Cosmos
Cosmos is a quarterly science magazine. We aim to inspire curiosity in ‘The Science of Everything’ and make the world of science accessible to everyone.
By Cosmos
If you knew that your every communication with your ‘work family’ were being analysed for its emotional intention and impact, who in that situation wouldn’t immediately begin to self-edit all of their communications writes Mark Pesce at Cosmos Weekly.
Few things have been more transformed by the pandemic than how we work. Everyone got sent home in April of 2020, and – unexpectedly – work continued to be performed. Differently – but companies still functioned, salaries got paid, and the economy, which had been expected to implode, chugged along without any major disruptions.
We couldn’t have expected that sort of outcome even a decade earlier. If the pandemic had struck in 2010, we’d have seen the wheels well and truly fall off the cart, as businesses, schools and the institutions of government all shuddered to a halt. Too few people had access to the kinds of connectivity and tools that make decentralised-yet-closely-coordinated work possible. Many of those tools – such as the now-ubiquitous Slack (and its Microsoft clone, Teams) hadn’t even been invented!
Every move you make
Today, around well over half of office workers either want to work remotely all the time or want the flexibility to decide when they come into the office. This ‘hybrid’ world of work feels like a continuous negotiation between employers and managers: managers plead for their staffs to return to the office, while their employees demand good reasons before they’ll invest the hours (and dollars) commuting. Something considered table stakes just three years ago now needs to be carefully justified.
Handwaving about ‘well-being’ does not justify continuous surveillance..
–author Mark Pesce
