Book Review: The Nowhere Office – Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
The Nowhere Office explores how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated changes in the nature of work have created a new type of office - a virtual space that is harder to define or manage.
You might think you’re getting ‘nowhere’ at work… but what if you’re not the only one? What if we’re all in The Nowhere Office?
Julia Hobsbawm makes a convincing case that if you’re a knowledge worker with a laptop, that’s exactly where you are in her book The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future.
Hobsbawm is an award-winning British writer, futurist of work, columnist for Bloomberg’s Work Shift, and a popular podcaster about the past, present and future of work. The book was first published in 2022 and reprinted last year.
In it, she explores, succinctly and compellingly, the seismic changes in the world of work in recent years and provides a series of predictions as to how our working lives might change even more and a call to action for us all to pay more attention to these changes and what they mean.
The nowhere office is one shorn of “fixtures and fittings,” at once a real and virtual space, much harder to imagine or categorise – or manage – than the traditional office building.
“Not since the industrial revolution has work undergone such intense and rapid change,” she writes.
Hobsbawm emphasises that the pandemic only accelerated trends like remote working, erosion of 9-5 standard hours, reduced face-to-face and vastly increased use of digital tools: it didn’t create them. She believes these changes are for the better, tilting the corporate power balance away from the higher echelons and giving employees more say over when, where and how they work.
Divided into ‘shifts’ rather than chapters, The Nowhere Office focuses on the professional class, which comprises 40% of the workforce in advanced economies. Hobsbawm examines almost every aspect of what constitutes ‘work’ or working conditions and asks us to think again.
She looks ahead to the changing role of office spaces, innovations like the four-day week, what will be required of leaders in a dramatically altered work world, and whether we will need to work at all.
Managers come in for a bit of a clobbering, seen as being too often inflexible, old-fashioned or Luddite. Culture is explored, too, in terms of whether a strong culture can truly be built through a screen, how generational attitudes to work differ, and why.
Hobsbawm derides the old physical symbols of capitalism, the massive city centre headquarters, as “palaces of presenteeism” though she sees no threat to the overall dominance of capitalism.
She goes into coaching mode to extol the importance of networking and how that can be done in a hybrid environment. Usefully, Hobsbawm’s network is extensive. She brings it to the book, sharing advice from business thought leaders such as Bruce Daisley (Fortitude, The Joy of Work and Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat) and commentators such as Ayesha Hazarika.
The Nowhere Office is very pertinent to professional communicators. Public relations is a knowledge-based profession in which much of the day-to-day can be done remotely, but it still requires people skills and human interaction, which the author explicitly states won’t go out of fashion – Hobsbawm positions them clearly as part of the essential mix of successful, productive knowledge work.
So while trends like increasing amounts of knowledge work, freelance contracts and digital nomadism put many of us, according to Hobsbawm, on the road to nowhere, her book ensures the journey takes you somewhere fulfilling.
Hobsbawm is set to follow up The Nowhere Office in April with a new book called Working Assumptions. It explores the speed and scale of the impact of AI and COVID-19 on the workplace.
The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
Julia Hobsbawm
Basic Books, 2023
£10.99
About Claire Munro
Claire Munro Chart.PR, CMktr is an award-winning communications professional and manager with over 15 years of experience in Scotland’s environment and housing sectors. She has been on the Committee of CIPR Scotland, a CIPR Pride judge, and has a CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications and the AMEC International Certificate in Measurement and Evaluation. Claire is both a Chartered PR and a Chartered Marketer.