Death of the Office
1843magazine.com
1843magazine.com
I've learned two things in the past couple of months:
* I really enjoy being at home when doing task work. I can play music without headphones. I can tweak my surroundings to be just the way I like them. I can meander down and see the wife and kids for lunch. Talk a walk around my neighborhood. (I would be able to run an errand or to, normally, but...)
* I hate being at home when doing design or collaborative work. Videoconferencing is better than nothing, but the latency makes me want to claw my eyes out. And I just deeply miss the conviviality and warmth of sharing a physical space with my team.
But I don't need either the former or the latter every day. What I'd really like is a team that worked together a couple of days a week, and from home a couple of days.
Plus everyone needs to still live within commuting distance to the office, and also have a productive work space at home, which is a huge luxury in a place like SF to have an extra room for an office.
This cut office costs in half and increased productivity. It was quite good.
Speaking of remote, I've worked two jobs which were semi full remote, where we'd come in if we wanted to collaborate, on average 2 days a month. Both scenarios would save the company money on office costs.
One company, we had a full dedicated office, where we'd find a space we wanted to work in. It was normally abandoned there, except the CEO, SFO, and CTO was often there every day. We'd find an empty office room and close the door having privacy. It was quite nice. The advantage of this was our office space was tiny, compared to how many people we employed. Likewise, when we wanted to come to the office the environment was always fantastic.
Another company I worked at used those shared office spaces with a pay as you go plan. Eg, if you reserve a meeting room, they charge the company for it. We'd go there and find some desks we'd like and go at it, or reserve a meeting room if we wanted. The company would pay for it, so I'm not sure the price, but the environment was good with a café and great outdoor collab spaces. I'm sure it saved the company a lot of money.
So yah, partial remote and full remote do save companies money. They increase productivity and reduce office space costs. However, both of these are quite different than shelter in place, where those who would benefit from coming into the office can't. Shelter in place is less productive and far more frustrating than proper remote.
Is that actually true? The company isn't paying people to maintain their home offices. Any day where everyone works from home is a day where they don't need to have cleaning staff, food services, etc. come in. It may seem inefficient to have the building sitting there empty, but relative to having people there (and not relative to having no building at all), it's probably a net win.
Think about how many restaurants in prime real estate locations are closed for breakfast or on Mondays.
It might be easiest to simply take turns driving to each other's house.
Private offices for all allow social distancing at the office if needed, ability to tweak your surroundings to suit your needs when doing task work, and easy access to share physical space with a team when needed.
I worry we are losing sight of how disastrous co-working spaces and all open-plan designs are.
Fully remote is better than open plan or coworking for sure, but none of these options come close to just coming to our senses and bringing back private offices with doors for individuals.
I was so much more productive in an office with a door. I could close it for silence, I could close it when on conference calls. I wouldn't be disturbed and I wouldn't disturb anybody else.
If my company let me reduce my salary by $2,000 a year and gave me an office with a door I would do it immediately.
What I like about it: I get a lot of control over where and when collaboration vs. heads down work happens. I know I'll have the space to go heads down for as long as I want tuesday/thursday, and that I'll see my full team at least twice a week, so we tend to plan around that. I can also plan personal activities, appointments, etc. on the days I'm working from home, knowing I don't have meetings or a commute.
I didn't realize how important that face-time was until we lost it at the start of the pandemic. While all of our processes and day-to-day translated to full remote with little to no changes, without the re-centering and catching up and personal side of things we got monday/friday people were more on edge and collaboration/unity suffered. It's been a tricky thing to recoup, but we're finding doing more casual video calls here and there is helping.
Best of both worlds - cost savings from everyone who prefer to be home (which will be a lot of people) with the option to commute when its the better option.
Perhaps this the killer thing for VR.
However, I don't think it would help with the latency itself.
My last full time office job began with a great, downtown location. But it became crowded as the company outgrew the space. Little annoyances like mandatory office music and shared desks made focused work more difficult. Of course management always gets their own offices, so they get control of their space with a choice to retreat when privacy or silence is needed.
Hopefully the shared experience will break the cycle of talking past each other. Though I'm not holding my breath.
What?
Forced office work already polarizes opinions. Many of us already say Work From Office is the devil.
Why does my typing on a keyboard in the office bring more "value" than when I type on a keyboard at home?
I completely agree with you.
Personally I feel best when both are the option but the office set in a way that it does not drive people out.
the same reason why you sometimes have to call someone or talk with them in person instead of typing them a text.
Correct. Sometimes.
And sometimes its better to text. See how not having the option to choose is limiting?
Just put up normal dividers, which exist in many many forms already.
It may be less efficient but I like going to work precisely for the face to face time and camaraderie. Though I have been lucky to work more often than not work on projects I was passionate about with people I liked.
