The Office is Dead….Long Live the Office
NOTE: The views expressed here are my personal views and don’t reflect the views or position of my employer.
The office is dead. It’s not dying or on life support, it’s just dead. The pandemic put it on life support and employers finished the job when they opened the doors to fully remote hiring. When teams became spread across the country, the purpose of the office died and it accelerated a shift that was bound to happen anyways. Remote work became the primary means of working and collaborating.
The value of the office
The real value behind the office was conformity, collaboration and indoctrination. Conformity had a range of ways in which it was exercised. Everyone had the same mouse, the same keyboard, the same monitors and this allowed companies to streamline the support process. In many offices, dress codes enforced a standard that would breed a set of attitudes. The more formal the dress code, the more professional the setting. Unless of course you were in Hollywood, Wall Street, Sales etc. But that was the theory anyway. How people worked, when they worked were all managed under the watchful eye of leadership, where too many coffee breaks were easily noticed. The loss of that conformity has sent many managers into a bit of a panic.
Collaboration was a huge hit in the office. No one will ever convince me that a video conference meeting is as effective as in-person meetings. When your best friend goes through a terrible breakup, you’d never say “Grab a beer and meet me on Zoom and lets talk about it.” No, you go to the bar and you have face to face communications about it. And if you can’t go to the bar, you have a Zoom call and complain about how much you wish you could be in-person doing the same thing you’re doing on a “just as effective” medium. If it’s not as effective for drowning your sorrows, it’s definitely not as effective for collaborating on complex topics, thoughts and ideas. Being able to share the same pen, on the same whiteboard without losing 3 seconds of audio every time you talk at the same time is priceless and something that I don’t think remote work will ever replace. That’s not to say that remote work is incapable of producing good collaboration, because it most certainly can. It just takes more dedication, planning and participation by all attendees.
Indoctrination is another hard one. Replicating a culture remotely is a challenge that I think many companies are struggling with. It’s hard enough to build a culture in person. We lose the rituals of culture building as they get lost in translation to video conferencing. The activities that resonated in-person don’t resonate through the lens and we’re still trying to figure out how to replace them. I think we’ve all learned that a lift-and-shift of cultural activities doesn’t work. Sharing a team lunch on camera isn’t the same and quite hoenstly turns into a disgusting affair really quickly.
With these three things listed, there’s one thing that’s a bit of a glaring omission and that’s work. The office has never been a place where “work” is super efficient. You’re constantly bombarded with distractions, drive-by visits, unexpected delays in your commute just to name a few. For many people, the office was the only option for work, so its effectiveness was never deeply considered. Prior to the pandemic, most people hadn’t transformed a space in their home to be effective work from home (WFH) employees. Those employees that were already fully remote learned this secret a long time ago and have been reaping the productivity gains ever since. But people new to the WFH game had to figure it out on their own. Many of us still don’t have a great work from home setup due to space constraints. Those people are probably longing for the reopening of the office, but they’ll find that what they come back to is just a shell of its former self.
The flood gates of remote hiring
Companies have been desperate to hire the last year or two. Many clever companies decided to open the flood gates and start hiring remotely. Even yours truly was a staunch supporter of the in-office lifestyle. I preferred people in the office, collaborating and working together, drinking the indoctrination kool-aid. But I also sensed the winds changing. Now 4 out of my last 5 hires have all been remote. My team is almost 50% remote now and honestly, one of my employees has such a long commute he might as well be considered remote.
The point being, I will never return to a world where everyone is in the office. It’s just not possible. Even if we forced the local people back into the office and allowed the remote people to stay remote, it creates an even worse scenario. Your team becomes bifurcated as they self-organize into remote and in-person silos. Yes, we should be doing everything in slack and yes, we should make sure every meeting has a Teams invite. But if you can have a meeting with three people in the office and one remote person, human nature dictates the path of least resistance and that four person meeting gets cut down to a three person meeting real fast. Guess who gets dropped.
