New normal must earn its keep

I used to think the turmoil and a lack of definition in gender relations was one of the biggest and most destabilising generational changes in Kenya.

For, while our radio stations are full of accounts of what it is and isn’t OK for men and women to do to each other when dating, married or raising a family, at the heart of so much debate lies real confusion.

There was a time when each of our cultures knew what men did, and knew what women did, in roles policed vigorously by societies with sight, and without anonymity.

It wasn’t at all an ideal division of roles, leaving no women locked out of leadership and engagement, and setting aside swathes of their skills, experiences and insights.

Yet, as the old, flawed order has fallen, so the new order has remained a matter of experimentation: with every family left to work out, it’s own rebalancing, in a constant negotiation of change, parity and partnership.

That hasn’t been a joy for our youth, or society, with one consequence being more than 50 percent of Kenyan children now raised in single-parent homes, and thus depending on a lone, and sometimes isolated, adult for care as well as sustenance.

However, few of us would opt for the return of the old order of things.

Yet now, it seems, our world of work has also been catapulted into similar disarray — by Covid-19.

For, last week, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of an array of businesses that include electric vehicle maker Tesla, told his staff to get back to the office.

Home working was finished, he said, and anyone who didn’t do a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office would be considered to have resigned.

Asked, on Twitter, what staff should do who still wanted to work from home, he answered bluntly, as Elon Musk does, that they could pretend to work for someone else.

Thus, his solution to the very real array of problems generated by the rise of home working is to turn the clock back.

For those of us who run teams, employ people or contract freelancers by the hour, it’s clear people do get distracted, by the children, the family, the house needs, personal phone calls and other personal interests or matters.

But, more impactfully, the divide between the professionally driven and those who need jobs, but care far less about doing a good one, has become a gulf when working from home.

My own experience has been that productivity plummets, and I have now seen that echoed by many other employers.

I have also seen friends turn down jobs that were 100 per cent home working because they need the interaction — and predicted they would go stir crazy alone in their home all day every day.

But others have relished working from home, enjoying the end of commuting and the freedom of the self-regulation of their hours and activities. And that’s a change that has shifted the axis between employer and employed.

It used to be automatic that people came to work. Now it’s a negotiation and a tough one.

And who can count the number of aggrieved conversations where an employer has received nothing and asks for details of what’s been done the last four days?

Call logs or un-cc-ed emails are sent over as if they are on affront, or they are never sent, and the labour buyer is confronted with the unwanted decision to terminate or accept zero output and outrage at records. it’s destabilised everything.

So Musk is drawing more flak now. But home working will need to be built with access to workflows or as piece work, or there really will be, as he says, a lot of people — not all — who are only pretending to work.

The lesson is that if we are going to change the rules, the new order needs to be built to deliver, not just as a matter of throwing out the old rule book.

We need homes that create stable and happy units for all, and jobs that deliver successful task completion at a viable cost, old roles or new ones.