Hot desking, tea rounds and surviving meeting irl: the new rules of the office
After two years of lockdowns, offices are almost unrecognisable. In many of them, staff are returning under a hybrid model, working from home a few days a week and coming in for the others. Some organisations slashed their floor space during the pandemic, making what is left feel distinctly cramped, while others have removed desks, and look a lot like departure lounges. A lot of us are hot-desking for the first time in our working lives, without a desk, chair, computer or pot plant to call our own.
And people have changed, too. Much to the disgust of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, after two years of WFH we have got used to wearing jogging pants, talking to our pets, cooking our own lunches, picking children up from school and doing mid-morning naked yoga while also getting our work done. So, as the commuter trains start to fill once more and the mug cupboard gets its first proper action since early 2020, what are the rules of this new office life?
How do I survive all these meetings? At least when I was Zooming I could pretend the wifi had gone down.
“When it comes to meetings, we should be having less of them,” argues Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the Alliance Manchester Business School, and co-author of Remote Workplace Culture. “If you have them, have them quick and have them late. Instead of having it at 9 o’clock where it can go on until 12, have it at 11.30, because everyone gets hungry at 12.30. Three-hour meetings are useless. Reach your goddamn decision and don’t have game-playing.”
You can also set an alarm on your phone to go off 10 minutes into one of those scheduled informal “chats” that can fill the soul with dread. Once your phone starts vibrating, you can claim it’s an
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