Welcome Back to the Office. You Won’t Get Anything Done

My first office job was an internship at a law firm in Washington, DC. I was twenty years old and a college student, which meant that I was quite useless. I found out that it was one kind of torture to do pointless work for two or three hours a day—usually, producing research memos that no one read—and then another kind of torture to figure out how to do nothing until it was acceptable to leave the office at 5 p.m. I spent a lot of time texting two friends from high school, who were also newly stuck in office jobs of their own. I perfected my technique for napping while sitting upright.

My second office job was an internship at a management consulting firm in Manhattan when I was twenty-one. At work, I was either gossiping with my fellow interns, trying to figure out how to optimize my per diem for lunch, or messaging different people on dating apps while waiting for one particular person to text me back.

But my lackadaisical workdays as a management consultant weren’t entirely my fault. The office was full of distractions, and I found it difficult to focus. People were frequently pulling me into unnecessary meetings or taking calls around me. Also, I function best when I have a snack every two hours or so. At the office, I was too self-conscious to eat, so I spent hours trying to distract myself from my hunger instead of working. I inevitably did most of my “work”—making PowerPoints and fiddling with spreadsheets—in the evenings and over the weekends. After that summer, I absconded to graduate school and vowed to avoid any job that would require me to be in an office from nine to five for as long as possible.

During the pandemic, the glass high rises that struck terror into my young, impressionable heart stood empty, and for a while, people wondered whether offices were relics of the past. But over the past two years, companies have begun to call employees back into the office. Ontario public servants are expected to return to office full-time this month. Major banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD, and the Bank of Montreal, have asked employees to come in four days a week. These announcements followed on the tail of controversial RTO mandates at major companies in the United States, including Amazon, AT&T, and Goldman Sachs.

Unsurprisingly, employees are almost universally against RTO mandates. One 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that 99 percent of companies that implemented them saw a drop in employee satisfaction. Part of the problem is that people are back to the commutes they avoided during the pandemic. In some cases, these commutes are longer than they used to be. As housing costs increased over the past few years, many people moved away from cities with the expectation that they could continue to work remotely.

Countless reports have also documented how RTO rules negatively impact women in particular. In places where day care is either unaffordable or unavailable, women typically shoulder the consequences. Many mothers choose lower-paying jobs that allow them to work from home so they can juggle child care at the same time. All this has likely contributed to another depressing fact: over the past two years, the gender pay gap has widened for the first time since the 1960s.

These mandates don’t really make sense for the employers either. Many companies are not equipped to handle the volume of people back in the office. The Globe and Mail recently reported that those who come in often struggle to find desks. The ones they do snag sometimes lack the essentials: a monitor, mouse, or keyboard.

Bruce Daisley, who writes the popular Substack Make Work Better, explained that this lack of space is especially inconvenient because the amount of time people spend in meetings has increased over the past decade as workers, perpetually plagued by precarity, strive to get more face time with superiors. As a result, even when people return to the office, they are not necessarily bonding with colleagues in-person. Rather, they are on back-to-back virtual calls, irritating other people nearby who are also on back-to-back calls. Daisley revealed that, at one organization he worked with, people were doing calls while sitting on the floor.

Companies in Canada urging their employees to return to the office also have to contend with a further problem: limited commercial space in Canadian cities. Downtown Toronto, for example, is running out of vacancy in Class A properties—newer buildings with spiffy amenities close to public transit hubs—and as supply goes down, prices go up. Employers could save massively on rent by allowing at least some of their employees to work remotely.

Why, then, are employers rounding up their workers so insistently, with both stick and carrot? (There are the mandates, of course, and then there are the flashy constructions. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., just cut the ribbon on an extravagant skyscraper in Manhattan. It includes a luxury gym, meditation rooms, and indoor spin studios. Allegedly, the architect consulted wellness guru Deepak Chopra.) Management typically cites productivity as a key reason for bringing workers back into the office. But several studies have shown that hybrid work does not impact productivity. To the contrary, it improves job satisfaction and reduces quit rates.

