The Second Great Working From Home Experiment, but What Happened to the First?

“The real trick in highly reliable systems is somehow to achieve simultaneous centralization and decentralization” Karl E. Weick

One of the many consequences of Covid-19 has been the great working from home experiment. Life is suddenly full of Zoom calls, with the now familiar grid of heads, and the cameo appearance from someone’s misbehaving child. But it is not the first time that many of us have worked from home. In fact, nearly 250 years ago it was a bit of a norm. So why did we give it up back then, and why is our society moving full circle back towards it now? It concerns an area of efficiency called centralisation, and a trade-off with its more scalable adaptable counterpart, decentralisation.

The Cottage Industry — an Age of Decentralisation

In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of the British population, much like the rest of Europe lived rurally and engaged in agricultural work. One common pastime was spinning or weaving at home so that families could create cloth to make clothes for themselves. The mother or daughter would spin the yarn and the father would do the heavy work of weaving.

By the eighteenth-century efficiencies due to innovations such as fertiliser, fen drainage and crop rotation meant people were becoming more productive and were finding a bit more time beyond basic survival.

Britain had long been a chief supplier of wool to the textile merchants of Europe. But now local merchants saw an opportunity to tap into this local skill base and rather than just supply the raw materials, produce textiles themselves and sell them instead. The merchant would purchase the raw materials and then put these out to different domestic workers to turn these materials into cloth. The workers were paid piece-rate based on what they produced.

Initially they would do the textile work in the slack time between their agricultural work — in the winter for example. But as it became more lucrative, they started to take on more and more textile work until they were more a spinner or weaver by profession than an agricultural labourer. Production gradually expanded beyond just wool and into cotton, silk and flax (linen). Thus, ushered in an age referred to as the putting out system or cottage industry. This is seen as an early form of industrialism.

In this era, workers were unsupervised and had autonomy where they could choose when or how to do the work. They may have a slow start to the week to socialise or carry out personal business. Then pick up work mid-week and work hard to the end of the week. Work was flexible as it was not measured on a time schedule but on the output of work. How they did the work was up to them. The merchant would merely judge the quality of their work when he picked up the goods.

Factories — an Age of Centralisation

As this market became more lucrative and therefore more competitive, merchants with growing amounts of capital were looked for new ways to invest and make more profit by increasing the efficiency of their production. The answer was to come from technology. A number of innovations saw the tools of the textile world develop to handle more complex operations, then more concurrent work and finally to be powered so that they could do the work of many people.

In order to exploit this powered machinery work had to be centralised into one location to take advantage of a centralised power source — firstly water and later steam. Thus was born the factory. It was called the factory system — and it was a system. The machinery was centre stage and the people were either ancillary to support the working of that machinery, or given specialised tasks that were not yet automatable, effectively making them an extension of the machine. A cog in a greater machine.

The cottage workers couldn’t compete. The new machinery could do far more work them. Adopting the machinery wasn’t an option as it was too large for cottages, too expensive and required power. It only became viable at a certain scale — that being the factory.

Now that work was centralised, it opened the door to many new economies of scale. The physical proximity allowed sharing and optimising of the three fundamental makeups of our world — that of physical matter, energy and information.

Shared energy of the power source instigated the centralisation. With regards to matter, there was a lot of savings in transport. In the putting out system the merchant had the transaction cost of transporting materials back and forth between lots of different cottages, something that was often carried out by a middleman. In a factory all the raw materials were delivered direct and worked upon on site, eliminating transport costs and cutting out the middleman. Also, many cottagers would specialise in a particular skill — perhaps spinning or weaving. This meant that transporting back and forth had to happen multiple times for the same goods. Early factories followed the same path but as machinery advanced, factories matured so that they became multi-disciplinary and could turn raw materials into finished cloth, saving further transaction costs.

With the increased scale, there was also the challenge to coordinate and get the most out of the workers. Centralisation allowed efficient information flow through centralised control. The physical proximity meant workers could now be watched, supervisors were hired to control them, and workers could be fined for the most innocuous of infractions. A hierarchy formed with top down decision making between the factory owner, supervisors and then the workers. Standardisation of work methods allowed a more consistent quality of work saving effort on verification and rework.

