Welcome to the Flexetariat Revolution: The Nowhere Office is here and the 4-day workweek could be next

During and following the pandemic, wave after wave of datasets have broadly shown the same thing. People who have the choice, who are not tied to specific work locations, are choosing to change their lives. A new kind of worker is emerging who prizes, above all, the ability to design their own working life: I call them as a group the Flexetariat. And they are choosing to stop commuting. To move cities. To share childcare differently. To work less. To take advantage of technology to create different rhythms for their working weeks, days and hours. The Cisco Global Hybrid Work Study across every continent except Antarctica, reported that 74% of employees state that their jobs can be done just as successfully when working remotely. This followed the Accenture Future of Work Study 2021 which found that 83% of workers wanted to work hybrid, and 63% of high-growth companies had already adopted a “productivity anywhere” approach. An entirely new social media subculture has emerged, the r/antiwork Reddit which now has 1.7 million members who want to totally reimagine and reorganise the way we work. For all the talk of quiet quitting, the complaints about work are in fact very noisy indeed. 

Not since the Industrial Revolution has the nature of work undergone such intense and rapid change. The impact of technology on work had already been identified in 2016 by the World Economic Forum as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but this revolt, during a period of time in work’s history I call the Nowhere Office, is radically different. That is because it is not manual or blue-collar workers protesting about the introduction of automation or new manufacturing techniques which make their jobs redundant, but white-collar workers in high-pay sectors refusing to return to business as usual and demanding a better quality of working life. As a result of these profound cultural changes and a tight labour market, the power seems to be shifting from a top-down leader-led system to one which feels more bottom-up. Even when brand-name companies with globally known leaders have instructed their workers to return to the office, even in a hybrid way, they have faced quiet – and not-so-quiet – rebellions. Stanford University Professor Nicholas Bloom’s data shows non-compliance as high as 50%. 

The Nowhere Office is a global phenomenon. It affects every continent and country. Debate is everywhere – and so is change. In Australia, 41% of the entire workforce now works from home some of the time, so-called e-changers who have moved away from cities to coastal areas for a better quality of life. In Japan (which was already changing its flexible working laws in 2019), 200,000 employees at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp will be able to work from over four hundred satellite offices around the country instead of fixed offices. In the UK the law concerning the right to request flexible working is due for its first update in a decade. As I write these words at the end of 2022, office occupancy around the world is under 50% of its pre-pandemic level, and J.P. Morgan’s global research paper in September 2022 gave as optimistic a feel as it could while conceding that ‘it will remain tough for office landlords’ from London to Singapore.

Not only does a wall of data confirm the picture that work is changed forever, but the cultural data is rich too. One of 2022’s biggest singles was “Break My Soul” by chart-topping singer-songwriter Beyoncé, whose lyrics include the challenge to “release ya mind, release ya job, release the time’ (in that order). With this song the so-called “Great Resignation” found a melodic champion. It has been amplified globally by repeated references to the Chinese “tang ping” social protest of rejecting work, yet for me it also has strange echoes of T. S. Eliot’s remarkable poem The Waste Land, published exactly a century earlier, in which he articulated the mentally exhausted, burnt-out existential angst of those who survived the Great War of 1914 to 1918 and who felt utterly changed. 

For many, the experience of surviving the pandemic, both literally and metaphorically, has become like surviving a war, and the challenge is to rebuild lives and establish new ways of living. Whether it is T. S. Eliot writing of longing to leave your desk “At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward,” or Beyoncé singing of motivation, to have agency in your life as the “new foundation,” there is a longing to leave work as much as there is a need to remain in it. 

The world of work is experiencing a post-traumatic response not just to the pandemic but to a number of other latent dissatisfactions and problems which have meant this is not a moment to go back to old norms, but to create new ones. Who says everyone has to be in five days a week to work well? What if they don’t? Who says that productivity will fall, when in fact it doesn’t appear to have done so? What do we do about social capital and social engagement if the world of work is in fact going to be hybrid? These questions are being rightly asked, and a great experiment is now underway. 

The Nowhere Office is, I argue, a phase in the history of work in which change is happening broadly for the better. It isn’t the end of the office, nor is it the end of the history of the office. It is a moment when all sorts of gears are shifting, all sorts of campaigns for workplace flexibility which were ignored for years have now got off the ground. The most striking of these is 4 Day Week. Its global campaign staged a worldwide pilot which demonstrated that 90% of the hundred companies in the trial found it worked, with no loss of productivity, showing the desire for models which shift away from full-time presenteeism. Firms like the Samsung-owned technology company Harman International have embraced Harman Flex which is expected to involve 40% of their 30,000+ global workforce. 

None of this is a certain picture or a comfortable one. Around the world Microsoft identified a new trend of “productivity paranoia”: just 12% of managers are confident that their workers are as productive when they are out of sight, contrasted with 87% of employees who report remaining just as productive. At the same time, the tenth anniversary publication of the World Happiness Report shows that attention to well-being has risen exponentially. If anything, the world has gone backwards, not forwards, in being able to provide well-being at work as the complexities of implementing new work systems take their toll. And to be clear: not only are there many hardships to hybrid working such as burnout, messy management and stress, but the privilege of choice remains denied to the majority of those in employment whose place of work really is fixed in classrooms, hospitals or transport systems. 

So why focus on the office at all? Because office life, knowledge work, is rising around the world, as technology, travel and new generational perspectives on work all shift and impact the global economy. But something else is happening too. We are beginning to understand that every worker is connected and perhaps when we pay closer attention to the unhappiness and discontent inside the offices and skyscrapers, we will start to notice the way work is unequal, unfair and unworkable at ground level too. Work needs improving everywhere, for everyone. So here we are. In the Nowhere Office whether we like it or not. There is no going back. But there are plenty of ideas about how to make it a better place than the single-space nine-to-five model we have had before. And, in my view, that’s a welcome development.

This article has been excerpted from  The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future  by Julia Hobsbawm. Copyright © 2022. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.