It may be that the problem is precisely that people are too satisfied with their jobs. Some members of the C-suite have admitted that they implemented RTO mandates to encourage people to quit. RTO mandates offer a way for companies to reduce their staff size without having to pay severance—a tantalizing possibility for employers embattled in the Sisyphean quest to maximize shareholder value.

But the price of playing this mind game with employees is not negligible. For one, management can’t control who will quit, so it’s a rather risky way to reduce the size of a company. You could lose the guy who never does anything, but you could also lose your star player.

The other reason that employers often cite for bringing employees back in-person is “company culture.” But Daisley told me that bosses are “not necessarily being honest about what work was and what we want to go back to.” He recalled that, back in 2019, one of the most common complaints among employers was that workers were sitting around the office with their headphones on. Of course, the headphones that the C-suite were grumbling about from their corner offices were necessary if a worker had any desire to get work done while people around them took calls, crunched chips, and clacked on keyboards. Prior to COVID-19, office space leased per worker had been declining steadily since the 1990s, and employees were increasingly piled on top of each other. If good fences make good neighbours, then no fences presumably make very bad neighbours. All this to say, the “company culture” for which employers are so nostalgic has not existed for a few decades.

I suspect the real motivation behind RTO mandates has nothing to do with productivity or company culture and everything to do with control. That is what the modern office was designed for, after all.

Herman Miller is an American brand that has become synonymous with mid-century modern chic (think wood and simple designs; the Eames Lounge Chair; the type of furniture sold at Design Within Reach that is definitely beyond reach for most of us). But the company made its fortune back in the 1960s, when it first went public with the Action Office, essentially the precursor to the modern cubicle.

The Action Office was developed by an inventor called Robert Propst at a curious juncture in American history. Two things were happening simultaneously: blue-collar manufacturing jobs were disappearing, and a robust countercultural movement was on the rise. The “action” in the “Action Office” refers to the mobility of its design. Instead of the default bullpen—an open-plan office crammed with desks separated by small dividers or none at all—the Action Office was a work system with three moveable walls and vertical storage. It encouraged workers to stand up, move around, and customize their workspaces. You can see it as an invitation for employees to work more flexibly—or you could see it as a way to domesticate the countercultural energy of the 1960s using modernist design. In other words, the Action Office allowed workers to stand up, move around, and customize their workspaces, all for the cause of working more productively.

The office has seen several iterations since Propst’s Action Office. The tech industry re-popularized open-plan offices in the late 1990s and soon introduced amenities, like breakfast bars and luxury gyms. It’s all fun and games—free granola and fancy squat racks—until you realize how dystopian it is to normalize going to the office before breakfast and staying there until after dinner.

I went to graduate school to study religion, a field of research that turned out to be surprisingly useful for diagnosing my allergy to the office. Scholars of religion know that the sleek lines characteristic of Herman Miller designs, like many aspects of our modern world, have religious roots. Herman Miller was founded in Zeeland, Michigan, which was home to a wave of Dutch Reformed immigrants in the nineteenth century. The Dutch Reformed tradition is Neo-Calvinist—a form of Protestantism consistent with ascetic practices that sent what sociologist Max Weber called the “Protestant work ethic” into overdrive. Herman Miller adapted the Dutch Reformed emphasis on plain living into the clean-cut designs that came to dominate modern office aesthetics.

“The history of the cubicle—like the histories of the prison and the asylum offered by Michel Foucault—began as a Christian proposition for bodily asceticism and became a contribution to the carceral network,” the scholar Kathryn Lofton has observed in an essay on the religious history of the cubicle. “The most alternative office spaces still emphasize your ability to be seen by your team, and used by your team, as an instrument of their mission. The walls may be lower, the colors may be brighter, and the chairs ever more ergonomic, but the territory is still organized for your physical submission.”

