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To keep a law firm or a tailor or a tavern running, clerical tasks such as bookkeeping had to get done. Around the same time, office came to refer also to a space for administrative effort, as in the back office of a retail shop. The specific role of such an officeholder was less important than the fact that his office structured, preserved, and handed down authority. In another sense, their workplace did the same, by giving monks a way to demonstrate their lifelong dedication.ĭuring the Early Modern period, Haigh observes, office took on another meaning too: a position held by a bureaucrat such as a magistrate, whose work was carried out in an official building. The substance of their work-the duplication of religious texts-helped sustain the Church’s legacy. There, among the scrolls and codices they copied, religious professionals sat at desks and performed skilled labor that couldn’t be done elsewhere. The first offices were monasteries, Gideon Haigh argues in The Office: A Hardworking History, and the first office workers were monks. The office is the structure that makes work possible, a kind of mothership for productivity, centuries in the making a place to construct and preserve a way of life. What is an office, even? One answer: an institution that organizes labor, but does not carry it out. This should be obvious, but somehow it is not: The existence of an office is the central premise of office work, and nothing-not even a pandemic-will make it go away. The Office must endure! To the office we must go. If your boss is nudging you to come back to your cubicle, the policy has less to do with one specific firm than with the whole firmament of office life: the Office, as an institution. Rather they serve as affirmations of a superseding value-one that spans every industry of knowledge work. That’s because return-to-office plans are not concerned, in any fundamental way, with workers and their plight or preferences.

Companies have been pulling employees back to work in person irrespective of anyone’s well-being or efficiency. A rational assessment of your time and productivity was never quite at issue, and I think it never will be. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.īut actually, it isn’t. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer-and yours-could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to-a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. I lose some time-time I could spend working!-transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform I make the commute I pour the coffee I do my job and then I go back home. Likewise getting to work, and being at work.

Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces.