looking increasingly like a self-serving one designed to enhance employee wellbeing.
Severance is a ghastly idea. I suspect science is a long way from developing such technologies, though the neurosurgeon drafted in by the show’s producers says it’s not ‘far off’. As taxpayers dismay at the widening gulf between worker and workshy, they may hope he’s right.
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