Throughout the pandemic much discussion has focused on the question of what may change fundamentally going forwards as we embrace a ‘new normal’. No topic has attracted as much as attention as the need to work in offices.
Some have already seemingly decided. The likes of Facebook, Slack, Shopify and even Microsoft have all made firm commitments to allowing staff the choice to work from home indefinitely. Many others are following.
Is this the end of the office as we know it? My view is not if you want to maximise your chances of being a successful business. That’s not to say you can’t make it work running a business remotely without an office. It’s just your success will be despite of it and not because of it. In reality you’ve almost certainly limited yourself.
To begin it is worth noting that this isn’t by any means the first time the office has faced an apparent existential threat. With the early advent of mobile phones and computers in the late 80s and early 90s the buzz was around the rise of so-called telecommuting and the demise of the office 9-5.
Despite only possessing what we would see as prehistoric forms of technology versus what we have today the end the office was predicted. Not only was the fate of the office determined but various new benefits were prophesised to those who moved beyond ‘the office model’. This wasn’t about simply standing still. Abandoning the office heralded unique opportunities.
Firstly, all employees, from busy executives to lower level employees alike, could avoid their time-consuming daily commutes. This was a growing problem at the time given growing urban transport congestion as the price of cars fell substantially in 1970s and 80s. Secondly, Telecommuting was also set to allow a business access to a wider talent pool. No longer would who you hired be limited to their proximity to the office and ability to reach it. Finally, with everyone working remotely the expensive city centre or urban office could be done away with along with the multitude of support function roles needed to maintain and operate an office. It would make you money.
It was as they say a win-win. Good for employees and the for the wider business.
Yet the office has survived and before Covid struck was still as relevant as ever. This despite the technology that underpinned the reasoning for ‘the end’ back in 90st exponentially improving in both affordability and available functionality / quality. Why has the office survived?
Not only did it survive but it went through a period of real renaissance after the start of the new Millennium. A new breed of global technology companies set about disrupting the world on a scale never seen. They all did so with one thing in common; their operations were run from central offices. Not just any offices either. Apple, Facebook and Google, to name a few, all built super-offices and called them campuses.
Getting people together in the name of work was still very much the done thing. It was about how best to facilitate the interaction that was evolving. As they set about changing the world they did so anchored in an office model.
Gone were the aisles of desks arranged to maximise occupancy capacity surrounded by executive offices and in came break-out spaces, open plan floors and, for a reason I’m yet to understand, pool tables or more unaccountably table tennis areas. The office was once again in the ascendancy.
The renaissance was widely embraced around the world, along with its measures, and I think this was the catalyst for a new wave of scepticism about the role of the office. As to be honest, many firms who tried to incorporate the ideas of Silicon Valley offices had a mixed experience at best shall we say. And with good reason.
Never before Silicon Valley came along, or after, had any employee in Hull or Slough asked for a pool table to improve their working lives. A subsidised canteen, yes. A decent coffee machine, yes. Pool tables no. Yet here we were with Senior Execs introducing these ‘perks’. It was like watching parents tragically try and look cool in front of their kids.
Executives would note the warm welcome such measures received from Employees as evidence of a job well done. They failed to recognise that Employees feel a pressure to ‘go along’ with things they know are attempts to improve their lot, however bad they are. They fear rejecting or criticising may scupper any more plans that could be worth their while. An instinct we are taught from an early age. “Be grateful for anything you get gifted”.
In my own experiences we saw Playstations and other perks like pool tables appear in the offices and they all had a common outcome. They became desolate zones of fear most of the time. Either employees, who were already busy throughout their day, didn’t understand when they were meant to use them, or they were terrified to use them and be seen by a more senior manager while they had work outstanding (which is always). They were introduced hoping to foster a new type of culture that no one felt they had they had the backing to participate in.
The brightest could see the gaping and obvious flaw by going to visit the executive floor or area. The most successful and senior leaders of the organisation – that more junior employees would rightly look up to and want to emulate – had no pool tables, or breakout areas or Playstations. Here then were ideas so terrific the best in the business saw no reason to embrace them.
In short, it wasn’t the office that was to blame. It was that leaders failed to understand you can’t simply buy a change in culture. And you certainly can’t change a culture if the leadership ignore the very tools of engagement you think are meant to foster that change.
There were also other factors that further boosted scepticism. The financial crisis in 2007/08 forced businesses everywhere to look again at their cost bases and expensive offices were an easy target. Culturally too change was underway. The growing focus on helping to better attract and retain senior female leaders led to a much wider embrace of flexible working across all employees. This inevitably undermined the prominence of the role of the office as now occupancy levels were falling day in day out as former exclusive office workers made the switch to the flexible model.
Is Covid then the final nail in the coffin? Has it forced business to trial a model they historically could never have dared try? Has this model proven to be successful and not just possible?
I don’t think there can be any doubt that Covid will have forced permanent change in how we do things. It forced changes to be made that would have taken months or years to agree in painstaking process in organisations. Change that in many cases would have been rejected. For example, within the NHS the idea of virtual appointment with your GP may become the norm. The time saved through just this switch is huge. It is a great leap forward in how we can do things more productively.
