‘It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.’ All true, I’m sure. But what you’re describing here isn’t an office: it’s a pub.
The same goes for ‘team-bonding’. Placing a lot of people in an open-plan office doesn’t really form a close-knit team – which may explain why very little military training takes place behind desks.
No, if you want to form a highly collaborative team, just book your subordinates on a Eurostar junket to Paris, then forget to confirm their return tickets. Trust me, not only will they be newly united in a shared disdain for your organisational skills, but the four hours they’re forced to spend together in Five Guys at the Gare du Nord will forge bonds otherwise found only in the SAS or Navy Seals.
Boris’s office obsession is a bit of a cheek from a man whose daily commute consists of a flight of stairs
I am not an unthinking fan of continual remote working. But the call to return to the office as if the pandemic never happened risks missing a huge opportunity to find what are effectively costless gains. We cannot simply turn the clock back to 2019, whatever Boris says. His office obsession is, frankly, a bit of a cheek coming from a man whose daily commute consists of a flight of stairs.
My friend the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen recently wrote an online paper entitled ‘How Economics Found Science… and Lost its Subject Matter’. He argues that economics has become so fixated on modelling trade-offs, it’s started assuming there must be a trade-off in everything it studies. This has blinded us to ways in which a more inventive approach might resolve a contradiction entirely.
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