“The ‘Nowhere Office’ is a moment we are in today,” says Julia Hobsbawm. She’s referring not just to the title of her new book, but also to what she describes as a new kind of landscape in which we now work. Over the past two years we’ve had to recalibrate our approach to our employment and employees in the face of continually shifting restrictions brought about by Covid-19 public health restrictions. This readjustment she says, “wasn’t caused by Covid. But it was accelerated by it.”
Many of us now work in a “liminal space”, says Hobsbawm, which is an umbrella term for the elements that make up today’s hybrid working. This space lies between those who are able to carry on in their workplace unaffected and those who are totally remote, working on the other end of a wire and hardly ever physically checking in.
What Covid has done, says Hobsbawm, is push more people into a space that she accepts was already populated by internet-enabled and freelance businesses...