I cannot though see what has changed to the office or its unique benefits. Offices are here to stay and with good reason. Although that’s not to say some are about to take a long and costly detour before they realise it.
Yes, Covid has proven you can operate businesses remotely and in a coherent and effective way. But that’s only a tiny part of what an office is there to facilitate. To me the best way to think about it is as follows.
Offices are the cities of businesses and flexible working is the suburbs. Remote working is the isolated farmhouse in the Shetland Isles.
Cities, we know, are important for our prosperity. In 2010 a pair of Physicists showed that as a city’s population doubled the economic activity grew by 130%. Later researchers from the MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab proposed a new explanation for that “superlinear scaling”: Increases in urban population density give residents greater opportunity for face-to-face interaction.
Full article here (https://news.mit.edu/2013/why-innovation-thrives-in-cities-0604)
There is something unique about face-to-face interaction that drives innovation. It isn’t easy to say why or what it is that causes it, but the fact it is true is enough. By closing your office and remote working you are more than likely harming your chances of success by reducing your capacity to innovate.
Again, as I said, this doesn’t mean you can’t be successful by embracing remote working. It just suggests you won’t be as successful as you could have otherwise have been.
Competitors who stick with an office and who use it by not allowing remote working will, according to the science, have a definitive advantage over you. Permanently.
Remember to the individual worker this effect is not likely to be known. From their perspective they can complete their required tasks remotely. What the business loses isn’t immediately obvious or tangible to them, or perhaps even to the business. Which will make opposing the idea of remote working post-covid harder to do.
If the office is vital, then the real challenge is how to maximise its unique benefits (innovation) while also recognising the benefits of flexible working and non-office time. The suburbs in my analogy.
The ability to have time away from the office can be vital for focus, balancing the work life demands and mental wellbeing. Forcing people to come to the office everyday is not sensible and may harm the collective output.
However, no one seems to have taken a scientific approach to how best find this balance. Most offices that allow flexible working tend to find themselves pretty quickly victim to the Friday virus. Where inexplicably offices become ghost-towns each week on Friday. It clearly can’t be true that this is the optimal balance. It also creates other problems around occupancy on other days. Most offices today are designed on the basis 60-70% of staff are present on average each day of the week. The Friday virus means while that may be the average over the week, the reality is that Monday to Thursday you have 80-90% and the office is overcrowded and functioning sub-optimally. For example, meeting rooms become used as desk space or the same for break-out areas.
The office model needs to be properly managed just like a city needs to have well-managed transport, utilities and distribution of space.
The future therefore calls for a more data led approach to ensure the office model and its unique strengths are realised. For example, I’m sure someone could write a piece of software that analyses an individual’s email contacts and meeting attendees and collate them across an office staff to draw up the most effective rota for occupancy and working from home. This could ensure occupancy requirements were efficiently managed and the opportunity for innovation maximised by scheduling those you speak most and work alongside to be in the office on the same days. It would also be fair in that everyone gets the same annual split of which days of the week are work from home days (no group would get Fridays each week). Managers can then manage exceptions.
For those that do choose to close the office and move to remote working there are also some obvious issues beyond innovation they will need to overcome. The costly detour I referred to.
In no particular order they could include;
Two-tier workforces
Building networks remotely will be challenging to say the least. Those with longer tenure in firms who have established networks will have distinct advantages and animosity between groups is likely.
Talent attraction issues
Young people aren’t best suited to remote working. They often share houses when they move to cities after University and that doesn’t lend itself well to remote working if your bedroom is your office. What’s more offices are in social places and that is a desirable factor to younger people who don’t yet have families. Given the choice between a company with an office and one that works remotely I don’t think the office loses.
Death by formality
What seemed radically flexible at first can quickly become almost totally formalised. Diaries are booked out completely in advance as you can’t rely on informal chats. The need for regular and formal ‘town halls’ grows as you need to ensure alignment that can no longer happen informally. Monitoring output and wellbeing can quickly become cottage industries within organisations.
Talent development is stifled
So much learning can simply be by being in a room and listening or watching how people interact and behave. Body language is important. All these things are impossible to do remotely when you can only see everyone from the waist up leaning over cameras in a variety of angles. You will though undoubtedly become sick of PowerPoint at a younger age than any previous generation of workers.
Wellbeing crisis?
We are social creatures. Social interaction is one of the best ways to avoid other mental health issues. Who knows what longer-term issues may come to light in those businesses that move to a remote working model.
You may think these aren’t significant or real issues that present barriers to remote working as a viable path for successful business. Fair enough. But as I said at the start. The idea the office was finished as a way of working isn’t new. Covid hasn’t changed the fundamentals either.
Finally, like any topic it is worth looking to history to see if any relevant experience exists that could inform where we stand today. Step forward IBM. It led the way in the early 90s with technology enabled remote working. By 2007 approximately 40% of its workforce were working remotely. A reality that allowed it to reduce its office space by 78m square feet between 1995-2007. In 2017 it ended this approach and called them back to the office. I wonder why?