The Nowhere Office
Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the Financial Times' BEST BUSINESS BOOKS OF 2022
What has changed in the workplace? Everything.
The traditional office was probably doomed anyway. Then a global shutdown changed everything we thought we knew about work, including where and when it needed to take place. Automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution have accelerated, and perhaps as much as one third of the world’s permanent workforce will soon become remote. In The Nowhere Office, Julia Hobsbawm offers a strategic and practical guide to navigating this pivotal moment in the history of work and provides lessons for how both employees and employers can adapt.
Hobsbawm draws on her extensive networks in business, academia, and entrepreneurship across generations to offer new ideas about how to handle hybrid working, as well as provides deep insight into how the way we work is being transformed by larger issues such as community, hierarchy, bias, identity, and security. The Nowhere Office describes a unique moment in the history of work which, if understood and handled correctly, can provide a springboard for the biggest transformational change in the workplace for a century: something better, more meaningful, and more workable for everyone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Business consultant Hobsbawm (The Simplicity Principle) delivers a rose-colored look at how the rise of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic has provided the opportunity for a "wholesale realignment of priorities." Contending that the "relentless rise of automation and new technologies" had led to "stagnant productivity and endemic stress" among office workers, Hobsbawm envisions a world in which a hybrid home/office model is the new normal. She contends that corporate offices will need to become more geared to networking and "learning, training, and development," rather than impressing clients and encouraging "presenteeism," and imagines that cities, in order to stem the tide of workers fleeing to the suburbs, will redesign their central business districts to be "much more mixed-use, residential, artisanal, and flexible in use of space." Elsewhere, she calls on businesses to accept the idea "that it's OK to work less, and to be more productive" and encourages HR departments to more clearly distinguish between their recruitment, training, conflict resolution, and firing functions. Though Hobsbawm's prescriptions are high on optimism and short on specifics, her message that "work can and should be not only a source of raw income but also a purposeful life itself" is inspiring. CEOs, managers, and employees will take heart in this encouraging thought experiment.
