From wood to WFH

Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has helped organisations shed their ambivalence about work from home (WFH), the office décor business has swung into the act, repurposing office furniture into WFH-appropriate idioms. With many companies offering employees allowances to set up home offices, the accent is on cosy professionalism — light functional furniture, yellow lighting rather than harsh white light, the odd knick-knack — you get the drift. Truly, with WFH, the evolution of the office in India has reached a new egalitarian paradigm.

Back in the eighties, cosy and egalitarian were not adjectives you would apply to offices. Then, Indian business was entangled in the wiles of the Licence Raj, and office décor uncannily reflected the government’s closed-door economic policy and the hierarchical instincts of corporate life everywhere. If the company was conscious of its consequence, acres of forbidding and claustrophobic corridors lined with wood panelling and brass-embossed tags bearing the name and designation of senior executives were the order of the day. Many forests in India were sacrificed to the service of expanding corporate self-importance, even as the plebs sat at shabby open-plan workplaces piled high with files and papers. Noisy fans whirred — the hiss of air conditioning was the sound of privilege.

The influence of India’s colonial inheritance was at least partly responsible for this heavy-handed style. Those storied agency houses sought to mask behind opulent ornate Victorian and Edwardian facades the essentially exploitative nature of their businesses built on indigo, tea, opium, and timber. The contrived grandeur of this architecture can be seen in Calcutta’s Clive Street (the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, for instance) and Bombay’s older business houses (the Tata group’s Bombay House). But many emerging industrialists of post-independence India saw progress in modernity. Since independent India did not have a modern architectural idiom, the result was the explosion of high-rises of unsurpassed ugliness. Within, the Boss typically inhabited a top floor, lushly carpeted expensive art on the walls, curated coffee table books on gleaming table and ashtrays embossed with the office logo (smoking was still in fashion). And then, at a time when less than 1 per cent of the population owned phones, multiple models of those clunky ITI instruments on a mahogany desk made a powerful statement.  

By the nineties, as India sloughed off its “mixed economy” pretensions and the private sector came to play a more central role, office décor had made a noticeable shift. Eicher Motors’ promoter Vikram Lal’s airy office with a plate glass panel close-up of the trees outside offered one alternative to dense woodwork. At the other end of the spectrum was the rococo gilt and granite opulence of a new business house looking to make it big in the tractor business.

But the most visible sign of the brave new post-liberalisation world was the Essar corporate office, an aggressively shiny glass and concrete skyscraper overlooking the Mahalakshmi race course. A helipad — a novelty! — topped it and expensive art lined the inner walls of the executive floor. Then, the Ruia brothers had ambitions of becoming India’s infrastructure conglomerate with interests in oil and gas, steel and shipping, and this Singapore-style edifice reflected that spirit.

The Essar empire’s descent into the insolvency process was some years away but its headquarters presaged the direction of the modern office in India. It wasn’t just the externalities, interiors also reflected alterations in the approach to HR (itself a novel term in the late nineties). The influence of foreign corporations brought open plan offices into vogue, supposedly reflecting the quest for greater transparency and flat organisational structures (the two biggest corporate myths of the late 20th century). CXOs still enjoyed the privilege of exclusive offices but the accent had shifted to understatement. But those down the hierarchy enjoyed the same air-conditioning, lighting and decent furniture. Yesterday’s staff canteen and water cooler expanded exponentially to include gyms, recreation rooms, rest rooms, breakout rooms and hangout rooms, all designed to ensure that work-life balance — that great 21st-century corporate myth — was weighted in favour of the office.  

It was the new back-offices that set new standards in office chic. Reflecting the thrusting values of a youthful New India, the colours became primary, the décor edgy — film posters, jazzy prints — the furniture quirky. But this has been a short-lived trend. By the mid-2000s the concept of “hot-desking”— equipping employees with mobility devices to work from home and maintaining a cost-saving bare-bones office — presaged the era of WFH. Covid-19 has underlined those benefits like never before, Marissa Meyer’s reservations be damned. Only, those tranquil home offices of the ads are misleading. For most middle class Indians, finding a zone that is free of children, parents or in-laws is the real challenge of WFH that no HR department can solve.