Words by David Michon. Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott.

Over the pandemic, the way we work has changed—we’ve changed. Companies are apparently seeing the value of actively caring about their employees, but does this go deeper than surface-level promises? Can your workplace ever really care about your welfare when profit is always a priority, and how will things look in the future? 

Of the innumerable films and television shows that parody “the office”, perhaps the most comically lethal—and too often overlooked—is the Sprecher sisters’ 1997 contribution to the canon, Clockwatchers. In it, four temp workers (Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach) languish at Global Credit, a stand-in for corporate sterility and soullessness, complete with rows of cubicles, anal-retentive office managers, and meaningless platitudes delivered by suited head honchos. (“I like to think of us as family here!”)

The quartet is subjected to a petty and paranoid workplace that views them as nothing more than a means of production—overseen but not understood. And though none of them give a damn about the success of Global Credit, it nevertheless infiltrates them. It distracts them from or warps their own ambitions, turns them against one another, and ultimately they (quietly, dramatically, or rebelliously) vanish. One even scrawls on her desk, “I was never here.”

From the worker’s perspective, the pandemic has incited the greatest shakeup to work in a generation. And, yes, many people worked from home and continue to—but, even at the height of the pandemic that remained a distinct minority of us. Many others were laid off or furloughed—often supported by novel and well-funded government programmes.

The real shakeup is care. Or rather, that’s where there’s potential. Suddenly last spring, emotional wellbeing was brought to the forefront, and an arsenal of tactics—from cosy care packages and virtual cocktail hours, to paid time off—were deployed to try and keep us away from the figurative ledge. Expectations of productivity were, maybe for the first time in the history of capitalism, relaxed (unless you worked at Zoom). And it seems to be stumbling into bigger changes: new benefits packages, more flexibility, and a radical rethinking of physical office space. All aimed at making work more caring.

As ever, there are band-aid approaches, and there are examples of deep-rooted commitment to reorganisation. “Like an athlete, recovery is important,” says Danni Mohammed, founder of GentleForces, a new creative and social impact company built on three pillars: live better, work better, and connect more. Part of living up to those principles is consistently giving employees space to wind down—on company time. That means, for GentleForces, an ambition to ban Friday meetings. “We call them ‘decompression Fridays’,” she says. “Saturdays shouldn’t be needed for getting over the work week,” she explains. “We’re asking ourselves how we can wind down within the week versus using your weekend.” The GentleForces team is geographically spread out and so necessarily remote. Where full teams remain co-located in one city, an employee’s agency over their working hours and environment has become a hot-button issue. Working from home isn’t a given—some bosses don’t want it, and some employees don’t want it. Others welcome it. There’s not always agreement and circumstances will change.

Sabine Zetteler runs an eponymous communications agency with three full-time employees, all in London. When the pandemic hit, she reduced their hours—the new workday was ten ‘til five—but not their pay. “People were surprised by that,” she says, remarking that those she spoke to expected her to reduce salaries pro-rata. 

At the same time, she renovated a new office with the help of designer Rhonda Drakeford and told the team that—pretty much—they could opt never to go there, at least while the pandemic persists as is.  “I’m really happy to run a company where everyone can decide where they feel most productive any given day of the week,” she adds. But, coming together in physical space as a team and with clients can’t be fully replaced. It’s crucial, and, says Zetteler, it will come back—albeit with a fresh perspective on how and when it’s necessary. “We can’t function as a nimble, dynamic, and truly responsive team engaged in our community via Zoom and Google Sheets.”

It is in the DNA of these leaders to be empathetic; they run companies that have embraced pro bono and positive impact work as a part of their business models. Their approach to employee care is one that hands agency to individual employees, who are trusted to meet their own needs and those of their work within a loosened framework.

Action doesn’t always feel so genuine, however. Many examples were recently outlined by Mashable’s Rebecca Ruiz:

For its US employees, Amazon introduced “Resources for Living”, a mental health benefit package that includes free counselling sessions, suicide prevention support, and an app offering, among other things, mindfulness exercises. But Amazon is also alleged to fire employees who criticise the company’s many, many disturbing workplace practices, some of which have earned Amazon a dishonourable mention on The National Council on Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen” list of most dangerous employers in the U.S. 

Nike gave its corporate staff a paid week off to process the trauma of the pandemic and “unwind” and “destress” — though the gesture was not extended to its retail and factory workers. Google gave its employees a $500 bonus and access to online tutorials to help them improve their resiliency after an internal survey showed a drop in wellbeing. Yet, many have also claimed that complaints of harassment or discrimination are met with a suggestion the accuser seek counselling—seemingly placing the blame on them, and not those at fault.

“I don’t know if it’s necessarily a permanent restructuring,” Kate Bahn, Director of Labor Market Policy at D.C.-based Equitable Growth, says of these new perks. Nor, she says, are these benefits being experienced across the labour market.

