The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-01)

The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 21

NEWS REVIEW

W

hen Martha was first asked to work remotely two years ago, she quickly found she was bored. But soon the 26-year-old saw the upside. It meant she could set her morning alarm for just 15 min- utes before the first meeting of the day, working as a product manager for a software company. If the sun shone, she could sit in the garden and scroll through Instagram without worry- ing that her boss would catch her learn- ing how to make the perfect sushi roll from scratch. Lunch breaks stretched from one hour to two: enough to fit in sev- eral episodes of her new Netflix series. As long as she sent a few emails every hour and turned up to the requisite Zoom meetings, her bosses were none the wiser about her “downtime” in between. Perhaps it is tales of workers such as Martha (not her real name) that have been stalking Jacob Rees-Mogg’s night- mares, driving him to leave notes on the desks of civil servants working remotely that read: “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” Not for the first time, the minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency was accused of being behind the times. The pandemic has shifted our working culture: the old British obses- sion with long hours — the longest in Europe according to a 2019 study by the Trades Union Congress — is fading. Hybrid working is the future, meaning more time out of the office, odd working patterns and alternative hours. No more nine to five, five days a week. Showing your face is a thing of the past. The new watchword for the way we work is productivity. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, hit the nail on the head last week when she asked: “Why are we measuring bodies behind desks? Why aren’t we measuring productivity?” She labelled Rees-Mogg’s letter-writing mis- sion “Dickensian”. Soon, as long as you’re getting the work done well, it won’t matter whether you’re working from a holiday home in Cornwall or a beach in the Maldives or commuting to the office five days a week. In terms of measuring value, as the mindset shifts from “presenteeism” to productivity, those in pointless jobs will no longer be able to hide behind water cooler chats and hours spent at the desk. The late sociologist David Graeber got there first with his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber claimed that despite advances in technology that ought to result in us working fewer hours than ever before, the modern era has brought the creation of an abundance of pointless work to soak up budgets and fill time. This doesn’t deliver much of anything other than the feeling of working. “We have seen the ballooning of... financial services... telemarketing, the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations,” he wrote. Martha might be the perfect example. Her job involves interviewing clients about how her company’s software is performing. There is nothing of obvious concrete value for her to produce apart from the occasional report, and most of the stuff of her work is meetings. As she found, much of it could be done in far less time than five days, or 40 hours a week. “I’m not going to complain if they’re pay- ing me the same,” says Martha. Hastened by the Covid-19 lockdowns, could a new focus on value, outputs and productivity, rather than hours and days, spell the end of Graeber’s bullshit jobs? Pedro Gomes, author of Friday Is the New Saturday: How a Four-Day Working

lockdown unfolded, if the proliferation in employee-monitoring products bought by paranoid bosses is anything to go by. Also known as “bossware”, the software tracks what you do while working from home: recording how many times a mouse is moved per minute; how many emails are sent an hour; the sorts of mes- sages you’re sending on internal messag- ing channels such as Slack. It can also record and transcribe your phone calls and take screenshots throughout the day. It is the digital equivalent of your manager hovering behind your desk. Shortly after the beginning of the pandemic, the interest of prospective buyers in one tracking tool, Prodoscore, increased by 600 per cent, CNBC reported. Another tool, Transparent- Business, saw a 500 per cent spike in monthly users. Much bossware is mar-

keted with slightly sinister names such as Teramind, InterGuard and Time Doctor. These tools also identify another hur- dle for changing the focus from input to output: how do bosses decide what to measure? It is easier to count hours worked and emails sent than to look at the bigger picture — whether or not a job is, in fact, a bit pointless. “There are some sectors where it is hard to measure. How do I measure productivity of lawyers? What if you’re an ordinary manager?” says Cary Cooper, a psychologist who coined the term presenteeism in the 1980s. Rethinking the value of our work goes both ways, argues Cooper, who recently published Remote Workplace Culture: How to Bring Energy and Focus to Remote Teams. He believes hybrid working mod- els will define our future. Working from home during the pandemic, he notes, gave lots of people the chance to rethink what they were doing with their lives. Last week, a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that one million employees have dropped out of the workforce as a result of the pandemic. About 400,000 are thought to have left for health reasons — but what about the rest? Have some discovered that without the trappings of office life, some jobs aren’t really worth doing? A YouGov poll in 2020 found that a quarter of British workers find their job lacks meaning, while 9 per cent believe their job is entirely meaningless. “People, particularly millennials and [Generation Z] have had a lot of time to think about this and they’ll probably say something like: ‘I don’t mind going off for a drink after work and I like to socialise,’ ” says Cooper. “Without that, they don’t actually like what they do there. They realise: ‘I’m in the wrong job.’ ” And it may be that the trouble is not simply that it’s the wrong job for them. It’s a job with no point, one that doesn’t need doing by anybody. Say farewell to the Great Resignation, Jim Armitage, Business, page 9 At home with Jacob Rees-Mogg, Magazine

17%

Not very meaningful

DOES THE DAILY GRIND GIVE YOUR LIFE MEANING?

