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If you told every executive director at a large corporation in mid-2019 that close to half of the U.S. workforce would work at home within the next year, they would at least have raised a skeptical eyebrow (and then probably called security to remove you ). Yet we are here.
Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, will close their physical offices until 2021. Twitter has told a lot of employees that they can work permanently from home. And now that we have nearly six months of involuntarily widespread work-from-home behind us, many other organizations are also reconsidering the value of office space.
In April, a Gallup poll showed that 62 percent of employees work from home, and 59 percent hope they could continue as much as possible once the pandemic is under control. While numbers have been declining for some time – the figures from the Stanford Institute for Economic Research in June showed only 42 percent of American workers work full-time from home – the fact that the relationship between people and their workplace remains has been dramatically restructured, maybe permanently.
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Management seems to be coming to the same conclusions. A Gartner poll in April found 74 percent of chief financial officers plan to at least fulfill the desire, shifting part of their workforce to permanent remote work to cut costs. The question is in how far companies will transform their definition of office to take advantage of the cultural and technical adjustments they have made to move things while offices are empty.
No matter how long it takes to get to the point where we can put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, it seems certain that the role of “the office” is bound to change. You do not have to search very hard to find utopian stories about the “office of the future” and “work after COVID.”
This will not be one of them.
I have not arrived as an inn of the new, shiny, corporate workspace of the future – instead, I want to throw a bowl of cold reality on the hype fire. What the past six months of leadership has taught many organizations is that their businesses can function adequately without people in the office and that balance sheets would look much more attractive if they could get rid of some of those real estate costs. Prepared for the onset of multi-year management consultancy.
I do not claim psychic powers. But as someone who has worked for many, many years in both “hybrid” and full-home capacity, I have some sense of what offices should be in the future – and what many of them will become independent of.
What is the office for, right?
For a very long time, the office has been the factory floor of information work. It existed as a warehouse of raw materials (office supplies) and vertical goods (submitted reports, balance sheets, and presentations). It’s an assembly line of content, an employee fair where managers can count on seats and monitor productivity. It is also the ship of corporate culture, where employees are marinated for good or sick in the steward of management and mismanagement, team building and destruction, and the casual conference room cluster.
As work has become increasingly digitalized, the production line aspect of an office space is less and less tethered to the physical space. But until recently, the role of the physical office has not changed dramatically, especially in industries that are not tech-centric or tech-savvy. Part of the reason is that for most of its history, IT infrastructure itself reflects the factory metaphor of work, with work closely linked to internal IT resources and access to data depending on connection to very specific networks. But this mandate in person was also in part because face-to-face interactions were seen as essential to organizational cohesion and effective management.
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Some organizations – such as consulting firms – can work quite well without an office, as they have traditionally been out of the office most of the time. But for many organizations, the office provides some things that cannot be replicated with complete loyalty in a very remote environment – places like the public library where my wife works. She has almost returned to work, but there have been some visible changes.
At first, only small shifts of staff were rotated in the library branches, before people were brought in for days of reduced length. Everyone socializes distance and wears masks; the break room has an occupancy limit of one. Cabinets that once held coffee makers, sugar and other delicacies were now police papered as a crime scene. Since there is not enough space for social distance in the staff workroom, tasks such as program planning, coordinating meetings, planning and professional development are best performed remotely. In addition, everyone now has work-home hours on their schedule.
Even if good remote work is possible, there are certain things that get lost without having any time in the office. Mentoring, informal personal collaboration, and other intangible matters can suffer without a shared physical space. Technical support may not be fully adequate for peak productivity. And while it does not necessarily mean commuting has helped with “work-life balance” during the lockdown, many people would be much happier if they could go to the office a few days a week for a better distribution of to get work and family life – yes, even if it’s just to hide a few hours for their children in a cooperative facility.
