Avoiding the Sci-Fi Workplace Dystopia
Long before the pandemic started, remote work was on the rise. But the Covid pandemic caused it to skyrocket. Lockdown, which lasted almost a year and a half, allowed even employees and companies who had never experienced online working to start using tools that had been around for some time to facilitate remote work. However, entering the digital realm has its benefits and also its costs. When dealing with the Digital Environment, we should never assume that things will stay the same. It’s time to take a different approach.
These past two years, a lot of companies were forced to implement online dynamics in order to continue working. But along with worker flexibility came work monitoring. An investigation from the New York Times found that 8 of the top 10 companies in the world engage in some sort of productivity monitoring, including keyboard surveillance, webcam photographing, and screen recording. These tools track how employees spend their working day. Oftentimes, this ends up affecting paychecks and bonuses. Can we really blame companies for wanting to get better results? Or for using their resources better? Companies are implementing a quantitative approach to employment using the tools available to them.
However, not every aspect of working life can be quantified. A lot of tasks take place online, and some can’t be measured. To complicate matters more, some measurements aren’t designed to capture work quality. The future of work is definitely shifting. With a lot of companies changing to either hybrid modes of working or to remote working altogether, along with people who already work remotely or are digital nomads, perhaps it’s time to rethink our overall working model.
A tale of two brains
The American sci-fi psychological thriller series Severance (released earlier this year) showcases the life of a group of white-collar workers in a peculiar company. In a world where hybrid dynamics have mixed the balance and boundaries between work life and personal life, the workers at Lumon have a fixed dividing line. They were each subject to a medical procedure called ‘severance’ that splits the brain in two. Not only do work and personal life not mix, but when the workers are outside the company premises, they don’t recall anything that happened inside. They don’t even know what their jobs entail or remember who their coworkers are. Likewise, their professional ‘innie’ personalities don’t even know who they are outside of Lumon’s white walls.
What’s interesting about Severance is that it tackles the work dilemma from different perspectives: workplace surveillance, office spaces, the absence of human connection, alienating productivity quotas, and so on. Working life and models are changing all over the world. The Great Resignation, a significant economic shift that started in 2022, is also a sign of this. With one in five workers planning to quit this year due to salary stagnation, rising costs of living, lack of benefits, and hostile work environments, it is easy to see that a change is in motion.
Future work is digital work
The Digital Environment not only allows us to collaborate across time zones and countries; it puts forward a new way of thinking about almost everything. An asynchronous and omnipresent environment could really open up our beliefs about what the working world should look and feel like. The change won’t come from old companies acquiring digital tools because they only use them to fit their outdated ideas about productivity and what a focused, hard-working person is supposed to act like.
Historically, change has always come from the workers themselves, from collective action. What do people who have been working remotely for a long time have to teach us about the future of work? And what do they still need to sort out themselves? Severance presents us with a dystopia that can be applied to every aspect of modern work. Perhaps there isn’t a physical office one is forced to attend every single day, but there’s a disconnect between colleagues. Perhaps a company’s model or the results to be measured can be tweaked and improved. The future doesn’t have to be a dystopia. But to steer the course of change, we need people committed to bettering not only the workplace but also the social dynamics associated with our productive life.