I do miss going to the offices once a week though, but that's because I like my coworkers.
I feel like this is key even for remote work. Teams that didn't get along or who didn't like each other are going to continue to struggle in new (and worse) ways if working remote. If people didn't communicate well before, I doubt they are going to do any better now.
Those who appear to be struggling are doing so mostly due to disrupted customer demand, supply chain or business relationships.
It wasn't just the remote, but the typical baggage people adopt with remote. For example, it made the mistake of adopting "work when you want" kind of attitude because that was always the norm with 100% companies, which is terrible for a VC funded startup. It set the tone of "what did you cook for lunch?", "oh wow, look at your view of the ocean in portugal" instead of kicking ass.
Obviously not the only problem, but remote was definitely an extra layer of hurdles. A lot of problems would have been easier to address in a physical office.
EDIT: the sibling post that says its a "path to mediocrity" is pretty spot on. But maybe you're fine with your company being a lifestyle company, a "good enough" company. That's fine for some people.
Sounds wonderful. If a move towards remote work makes it harder for those with capital to extract maximum value from their employees, all the better for society imo. I've seen a lot of propaganda on social media about how people should be excited to work _more_ (to 'kick ass') now that they don't have a commute lmao.
The employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial to some degree, and remote work clearly shifts power towards the employee and gives the employer less ability to monopolize people's lives.
If your company needs people to drown in kool-aid to be successful, sorry! People seem to be slowly but surely leaving that capitalist hypnosis BS in the last decade.
But i think you can have a high-energy culture but still be healthy, its just incredibly hard to figure out.
Humans need offices. Online encounters may be keeping us alive as social beings right now, but work-related video meetings are too often transactional, awkward and unappealing. After the initial joy of peering into each other’s houses on Zoom, we are confronted with people’s heads looming even closer than we see them across the desk at work, and we gaze in horror – half of it self-awareness that we, too, must look awful – at thinning hair and double chins. We become freakish specimens rather than people. No Skype chat can replicate what Heatherwick calls the “chemistry of the unexpected” that you get in person. [...] Because what moves us is not sitting at our computer, it’s the relationship that we have with people.”
Although I've been 100% remote for more than a decade and love the freedom and flexibility, I still don't think this COVID-19 crisis will kill offices and commuting as much as some workers hope for.
Today's telecommuting technologies like videoconferencing, screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, etc are still not seamless and fluid enough.
Therefore, some companies (especially young startups) that have high degree of collaboration will continue to work in offices to outcompete the companies that are 100% remote.
Yes, onsite collaboration in offices is overstated but maybe productivity of working at home is overstated as well. As a random observation, I find it interesting that TV show writers' rooms (including weekly dramas and comedy skits) will all get into the same office to hash out a show. Why do they do that if remote tech like videoconferencing can replace in-person interaction?
Because the screenwriter's boss is no different than yours: "butts in chairs, people. It's how collaboration happens!" Or inertia. Or enough other things that I'm not going to immediately leap to, "because it's the best way".
I believe some TV shows (SNL IIRC) are still being made with people working remotely.
I think you're saying the current COVID is making producers and writers adapt to the lockdown situation because they have to, and therefore they have to work remotely. Yes, I understand that.
I think once the coronavirus scare is behind us, those writers will willingly go back to being in the same physical room to hash out the dialogue for a show.
If you look at the "writers room" from the SNL documentary[0], you wonder why all those writers and stars are in the same room when they could just use videoconferencing for the "table read". They're all younger generation with money so using technology such as laptops with webcams probably isn't the barrier. I think it's because most writers want to be in the writers room and videoconferencing is still not a good enough substitute for a physical presence. That's why they suffer the miserable Los Angeles traffic to show up in that room.
[0] deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu3LyygiSJM&feature=youtu.be...
Commercial real estate is very expensive. In many companies the biggest expense after salaries is the cost of their office space. That cost is going to be challenged very heavily moving forward. Many companies that were against work from home because “it won’t work for our company” have been in near 100% WFM mode for a while now. After some initial stumbles most haven’t imploded and many quite like the new model.
I suspect that hybrid will become the new norm and that many fewer people will spend every workday at the office. That in turn drastically reduces the square footage required by many companies.
The implications of all this for the commercial real estate market are quite severe. Expect to see developers quickly try to pivot some of their commercial space into residential ASAP before they find themselves sitting on empty floors with plunging value.
If this becomes the new normal, it will change the way people think about what their home is used for. In many cases, it implies an increase in needed living space, which comes at a cost.
I suspect the cheapness of rent reduction may win over many companies to remote long term just as open offices and cubiciles seduced them in the past. It may give increased delays for certain tasks but lets face it - they had no problem with increased delays from travel before.
I suspect we might see some increased very short term rentals for interviews and meetings in the future if the bottom line beats out the culture for a change.