Cities of bureaucrats, corporations, officials are the most extinct. Big cities. I recently spent a day in Łódź, including at the Fabryczna station. It was as after the experimental neutron bomb explosion (who remembers about such a bomb, Mr. Reagan proposal as radical solution for US-unfriendly world?). Including that it killed a newsagent and a burger.
Warsaw, Krakow and Poznan are extinct cities. People work it in a so-called home office. Some work really. Everyone is really at home. Small towns are not so extinct because there is no home office. What will result for the economy probably nobody knows – that is, what is the meaning of the work of biuralists for the economy, and no work, or work in the home office (how do you write with this apostrophe, who will tell me?).
Biuralist unmasked
And it seems to me that the work of biuralists, our work, was somehow exposed. As unnecessary. Or as not needed as much as we try to pretend it is.
Of course, I know that some office workers now work even more than before the plague. However, this is due to my view that the systems and principles of this work are immature. Confcalls drags like oil tripe, for no apparent reason, and office workers, like office workers, have learned how to fake people that they work and that this work is badly needed. Sometimes I have the impression that a confcalls, in which six or eight people participate, lasting an hour or one and a half replaced the two-minute interactions between some of these people only. In addition, there is a lack of ability to use data transmission programs, or – some imperfections of these programs, which will soon be removed.
But if all this is measured and weighed, it turns out that a huge part of the office work is simply unnecessary. It results from tradition, habits or pleasure. In the morning there is a coffee or tea in the office, check the internet and e-mail, at home before you have to paint or choose a tie and wash the shoes. Then we go to work an hour, a little less or a little more. Work-related activities take a few hours in a big city, maybe three, maybe four, it depends who lives where and what the requirements are for him at work. Either way, these few hours are the pure yield of this work system.
More time, more quality
The second yield, at least the yield perspective, is a different level of concentration or efficiency in many professions. Home office clerks may complain about the teenagers walking their heads, but I think it’s still a very small waste of time and concentration compared to what is happening in many offices as part of a normal route. Everyone can want something from everyone, steam in “just for a moment” at any time. In many cases, this means that a task that needs more than 20 minutes is only possible in the very morning or afternoon. Or it requires spoiling relationships as a result of chasing offensive attacks. Either – or transfer work home. As for these interruptions in the home environment – it is also worth last but not least to consider and how much the housing conditions of biuralists have improved over the past 20 years.
If my image of work in a corpo office or consulting company is not excessively distorted, one of the effects of the plague should definitely be a new look at the whole sense of the office’s functioning in its current form. Offices also in the sense of a room – usually very expensive, constituting a significant part of the company’s fixed costs. In offices where they work usually very demanding, well-paid employees, whose social status is in a perverse sense shaped in the way that they work in the office.
Some familiar HR managers and company bosses have been well aware of this for years. Much of the office work can be done at home, thus reducing all possible costs. In fact, as the most important reason for keeping the office in its current form, they consider elementary control over employees, whose other side is – how else – lack of confidence in the reliability of employees, i.e. lack of faith that they would work at home.
New Bill
This profit and loss account is certainly not the same, it depends a lot on the industry, the individual culture of a particular company or the way of thinking about business. The crucial issue is and will be the measurability of the product provided by the biologist. Well, actually, why should a biuralist’s product not be measurable?
I do not doubt that such a bill will be carried out in many companies, especially that for now companies will sell less and not more.
