Opinion: The summer of 1998 was a hot one – it would ultimately deliver what was at the time the warmest February on record. The first of the four 110 kV cables connecting Auckland’s CBD to the national grid failed on January 20, then the other three went successively on February 9, 19 and 20. There was no hope of a low-capacity line from Kingsland sustaining the city centre’s electricity needs and the Auckland power crisis began.
I was working for IDG New Zealand, publisher of Computerworld, and our office at 246 Queen St went dark. We were fortunate that the lights went out on a Friday, Computerworld’s publication day, so we had more than a week to become a distributed operation and get the next newspaper made in our homes and garages. With the help of the new technology we wrote about, we did it.
Five weeks later, the lights went back on, the thud and stink of inner-city generators subsided and everyone began to return to the office. Everyone, that is, except me. I had always been annoyed by the distractions of the office, the ridiculous waste of time involved in even a short commute and the fact that if I happened to have an errand in Ponsonby, I couldn’t just go and do it. Even with what now seems like a comically slow internet connection, working from home was bliss.
Eventually, I slunk back in, asked for a meeting with the boss and told him I really didn’t want to come back. He took it well: it was an experiment the company needed to have, he said, and I was the one to do it.
I went home and worked hard, establishing a habit of rising at 6am to populate the company’s website with stories from its international newswire. I attended to errands in Ponsonby as they arose. I congratulated myself on being what was called at the time a “knowledge worker”. I was first to the future.
Twenty-six years later, Finance Minister Nicola Willis warned that the practice of working from home for at least part of the week – which had developed during another crisis, the pandemic – had gone too far. Willis’s target, in more than one way, was Wellington public servants – she issued new guidance clarifying that working from home was “not an entitlement” in the public sector – but the idea quickly gained legs.
Viv Beck, CEO of Auckland central business group Heart of the City, shared research indicating that 30,000 fewer people were coming into the city centre than before the pandemic and called on Auckland Council to set an example by being less flexible about how its people could work. The council declined to act, but on the internet the right to “WFH” had already become a culture war issue, alongside raised pedestrian crossings and electric cars.
Ironically, Auckland’s CBD is actually home to more than 38,000 people now – 30,000 more than in 1998 – and they presumably shop and eat at the businesses Beck represents. The precinct’s future may lie more with them than with the 30,000 Beck would fetch back in from the suburbs to serve the full five days a week. On Fridays especially, evening rush hour is less frantic than it used to be. Tens of thousands more commuters is not a happy prospect. Families who have adopted new ways of working to attend to the needs of their kids are also unlikely to want to spend more time at the office.
Yes, productivity matters, but there are better ways to measure productivity than a roll call. Perhaps we should trust public and private organisations to make their own arrangements with staff in broadband-rich 2024. And please, let’s not have yet another culture war about it.
