The panopticon
There are three ways to tell if people are hard at work in an office:
- the boss can watch them go to meetings. And they can watch each other in meetings as well.
- the boss can watch them sit at desks in an open office.
- we can make promises to each other and then keep them.
It seems as though only the third one is a useful, long-term way to allow us to do our best work together. The first two can help along the way, but if a meeting or an open office exists as a convoluted way to do surveillance, you’re probably wasting precious energy and trust.
And while transferring our work to home makes #1 even easier and #2 irrelevant, I’m still lobbying for #3.