26%

Very meaningful

45%

Fairly meaningful

9%

Not very meaningful at all

Source: YouGov questioned 1,150 adults, January 2020

owner of MRL Consulting Group, a recruitment agency in Brighton, redefin- ing the way he went about measuring value changed his life — and that of his employees. Stone switched from a five- day week to four in 2019, long before it was trendy to do so. “It’s a total mindset shift, and what you’ve got to focus on are your outputs,” says Stone. “We as a society have been conditioned to focus on inputs. We go to school five days a week, work five days a week, an office job is nine to five. That’s the way it’s always been. “A bit less chatter about football and Love Island at the watercooler and I get Friday off to spend with my five kids,” he says. The model he has adopted also allows for the all-important in-person interactions that benefit many members of staff, particularly younger ones. Despite Stone’s optimism, this new way of thinking does require a lot of trust: employers have to trust employees to deliver results without seeing their working-out behind the scenes. Employees, in turn, have to trust employers thoroughly understand their role and will set fair targets. Meeting those targets will become what workers can be judged on, not how hard they try or how nice they are. Yet this trust did not always hold up as

Do you need to be in the office to do a good job? Have your say at sundaytimes.co.uk/poll

Corden won a Tony award for One Man, Two Guvnors

Jacob Rees-Mogg was criticised as “Dickensian” by his fellow Tory Nadine Dorries after leaving notes for civil servants working from home

Week Will Save the Economy, suggests that a productivity over presenteeism approach is likely to force firms to reckon with what their staff actually do. His view is that technology has indeed enabled us to accomplish more in less time, and that as a result we needn’t be working five days a week. The Industrial Revolution shifted us from a six to a five-day week — he believes we are now ready to make the leap to four. “There is the argument that there is a lot of fat in the economy. So there’s a lot of things we do that we don’t really need to — that’s a waste of resources. The reduction of the working week will force competition,” Gomes says. We will have to trim that fat, eliminating so-called bullshit jobs — or at least reducing the parts of our jobs that are bullshit: pointless meetings, superfluous emails, self-fulfilling pro- jects and corporate team-build- ing days. For David Stone, 51, the

told me. “But there will be a period of readjustment. Apparently, Johnny Carson [presenter of The Tonight Show for three decades] said, ‘How do I carry on without a standing ovation every day?’ And I get that.” It will pain CBS, which airs The Late Late Show, to watch him go. It was bold to pick Corden in 2015, when his experience of both the States and chat shows was minimal. But in his seven years, by harnessing the internet, Corden revolutionised viewing figures for a show that airs when much of America is in bed. He is more power- player than personality now, and his production company, Fulwell 73, which he runs

with old friends, has branched out even further. It made the Bros documentary After the Screaming Stops, plus last year’s Friends reunion. From Netflix to Apple to Amazon, everybody will want a piece of him — bidding plans to sign him to a streaming giant will certainly have begun. Closer to home, others wait for the phone to ring. Mathew Horne said recently that he would love to work with Corden again. “I see James rarely,” admitted Horne, a man who knows what it is like when our friends become successful. “But it was really emotional to see him again for the [2019 Christmas] special. I would love to do it again. But it’s down to him.” He is waiting. As is the industry. Corden makes money, lots of it, which is the reason naysayers should move on. People in his business do not get the work that he does unless they are liked and watched by millions. Just exactly who is James Corden then? I am not even sure that he knows yet.

on one of his rare trips back to his hometown of London from Los Angeles. We talked about his plans for when the lucrative talk show days are over. He said he would like to go back on stage one day, where he started out, notably in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in 2004. This week, though, he said he wants to write again. “I’d like to see if I’m capable. The fact it’s terrifying is the reason to do it.” It surely won’t be easy to go back to treading boards, or penning scripts, after spending eight years glad- handing the richest and most famous. He drove around Liverpool with Paul McCartney, singing Let It Be. Theatre director Sir Nicholas Hytner thinks it can be done, though. He directed Corden in One Man, Two Guvnors at the National, giving the actor a boost in 2011 after a dreadful sketch show (Horne & Corden, with his Gavin & Stacey co-star Mathew Horne) and the ghastly film Lesbian Vampire Killers. It turned into the actor’s finest critical hour, winning him a Tony award.

Corden’s

coming home

— and he wants

to do more

than count

his millions

More theatre, writing and producing beckon for the US talk show darling, and his old mates are waiting for the call, writes Jonathan Dean

S

o far, during a 20-year career, James Corden has managed to be an actor, writer, producer, comedian, quiz host and cat (in Cats). His most recent big stint has been as a talk show host. All of which makes his next step, after announcing he will leave The Late Late Show in 2023, so unpredictable. Is he coming back to the UK? Well, his football team, West Ham, are doing well, so it must be tempting. But not even that is certain for the 43- year-old and his family of three kids (aged 11, seven and four) and wife, Julia. Will he take a break? Unlikely. Will he do what other British funnyman Stephen Merchant did and try out serious acting? Corden as a serial killer? Put nothing past this versatile star, whose career already spans from singing with Michelle Obama in Carpool Karaoke on The Late Late Show, to acting in the film All or Nothing, by the stalwart of sadness Mike Leigh. Yet people still question his talent. A few years ago, I met him Singing Carpool Karaoke with Michelle Obama in 2016

Jacob Rees wascriticis “Dickensia his fellow T Nadine Do after leavin notes forc servants w from home

staff actually do. His view gy has indeed enabled us more in less time, and that needn’t be working five heIndustrialRevolution a six to a five-day week we are now ready to o four. argument that there is e economy. So there’s a e do that we don’t really a waste of resources. The he working week mpetition,” e to trim minating it jobs — ducing ur jobs llshit: tings, ails, ro- o- d- d e

He has too creative and fertile a mind

“I know James misses the stage and wants to do more,” said Hytner. “It will surprise me if he doesn’t, at some point, start appearing on stage again relatively regularly. There is no way he is going to be a chat show host for ever — he has too creative and fertile a mind.” But Corden’s Carpool Karaoke session with Adele has been watched more than 250 million times, and, like Harry Kane turning out for Ridgeway Rovers again, don’t some stars get too big to go back? “I hope not,” Corden CBS/GETTY IMAGES

It’s not how busy you appear but what you produce — and some jobs face a brutal reckoning, writes Madeleine Spence

The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 21

NEWS REVIEW

One million employees are estimated to have dropped out of the workforce because of the pandemic

ARTWORK:TAMARA KONDOLOMO

The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-01)

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