The job market has recovered quickly from the pandemic-induced recession, and it has meant that, overall, there are far more jobs available than people seeking jobs. “At least in the US, there’s a historic high number of job openings,” explains Bahn, “I think they started collecting data (on this) in the year 2004. Today, there are something like 11 million job openings. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

(To no one’s surprise, this advantage isn’t distributed equally. “The top line unemployment rate is not that bad,” continues Bahn, speaking still of the US, “but then if you look at specific subgroups, it’s a different picture. For example, unemployment went up for Black workers in August 2021. And so, it looks like our unemployment rate has decreased shockingly quickly—but the gap between Black and white workers widened.”)

The incentives for companies to offer a comfortable suite of benefits will wane once they’re no longer competing for employees—especially for jobs that do not require a specialised skill-set.

Judy Wert is a co-founder of Wert&Co, a go-to executive recruiting agency focusing on design roles. Her candidates are at the top of their industry, whose success often affords them a greater degree of choice that, in times such as these, is more often sparking serious reflection.

“Actually, I’m seeing some people have opted to become more of an individual contributor rather than a leader,” she says. “In this new era (post Covid) people are reflecting on what they really want to do. Where do they get their joy? Maybe they don’t need to be advancing the classic career ladder to make a good income for their family.” (Or maybe their career ceases to be an all-consuming priority.) It is within the range of options for those candidates to lean into established reputations and networks to carve out an entirely bespoke career path.

Yet, the parameters of  business “care” will always be cast in the mould of profit-making—even at their most generous. It is hopefully stating the obvious, but those who find success within a system don’t deserve more or better care than those who struggle within it.

It’s perhaps important to pause the story to also remind ourselves that the supposed success of these alternatives to work—and the scaffolding of care—were forged in a time of great uncertainty.  And they remain there.

We worked from home, it is said, and we were just as productive—or even more so. In praise of the office for the Harvard Business Review, Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of organisational behaviour, aptly reminds us that researchers know that such boosts in productivity—as seen during the pandemic—are often due to increased anxiety. Are we productive because we fear losing our jobs, of being forgotten, of letting down our employers in a time of crisis?

Just as we’ve seen individual productivity measured, now we’re also seeing our wellness quantified.

Speaking to a friend who works for a small creative company and who, generally speaking, loves his job, it’s a concern. “I do feel there is a lot of care, but a lot of it feels ‘automated’… for fuck’s sake, enough with the digitisation of everything at work, including our wellbeing.” How much do you feel connected? Appreciated? Empowered? How are your friendships at work? Are you happy today? Rank these all on a scale from 0 to 100. That is what is asked of him.

That tool used is Friday, a platform and app founded in 2019 whose user base increased ten-fold during the last several months, now sitting at 100,000 customers. Primarily used for individual time management, Friday more broadly attempts to recreate some of the outcomes that an office used to provide—helping workers learn by osmosis and observation, for example—in a digital-first way.  

“(Even before the pandemic,) there was a promise of more freedom and more flexibility, especially for women, especially for people who lived further outside of the city, but there were so obviously problems,” says Friday founder Luke Thomas. “We do not believe there is a replacement for in-person conversation—the rich dialogue, the body language… our view is you should do more of that… But you can kickstart richer real-time conversations if you basically collect some information behind a screen first.” And, the factor of the screen, says Thomas, can, reduce the inhibitions of employees to share honest feedback. One tool, in a kit of many.

Scepticism of wellness tracking perhaps speaks mainly to an unsurprising digital fatigue. We’re asked to input our whole selves into a device, and we haven’t found a sense of balance. So, for the time being, it feels to some like another form of surveillance. It highlights a conundrum: if more flexible working gives us a sense of emancipation, how much are we willing to accept the digital replications of “the office” our employers see fit until we again feel trapped? Even if those incursions to our freedom are in the name of better care.

That is, if care is here to stay. (Bahn points to a tried and tested way to make that happen: “Unions.”) And, if it is, will it extend across the workforce? It is telling that throughout the pandemic, at least in London, you could always find a fresh croissant. As a society, the workers we told should risk their lives to continue to serve was, at best, a very iffy judgement call.

Clockwatchers ends in a modest moment of triumph. Toni Collette as the once-meek protagonist Iris finds a small way to take advantage of her anonymity and the veneer of caring supervision at Global Credit to ridicule the corporate system. It’s her last day, and as the clock ticks to five, she amends her colleague’s vandalism: “I was never here.” Iris narrates: “When I look ahead, I imagine infinite possible futures, repeated like countless photocopies, a thousand blank pages. And in each one, I see myself, never hiding, never sitting silently, and never just waiting, and waiting, and watching the world go by.”

And the send-off is an existential call to arms: opportunity must be seized.

This article features in Riposte #13 - The Care Issue. Click through to our shop to order your print copy.