Same with the remote people. You’re trying to collaborate with people remotely and even though you have a great microphone, solid lighting and an HD camera, you’re working with a bunch of people trying to figure out the antiquated video conference software in the room. The microphone sucks so you can’t hear Joey, who always sounds like he’s talking at a funeral. Mary gets up and starts doodling on the whiteboard, forgetting that you can’t see the whiteboard. Now we spend 10 minutes adjusting the camera to point at the white board, only for it to pan back to the first person who starts talking. Yeah, you’re familiar with this nightmare. There’s no need to rush back to it.
If everyone is remote, everyone is on the same playing field. And while it may not be as effective as everyone being in the office, it’s way more effective than having some people in the office and some people remote. If you’ve started down the path of remote hiring, the current incarnation of your office is dead.
The Future of the Office
The office was never about work. But now we can’t even afford to pretend that it’s about work. Most of us have created a work from home setup that rivals anything the office would provide. It’s tailored to our needs and our tastes. When we go to the office now, it’s a step down in every category. Even my wife has a 34" widescreen monitor now. People are spending major dollars on their chairs, their keyboards, their mouse because now it’s an investment. The occasional Friday at home didn’t warrant the investment we’re willing to make now that it’s 5 days a week. And that means companies are either going to have to adjust their budgets and their equipment flexiblity or they’ll need to find another way to entice people back to the office. It’s hard to compete with great ergonomics, beautiful displays and a 2 minute commute.
The office still rules in the areas of indoctrination and collaboration. Collaboration has to be intentional though. For starters, every meeting space has to treat remote workers as first class citizens. That means solid audio and easy to use camera setups that are well maintained. The tech in these rooms has to be designed with these hybrid meetings in mind. I don’t think it will ever be as good as being in-person or everyone being remote, so these items are tablestakes just to get people considering a trip downtown.
Where the office will truly shine though is in collaboraton between people who normally don’t collaborate. Building relationships and strengthening netowrks is the place where the office still has clear dominance. For example, I went into the office a month or so ago for a meeting run by our facilities team. I don’t work with the facilities team often and certainly not since going full remote 2 years ago. But it occurred to me that I talked with Jan (our facilities manager) every day prior to the pandemic. Why? Because we would always cross paths in the kitchen and strike up a conversation. The kitchen was a sort of central access room and because of the respective locations of our desks, we would constantly find ourselves running into each other in the morning and afternoon. A happy little accident.
The office was great for building these sorts of connections. But now we’ll want to be more deliberate. How do we construct the office space to generate these common access patterns. Do we need to rethink the idea of these silo’d teams, isolated to one specific spot in the office? How do we design the layouts to encourage and entice foot traffic from many different groups, creating the conditions for the happy little accidents Jan and I shared for over 4 years? The office needs to look very different than how we left it, with these thoughts front and center.
The need for networking becomes apparent when you have more than 4 people from the same department in the office at the same time. The desire for human contact is palpatable. When I go to the office, I spend more time talking and catching up than I do working. Sure that will die down with the frequency of office visits increasing, but the long tail on that is probably bigger than you think.
Many companies aren’t considering a five day a week return to the office schedule. Some are doing the three days in the office, two days remote or a version of that. But many companies don’t dictate who works on what days, so you might not get the colalboration (and therefore the productivity) that you were expecting because people aren’t in the office on the same days. That also means you’ve got a much larger number of personnel combinations, meaning you might not see the same sets of people all the time.
Networking and specific collaboration events is where the office will prove its value. But with a shift away from “where work happens” the office design and layout also needs to change. New tools need to be brought to the office to streamline the in-person/remote collaboration efforts. If you’ve still got people pointing their laptop web cams at the whiteboard for the remote folks, you won’t succeed in this new era of office work. We’ll need to rethink how people are grouped together for work as well. How do we entice the chance meetings that were fueled by common spaces such as the lunch and coffee areas? Does grouping people by departments still make sense if the office isn’t about general work getting done?
These are all questions that we’ll need to ask ourselves as we figure out where the office fits into corporate life. I believe the office does still have a future but only if we rethink its purpose and the organization’s commitment to that purpose. You’re not going to lure people back to the office with snacks and unlimited soda. The office will have to offer something that can’t be found at home. People and their need for interaction both personal and professional will be the cornerstone of the weekly office visits.
