The debate about the merits of working from an office, or from home, will rage for years rather than months. Younger workers who live in shared accommodation, and need to be seen at work to speed promotion, have obvious incentives to go back. Factory floor workers, people who operate in tight-knit teams, or in people-facing roles, don’t have a choice. For older workers it’s more complicated but for many, the workplace is part of their social life. Middle-class, middle aged men meanwhile, may enjoy splitting work between the office, the home office and Dordogne office.
All of this begs a question at the outset - what is ‘the office’ for, in the age of the computer? I’ve spent the last 38 years working in financial markets, most of them as some kind of economist (the actual title on my business cards reflecting an attempt to boost my pay), usually on trading floors.
Trading floors have changed, however. This Youtube clip shows Citi's FX trading floor in 1980, and captures the environment when I started, except that in London, there was more banter and more swearing. 'I sit here and I listen' says the head trader, who uses the information flowing all around him to make money. The edge that traders on large trading floors, seeing big flows, had over smaller firms and their clients, was very clear. I loved watching the flow of information and money, and I loved the environment. But that's not what a modern trading floor looks like!
This on the Credit Agricole trading floor is more corprorate, and more recent. When the presenter says that a few years ago he couldn’t have stood in the middle of the floor and been filmed like this, because of the noise, that struck a chord. If I sit in a modern trading floor and listen, I will hear and learn very little.
A third clip, from a few years back, shows a trader at BNP Paribas in London. He sits in front of a large bank of screens and uses technology to provide financial solutions for for his clients. There's a lot of Bloomberg in the picture and a lot of numbers. There's no banter and no information flowing around the room.
The trading floor is no longer the nerve-centre of a bank. It's a room full of (hopefully) smart people using technology and information to provide both simple and complex solutions to clients. There is still physical interaction going on; Huddles of people try to solve something; someone asks a colleague to watch phones (and screens) while he/she grabs a coffee, and so on. But the morning meeting isn’t a physical gathering before the market opens, because the market’s always open. Instead, it's a conference call. It's often easier to call someone 20 feet away than leave your desk to find them, standing up and shouting is frowned upon and anyway, it’s much harder with banks of screens. And that Credit Agricole trading floor is for traders, sales people and structurers. Not a suitable place for me to hang out, then!
A modern trading floor provides maximum information and analytical power to a workstation, filling as much screen space as can fit in front of one person, so that they can do their job to the best of their abilities. Doing that job involves computer-based analysis, electronic trading, electronic communication, and a smidgeon of actual old-fashioned face to face talking. If there’s information that can legally be gleaned from the flows through the system, an algorithm will do that and deliver it to the trader.
What I need to be in work to do, is those conversations that help build teams, improve the flow of information and encourage us to question what we think and really understand what’s happening in markets. On a different post years ago, I wrote about the importance of creating a ‘virtual pub’ to encourage people to challenge views. Now I realise, there’s little point in the pub being virtual!
After lockdown ended I used, at first, to go into work in time for the 7am morning meeting, and sit in a near-empty office. After a while, I decided it was more productive to do the meeting from home, and head in around 10am. Now I wonder whether I shouldn’t vary between getting in for lunch with colleagues or arrive later, simply to chat to a few of them and then go to the pub. Because discussing marketing or publication plans is best done at lunch and debating markets is always best done in a pub.
I can’t speak for other industries’ workplaces, but trading floors have changed dramatically in the last 30 years. So has the computing power available to me, both at home and at work, and the means of communication. We’ve come a long way since the days of carrier-pigeons bringing news from Waterloo.I think the decision about where and how to work can only be answered by understanding how the workplace has changed. A trading floor, and any other place of work, still serves a purpose; it’s just a different purpose from the one it used to serve. The pub, which started life as a Covent Garden coffee house, still serves the same purpose as it did in the City a hundred years ago.
