David Penberthy: Just because a job can be done remotely does not mean that it should be

It is much easier to bludge when no-one is watching, and no one is watching at home, writes David Penberthy.

Now let’s be honest. Whose garden has never looked better since they started “working” from home?

Who hasn’t found that the initial flurry of punctuality and endeavour in 2020 – at the start of the pandemic when almost everyone was forced to work remotely – has now eased itself into something less taxing involving the repeated thumping of the snooze button or a sneaky afternoon siesta?

Who hasn’t forgotten the names of some of the people they work with?

Who hasn’t put a Zoom meeting on mute so they can do some online shopping or plan that night’s meal on taste.com?

Who hasn’t done less real work in the past two years than in the previous two?

Karl Marx envisaged a world where with capitalism vanquished a worker’s utopia would emerge where the proletariat could work on Monday, walk and read on Tuesday and fish on Wednesday.

That’s kind of happened in the past two years thanks to the mandated response to the pandemic by governments, and its management by the worry-worts and wellness adherents in the HR department in the corporate world.

Fear of Covid is now underpinning what for many people has become less of a workplace choice than a lifestyle choice.

It is killing our cities, killing small businesses that rely on a CBD population to survive and it is undermining productivity.

“Sorry, boss. The Covid card means WFH is here to stay,” a headline in The Advertiser declared this week.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

“Workplaces struggling to entice employees back to the office will hit a brick wall if their staff raise worries about catching Covid-19,” the piece warns.

It went on to reveal that even the most touchy-feely government in Australia, that of Dan Andrews in Victoria, is taking the extraordinary step of seeking legal advice in a desperate bid to bring public servants back to the office.

There is an inherent stupidity to many of the remote work arrangements that are still in place even though the world has decided to live with Covid, and rightly so, given that triple vaccinations have proven themselves so effective against this very survivable strain. I know of several workplaces where on spurious health grounds, it’s been decreed by management that workers need only front up three days a week so they can better manage their exposure to each other.

It makes perfect scientific sense. I mean, everyone knows you can’t catch Covid on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I know there will be some workers reading this saying they have never been busier and that they have found the freedoms that come with working from home have made them more productive than ever before.

I would accept that this might be true in some cases but is more commonly what’s known as a whopping big fib.

There are many workers who would laugh at this entrenched white-collar malingering – tradies who haven’t stopped digging holes, truckies who kept on trucking, the teachers who valiantly fronted up to classrooms that have been awash with Covid and, most of all, the dogged nurses and medicos who have worked tirelessly to keep the rest of us alive. Meanwhile, Barry from the Department of Land and Water Conservation shuffles out of bed just before 9, slips back into his tracksuit and mentally steels himself for the pending Zoom meeting at 10.30am.

The rejoinder to this is: well, none of those aforementioned jobs can be done remotely.

But here’s the point. Just because a job can be done remotely does not mean that it should be done remotely.

Offices exist for two key reasons. They enable collaboration and they enable supervision.

Working from home might be good for workers, but it’s killing our cities. Picture: iStock

Every good idea involves feedback and testing and input. I have never been able to write headlines on my own, not great ones at least.

You might jag the occasional cracker but you only know that it is truly good if you get an enthused “Yessss!” from 15-odd people in the newsroom when you share it aloud.

The best work comes from people trying to add to an idea to make it richer, smarter, more compelling.

In other fields of work, be it problem solving for engineers, developing a new product in a retail setting, devising a sales strategy to identify new business … the greatest strength people have is numbers, where you work in a collegiate way to create something excellent and new.

Sitting in your spare room, working fewer real hours than normal, through the creatively stultifying medium of Microsoft Teams is not a recipe for productivity.

And then there’s supervision. Given the chance not to work, many of us won’t. I say this from personal experience.

The office started life almost as a form of gentle incarceration whereby group pressure and the ability of the boss to peer through his office venetians on to the floor meant a bedrock level of productivity could be maintained.

It is much easier to bludge when no-one is watching, and no one is watching at home.

Thank you for reading. I’m off to mow the lawn.