What I miss about the office

I have been thinking about what I actually miss about the office.

Not what I am supposed to say I miss. What I genuinely do.

I miss the people. The coffees that were not booked in advance. The gossip. The routine. The feeling of being part of something bigger than my own week, and the feeling of being successful at it.

That list is real and it is longer than I expected when I sat down to write it.

Here is the other one.

The commute. An hour each way.

The room. A lot of people in one open plan office with no airflow whatsoever. Loud, in the way those floors are loud, which is never one loud thing but forty quiet ones. No say over the temperature. I was required to be in it, and then required to concentrate in it, and nobody ever treated those two requirements as being in tension.

The guilt. This one needs saying carefully, because it is not the complaint it sounds like. My boss was genuinely good. The policy was fine. I worked in HR, so I knew exactly what the policy said. None of that touched the small drop in my stomach when the school number came up on my phone, or when something was on at two in the afternoon that I wanted to be at and had to weigh first.

Being away from my cats all day. I am including that because it is true.

The politics, and the work that made no sense.

And the feeling that my own future was being decided in a room I was not in.

Then I looked at the two lists side by side and found the same word on both of them.

Purpose.

I miss having a purpose handed to me every Monday. I do not miss the work that made no sense, or the work I had no control over. Both of those were also handed to me, by the same organisation, in the same week, and I did not get to choose which.

That is what a big company actually gives you. Not the salary, which is the thing everyone costs correctly. The sense that what you are doing matters, and that somebody else has already decided it does.

I was Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse. Then technology reward at UBS, during the integration. Some of what I did there genuinely mattered. Some of it changed nothing at all. I could not always tell which was which at the time, and that is not a criticism of anybody.

When you leave, the purpose stops being handed to you. In the same moment, so does the nonsense.

You get to choose. Choosing is much harder than complaining, because it requires you to do something.

Not everything in corporate is bad, and I want to be clear about that, because there is a genre of writing about leaving that pretends otherwise and I find it dishonest.

Plenty of it was good. I learned things there I could not have learned anywhere else. But when I pictured twenty more years of it, sat in that room, an hour each way, it did not fill me with joy.

It took me a long time to say that sentence out loud, because it sounds ungrateful and it is not.

I am also not going to pretend that working for yourself is the answer and everything else is rubbish.

It covers a great deal of what corporate does not. It also comes with an amount of self doubt I was not warned about, and learning to trust yourself takes much longer than anyone tells you.

You have to sell. You have to say what your value is, out loud, in a way you have never had to before, to a person who is deciding whether to pay for it.

And in a big company somebody else tells you that you are doing well. A band, a title, a rating, and a room that settles it once a year. On your own, nobody does that. There is a real awkwardness in not being where you want to be yet, with nothing external confirming that you are on your way.

That is where I am. Still working it out, in public, on purpose.

Which brings me to something I should say plainly, because you will notice it anyway.

I have changed what I do. For the last eight months I helped senior people land the next role, and I am still glad to do that for anyone who asks me. But what I am building now is for the people who are not going to take another job. Helping you build your own practice, and the AI workforce that runs it, so that it does not cap out at the number of hours you personally have.

I made that decision because of the second list. Not mine. The one people kept sending me back.

Most people reading this cannot say any of it publicly, which is exactly why it goes unsaid and why everybody assumes they are the only one thinking it.

So if the second list is familiar, hit reply and tell me which line it was. Not a form, not a link. Just reply. I read every one of them, and nothing you send me goes anywhere else.

And if you have been thinking about doing your own thing, say that too, and tell me where you are stuck. I am shaping the next twelve months around what comes back, and I would rather build it out of what people actually say than out of what I assume. If what you send is the kind of thing I am building for, I will offer you half an hour to go through it properly.

Lisa