I got on a call with Lofton, who clarified that the goal of her essay was not to prove that the cubicle is Protestant, or that office workers are secretly Protestant even though they may identify as Buddhist, Muslim, or “spiritual but not religious.” Rather, she hoped to invite readers to think critically about the visible and invisible structures that organize our lives.

Ultimately, the fact that offices—in whatever shape or form—are not necessarily conducive to productivity is beside the point. The office is, first and foremost, a space geared toward organizing people to become a certain type of subject: a cog in the capitalist machine. By physically containing your body and putting you in proximity to other people who are also “at work,” the office contains you psychologically. You have to work—or at least pretend to work—at the office because you are constantly under surveillance and cut off from the rest of your life. By the time you get home, odds are you are so tired you can barely do more than turn on the television or scroll social media for an hour or two before going to bed, just so you can engage in the same ritual again the next day, and the day after that, ad infinitum.

The fact that psychological control has become more important to employers than productivity is one of the many paradoxes wrought by capitalism. Employers want to control their employees not only physically but also psychologically because they feel like they have bought their employees’ time.

The notion of buying someone’s time is an ideological invention that traces back to the dawn of the industrial period. The anthropologist David Graeber has observed that, in premodern times, you could buy a pot from a potter, or you could buy the potter and enslave him, but you cannot buy the potter’s time. Such a form of temporary enslavement “was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly befall a human being.” But after the invention of standardized time in the nineteenth century, time became yet another commodity that could be bought or sold. And if an employer bought your time, you bet he wants to get the most out of every cent he paid, regardless of whether it would improve the output.

• Why It’s So Hard to Actually Work in Shared Offices
• Workplace Surveillance Is Here, Counting Your Mouse Clicks and Bathroom Breaks
• Hybrid Workplaces Are Still a Headache

Of course, the discipline instilled by the office didn’t disappear when white-collar employees began working remotely during the pandemic. People simply turned the panopticon on themselves. After decades in the office, many people internalized its disciplinary function. A study that tracked more than 60,000 Microsoft employees in the early months of the pandemic found that, when the company shifted to remote work, employees logged 10 percent more weekly hours.

This was in part due to the fact that people no longer had to commute. A study that analyzed data spanning twenty-seven countries found that remote workers saved seventy-two minutes commuting every day. As a result, the average employee worked thirty minutes more each day, which added up to more than two hours a week. It was also possible that people logged more hours precisely because no one was watching them. Alone at home, they felt the need to go out of their way to prove that they were hard-working and should not be fired.

But eventually, people realized how lovely it was to not be in the office. Employees are quietly bucking RTO mandates when they can get away with it. And when they can’t, they are circulating petitions and challenging their supervisors. Notably, Dimon unveiled the new JPMorgan headquarters in Manhattan after the circulation of an anti-RTO petition signed by 2,000 JPMorgan employees earlier this year.

One of my high school friends, whom I texted constantly during that miserable summer at the law firm, eventually got a real job in tech. With a hybrid schedule, she perfected a practice of working at most five hours a day. She spends the rest of the time walking her dog, going to the gym, and cooking. She goes for runs in the middle of the day when she feels like it. She also started knitting and has since made baskets of beanies and sweaters in complex designs for herself and her loved ones.

Employers are so terrified at the prospect of their employees not working or thinking about work that they would risk cutting into their profit margins. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. If people weren’t locked up in offices for eight to ten hours a day, they might have time to take care of themselves. They might have time to reflect on whether their jobs actually bring them happiness or contribute meaningfully to the world. They might have time to discover other ways of experiencing pleasure beyond the fleeting dopamine hits occasioned by retail therapy. Instead of buying things to fill the voids in their lives, they might make art, they might experiment sexually, they might organize a protest, they might read a book, or they might spend time caramelizing onions for a leisurely dinner with their friends—and God, what a frightful world that would be.