Writing of the future workplace in one Time issue this month, Eloise Barry wondered how the pandemic, and with its "mask mandates, social distancing and enhanced hygiene practices" have slowly reconfigured office-space. Referencing a largely 'western' office structure and addressing a largely 'western' audience, she noted how "creative shared spaces" were both popular and better reflected individual preferences. How "the sea of desks typical of traditional office spaces" were being replaced by "large booths, plush lounge spaces, production studies, and dedicated 'listening rooms'," raises questions if future offices would become "Club Offices," resembling typical "social clubs."
Here, too, lockdowns and the shift to both online offices and education brought Bangladesh into this conversation. Amending traditions, students, for instance, made the difficult transition to online education from 2020 (without training, often without purchasing funds), then shifted to hybrid teaching (mixing online and offline versions) when class teaching resumed this year. Two years of experimentation helped us peek into what looks like an even murkier future.
Those working in offices, as bureaucrats and professionals, faced a similar predicament: although urban offices have largely returned to pre-pandemic work modes, online functions, transactions, and platforms may be bouncing back for other reasons, suggesting how exogenous features complicate endogenous planning in this software age.
One post-Ukrainian war lesson, inflation, may be forcing a return to a partial online solution in both education across Dhaka and incrementally in offices (to save energy costs). Since this predicament is unlikely to be softened or rectified immediately, the sooner we adjust (at the micro level), the better collectively (at the macro level).
In addition to external or exogenous triggers, domestic dynamics have also been chipping into this transition. Traffic congestion, for example, on Dhaka's crowded streets, has made us more inefficient. Rising costs, for example, curtail the scope for 'creativity', throw us into a retreat trajectory (from which progressive 'porosity' becomes difficult), and warns foreign investors to stay away. Online alternatives or automation assuage these concerns, at least for now.
Returning to Barry's piece, since we continue to prefer those "desks typical of traditional office spaces," Bangladesh's different working cultures could profit by comparing 'western' and 'eastern' models. Two facets expose what is at stake: social contexts and time-management styles. Whereas the former informs us of how hierarchical or 'even'/'flat' the social playground within which the office domain is situated, the latter exposes metamorphoses in office-impacting nuances, such as in gender treatment. Reverence and deference play a big part in our societies (for the elders, or those vocationally stationed higher up, and so forth), in turn imposing limits upon 'creativity' and the kind of 'sharing' that leads to 'porosity' in shaping work-spaces. By contrast, individualism undergirds 'western' societies, even to the extent of softening the same strictures and structures, for both the elderly and professional superiors. Our 'extended' family structure functions as an inclusive social platform, unlike the exclusive 'nuclear' 'western' counterpart. Office-spaces cannot compromise such 'eastern' traits as rapidly or readily as the 'western'.
Time-management illustrates this more robustly. Rather than to social strictures or structures, 'western' societies pay reverence and deference to time-management. 'Lunch from 12 to 1" exemplifies one of the unwritten codes in 'western' societies, in a way it faces a facetiously dismissive 'eastern' response. Navigating, even balancing, written and unwritten codes enters our agenda almost automatically, and in a way they do not in the 'west'. This is more evident in the greater reverence we pay religious practices, particularly fitting fluctuating prayer time-slots into work schedules. There is no 'western' counterpart large enough to catch our eye.
The pandemic formalised balancing the written (online) and unwritten (free-for-all, business-as-usual regular life). In a countrywide survey conducted by Independent University, Bangladesh's Global Studies & Governance (GSG) Department, women particularly approved the emergent 'social balancing' window: they could harmonise classroom study and domestic chores (even motherly obligations if a parent), rather than become a perpetual victim of them, all from one location. Online education became the unthinkable clincher amid unpredictable traffic-congestion.
Will Dhaka's evolution, in whatever direction shape the emergent workspaces? More succinctly, will Dhaka reproduce the 'western' "Club Office" laced as it is with "modular sofa systems, flexible partitions, and foldable desks that fit together like a puzzle?"
Our more hierarchical and patriarchal social bent has already thrown a curveball preventing us from changing the office-space physically. Our disdain for social symmetry in our own personal lives (even though we clamor for democracy), mirrors our resistance to change: who would bring our coffee or wash the cups for us? Yet, changes of sorts cannot but seep into the office. We even invite them: our office signboards often mix Bangla and English, and often in their alliterated forms. This 'best of both worlds' mindset is growing, without threatening dominance.
Anyone noticing newer governmental-constructed buildings, for example, in Agargaon or Saat Rasta, cannot but respect new architectural flavours and styles, even interior designs, for opening gateways to 'creativity' and more 'porosity'. Traditional governmental constructions, as evident in the Secretariat on Topkhana Road or the housing estates in Azimpur, Eskaton, Kalabagan, and Rajarbagh, among other neighbourhoods, may be just too staid to survive 21st century tastes.
As nuances and subtler styles have permeated our taste-buds, whether they dig deeper may be dictated by other evolving features, some staying too long to even claim a traditional touch: the paucity of land, thus forcing us to build vertically rather than spreading out horizontally, which limits 'creativity', while making redesigning far costlier (and less visible). Congestion, too, forces us to invest more time and attention to cling on to what we have (our property) than to divert it to innovate or explore new versions of what we have.
Such mental battles notwithstanding, our ancient villain, traffic congestion directly (or because of it), might also catalyse the key breakthrough. Even with huge infrastructures being built and meant to alleviate us of our traffic nightmares, news of particularly the metro-rail to Joydevpur becoming more expensive and taking far more time deflates any desirable 'creative' intentions with property or space redesigning. It seems, the more we fix problems in one arena or sector, another one crops up as a byproduct elsewhere.
This then takes us to a final feature in the conundrum: Bangladesh seeking to become a developed country (Vision 2041 mandate). Will our office spaces commensurately reflect the Fourth Industrial Revolution expectations of facilitating software exchanges? Or will it simply continue to remain behind archaic desks? Must we continue with our workplace outfit introduced by the British in the 19th Century, or brew something new for our children to look up to?
Innovative ideas do not sink in under fleeting circumstances to make a difference, which is precisely why we need the brash and the bold to take us out of the 20th Century into the 21st.
Professor Imtiaz A Hussain Department of Global Studies & Governance,
Independent University, Bangladesh.
