SENSORY MONOTONY IN REMOTE WORKING

The debate on whether remote working is harmful or beneficial has been characterised as a bitter fight between Millennial workers with higher expectations for their standard of living and Boomer bosses who want to force people back into the office for no good reason.

I think that characterisation is what has led to so little genuine discussion on the matter between employers and employees.

You could write a book debating the best way to work; one probably gets published every seven minutes. But there's a piece of the puzzle that I haven't seen getting the attention I think it deserves. I've called it sensory monotony - you could call it experience homogeneity or sensory ground hog day too.

Those in favour of remote working paint the pre-pandemic era of office jobs as endless months of long commutes to soul-destroying offices to sit at a desk for nine hours and then go home. We can sit at a desk at home, so why bother?

Recently, though, I've found myself wishing I could go back to pre-pandemic working. I knew the reduced social interaction was taking its toll but there was something else. It took me weeks to identify what it was that I'm missing and I finally know what it is: diversity of sensory experience.

Some are unfortunate enough to find themselves in office work that plays out like the pre-pandemic story I described above, but if we take time to remember what it was really like for most of us, we'll realise that sitting at a desk wasn't all we did.

The decrease in social interaction whilst working remotely and the harms this causes are well documented, but what about the decrease in sensory experience?

Let's think of two things that we can do remotely that we used to do in person: attending a conference and meeting with your team.

This is what it looked like when I used to attend conferences pre-Covid. Maybe you had similar experiences. I'd go out of my house into the fresh air, get on a train and travel through countryside that I don't usually see, sometimes to places I'd never been before. I'd stare out at the landscape and watch the trees glide past and then stride across a new city (because I was usually running late).

When I got there, I'd physically interact with different groups of people, take in the venue, eat the food, explore visual information, try a local restaurant for dinner. I'd stand at the front and talk through my training presentation, walking around, engaging with the audience, using my body to inject some energy into the topic. I'd be presenting to people I'd met earlier in the day, and we'd speak again afterwards over coffee. Breakouts would see us physically move around the room, greeting new people and using physical resources. The views, smells, sounds, tastes and physical experiences were always different.

Team and project meetings always varied, too. Sometimes we'd be eating breakfast together, or walking in the park, or sat around the board table. Through the windows would be views of Nottingham, Birmingham, London, Manchester or any other city. We'd be looking at a presenter, a TV, a piece of paper or a chalkboard - on more than one occasion, we were looking at a wall of post-it notes. Often team meetings were happenstance, a catch up over lunch, an emergency meeting. I'd visit other offices, experience other cities, drink different tea, walk down different streets, see different ways of working.

Remember that?

Okay, but surely sitting on a weird chair we got when we tried to make the office look like Google's headquarters, looking at a badly drawn mind map on a whiteboard and laughing at someone attempting to stand up from a beanbag is no better for me than doing the meeting from home? Well I think it is better for us, actually.

At home, we can attend a conference and meet with a team but the experience of each from a sensory perspective is exactly the same. We're sitting in the same flat, in the same location, in the same chair, at the same desk, looking at the same screen, eating the same food, seeing the same four walls.

We could do a million conferences on a million different topics but the physical and sensory experience of every single one would be feeling the mouse under your hand as you click 'join Teams meeting'.

But can't we replicate diversity of feeling at home? I don't think so. Working at home means we have more time to go out during the day, but we're restrained by the need to return to work, so we find ourselves traversing the same local park day after day. We can try to switch up where we sit in our house, what we wear and what we eat, but ultimately the sensory experience is almost identical day after day, month after month. We live and work within a radius of a few miles of our home.

For those of us who work from home without a noisy and unpredictable family, we even lose the sensory experiences associated with being around other people. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but either way - variety. At the office, the sounds and sights around you are continually influenced by the actions of lots of different people. At home, they're only influenced by whether you bothered to clean the kitchen last night and whether you've ordered anything from Amazon.

You might scoff at the idea of sensory monotony and tell me you'd rather look at your own walls than the walls of a conference room in a hotel off the M1. You'll say your sandwich is better than stale muffins and going to your local is better than braving a restaurant in a different city after a long day. Who cares about looking out the train window, or drinking bad coffee? Who misses getting lost in an unfamiliar city or having to shake someone's clammy hand?

I agree that there's no use having rose-tinted glasses. Full time in-person work isn't all good; some of it's pointless and boring but my point is that even the dullest conference room gives you variety. And we had loads of experiences that weren't so naff.

I tried to revive my pre-Covid ways of working and went back into the office but it wasn't the same. There was nobody there to have breakfast with, no noisy ping pong balls or thumps of music from exercise classes. Meetings always had someone dialling in, so we always had to sit in a meeting room rather than going for lunch or to the silly beanbags.

It's an unpopular opinion but as much as I appreciate the benefits of more flexible working, I mourn the loss of the type of dynamic, collaborative workplace that I used to be a part of, and I miss the diversity of sights, sounds, smells and tastes of an in-person job.

The hybrid model is seeing us organise conferences again and make an effort to get teams together in person, but it's a shadow of the social and sensory variety we used to experience.

More flexible working is definitely a good thing. In particular, it benefits those who are less mobile, carers, and parents. I just think we've gone too far and we don't know how to get back. We don't know how to do hybrid in a way that retains the benefits of pre-pandemic working whilst reaping the rewards of flexibility.

Don't dismiss the benefits of in-person working as the ravings of people who own corporate real estate. There are real benefits to more socialising, exchanging ideas in person, making decisions together, and experiencing a team in real life. I think there are also real benefits in maintaining the kind of sensory diversity that many of us got from work pre-Covid that we now struggle to replicate at home.

Lots of people say they love remote working but I wonder how long any of us can really go on with 40 hours of every week made up of the same sensory experience. If you thought working in an office was like ground hog day, surely working from the place you live is even worse.

How about you? Do you love fully remote work? Are you frustrated with the half-hearted return to in-person collaboration? Do you miss your pre-Covid working life? Let me know, I'd love to chat.