The other new method of control was the clock. As the workers were now employees of the factory owners, rather than contractors, they were expected to work set hours. The workers had never had to work to a schedule before. Work bells were introduced to start the day. Turning up even a couple of minutes late would mine a fine, or even a beating for many of the children that were employed to do the work. The workers hired a knocker-up who would use a long pole to knock on their upstairs window each morning to get them up in time for work. As David Landes put it “the factory was a new kind of prison; the clock a new kind of jailer”

The obsession with ever more efficiency led to more exploitative and unsustainable methods. Machines would be worked 24 hours a day. Workers would do shifts of up to 18 hours. Most of the workers were unskilled women and children because they were cheaper and the strength and skill of men were no longer required due to the machines. Working conditions were appalling. The noise of the machines was deafening all day long and the workplace was uncomfortably hot due to the machines. Cotton dust choked the air leading to chest and lung issues. Industrial accidents were commonplace with many maimed or killed. For those that survived, long term health issues were to be expected. Total efficiency is rarely humane.

Eventually this exploitation and lack of ethics would lead to government legislation banning child labour and limiting working hours. The workers also used centralisation of their own to form unions to fight for their rights. A deep divide had been created between the workers and their management — there was an air of distrust. The origins of political movements such as socialism and communism were based on this divide.

Frederick Taylor later finessed a lot of this efficiency thinking with his scientific management movement. He believed management should analyse the work, break it into tasks and work out how much time workers should take to do tasks. The scientific part was the experimentation to identify the optimal time for a task. This included optimising the motion of the workers like the optimal amount of material to have on a spade. He also recognised that without breaks the workers would slow down so there was some humanity in this approach. The workers had nothing to do with this decision making however so it did nothing to heal the rift between management and the work force. One of Taylor’s zealots was Henry Gantt, who would go on to create the Gantt chart, still popular in project management today.

Centralisation had defined this era. Centralisation in space of physical structures and people, and with the social organisation, centralisation of decision making through strict hierarchical control, time management and the dysfunction of distrust between management and workers. This centralisation continued beyond textiles to other industries. The centralised work places brought workers to live nearby. This brought centralised infrastructure to trade on the necessities of life for the workers. In turn this fuelled the rapid centralisation of people into towns and cities.

Today — Centralised or Decentralised?

So, what of today? Certainly, the effects of centralisation are stronger than ever. The vast majority of us live in towns and cities. The increase in scale is dramatic.

With regards to matter and energy, some decentralisation has become necessary for businesses because of the increased scale in today’s global economy. We have moved past individual factories of hundreds of people to large corporations with thousands, sometimes up to hundreds of thousands, of employees. The logistics of servicing for that global market can mean hundreds of sites, in dozens of countries and across many time zones.

At a local level within these organisations however, centralisation is still effectively the norm. We still have factories, as well as other modern centralised environments such as the office or the supermarket.

But what of information and centralised control? Information has arguably overtaken matter as the key component to our economy. We live in the information age. The irony is that technology triggered our move to centralisation but it may ultimately revert us back towards more decentralisation. For it allows us to share information without physical proximity. This can be used to maintain the traditional approach of centralised top down hierarchical control. But the scale and the hierarchy depend not only on the technology but the people themselves. This creates delayed and distorted information flows which hinders control.

This is exacerbated by the pace of change in the modern world due to the exponential innovation cycle that we are on which is trying to keep pace with our exponential economic and population growth. The hierarchy lacks adaptability to the changing environment that it is operating within.

As a result, organisations are showing a trend towards decentralised control which introduces more decoupling within the hierarchy, or a flatter hierarchy. This reduces the information flows and allows more adaptation to feedback from the current environment. This is the driver behind the move from management to servant leadership. Where there is more delegated authority, more empowering of the workforce, and with emphasis moving towards enabling rather than constraining control with strategies, values, purpose and goals.

So, if information rules and we are trying to decentralise more, what has stopped us from working remotely? One thing has been that up until now, technology has been unable to replicate the richness of immersive face-to-face communication — and this is critical to ensure we align and adapt effectively in our rapidly changing world. But the gap is closing.

Messenger with its emoticons which crudely emulate body language has provided a more interactive, informal, and efficient form of communication than email. Tools such as Slack have built on both of these by providing more transparency to wider groups. Then there have been tools such as Skype which improved on the one-to-one interaction of the telephone, with visuals providing some degree of communication through body language, and at least some feeling of presence with your colleague. Zoom has added to that by creating a presence for groups, allowing more effective meetings with more interactive features such as polls and seamless screen sharing.

The tentacles of traditional centralised thinking have also had some influence on preventing working from home — those of mutual distrust and a need for strict hierarchical control between managers and workers; as well as the control of time management. The boss might work from home. But workers need authorisation to do so, and only if there is some definite need. As for all workers working from home, how would we control them? Would they do their hours? How would we even know?

The Working From Home Experiment

Then there was Covid-19! So, what has the experiment taught us?

Working from home does work. It’s still not as good as face-to-face communication. Some people complain of lots of Zoom calls but are these just replacing lots of office meetings? There are distractions — like a curious child entering the room, or the whirr of a vacuum cleaner. But let’s face it, there are lots of distractions in the office too. There can be a lack of informal work chat that is key to forming bonds with your team mates. Although many teams are trying to compensate for this with ideas such as after-hours Zoom drinks. Again, with time I’m sure we will adapt to this.

Some people don’t have a quiet, secluded area to work in the house, or others might simply not want to work from home, preferring that physical separation. But given this change was thrust upon us overnight, if working remotely was a norm we would evolve more naturally to this way of working. House layouts would start to incorporate this.

Or perhaps a compromise for those who don’t want to work from home may be popup offices which are conveniently located nearby and offer the service of a designated small office space, isolated from lots of people working for other companies in the same area, and where you then immerse yourself with your team mates through technology. Or maybe just a comfortable recliner in the bedroom and a pair of virtual reality goggles?

On the plus side, much like the cottage workers of the eighteenth century, we are finding the flexibility of working from home can give us many benefits. The saving of significant travel time can be put to better use. More time is spent with the family — over lunch, or during a five-minute tea break.

With the cynical traditional view of people as cogs in a machine, the expectation was that once you enter the office, you completely divorce yourself from your home life. But things crop up or need to be dealt with at awkward times and that viewpoint merely creates tension that ultimately distracts people from their work. Working from home gives you the freedom to quickly deal with any personal concerns or issues at an appropriate time without any disruption to others and ensures that you can keep a clear mind for work.

Another aspect of the information age is the manner in which a knowledge worker achieves productivity. It is quite unlike mechanistic work where productivity is more linear with time. Creativity often occurs by ruminating on an idea or a design, followed by down time by distracting yourself with something else. This is different from an interruption — it is a distraction on your terms. Then when you return to the issue later it all falls into place. It is easier to structure this way of working with more autonomy and what better place to achieve that than the freedom of your own home.

Also, it implies a greater degree of trust between you and your manager and that certainly must be a good thing. Perhaps too people will be judged more by the output of their work, just like the cottage workers, rather than merely doing the hours, a slave to the clock jailer. After all, surely your output is the fundamental gauge of your efforts?

So, will remote working remain the norm after Covid-19? And if it does, what will the long-term implications be for those bastions of centralisation our cities? For your work location would now be spatially decoupled from your home. This would level the job playing field from working in the hectic hustle and bustle of central London or equally so the sleepy pace of a Scottish island. The choice would be yours. Will this stop city growth or even reverse it? What do you think?

References

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World — Joshua Benjamin Freeman

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 — Friedrich Engels

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History — Kassia St Clair

The Penguin Social History of Britain: English Society in the Eighteenth Century — Roy Porter

Iron, Steam & Money: The Making of the Industrial Revolution — Roger Osborne