The media is in a bit of a frenzy at the moment about the prospect of getting rid of the office for good. And you can understand why.
For some, it’s become a symbol of 21st-century drudgery. We could all be living lives of leisure and learning, but instead, we’re chained to the nine to five.
This negative view of office space is nothing new. Movies like to emphasise it when they show images of grey-faced workers, typing in front of computer screens in tiny pods.
But that’s not actually the truth of the office at all. It’s not just a glass-clad, multi-storey building in the middle of a big city. It’s a place where people can come together and discuss their ideas.
Look at what’s happened to the business community since we moved out of the office. People feel more alienated than ever. And they’re way less loyal to the companies they work for. When you’re sitting in front of a laptop screen at home, every firm seems the same. You’re not mixing with certain people within the business, getting to know their personalities. Instead, you’re going about your craft and wondering whether there’s a better life out there somewhere for you.
Offices are just meeting places for people who come together to produce something. So, in this sense, a shop is an “office” or a factory is an “office.”
Physical proximity is much more important than the majority of people believe. We think that our working lives involve the efforts of our conscious minds, focused on some analytical task. But the reality is much more subtle than that. When we meet in person, we pick up on each other’s cues. And our non-verbal energy can rub off on one another, producing remarkable results. Can cloud-based chat apps produce that kind of interaction? Obviously not.
People tend to forget that there’s a reason offices didn’t immediately dissolve after the invention of the cloud. There’s a big difference between chatting to somebody via email and really being there in the room with them. You probably can’t remember any of the email conversations you had last month. But I bet you can remember the meetings you had with colleagues before the pandemic struck. They really rubbed off on you.
In light of this discussion, the office is almost certainly coming back. The world isn’t going to go digital as many people suppose. You just can’t recreate the tacit value-add that offices bring by putting everyone online. We’re social creatures, and we work best when shoulder to shoulder with one another. Nobody’s mind is an island, working perfectly by itself. Other people are a necessary part of the picture.
The most likely outcome will probably be something like this: companies move to remote working models. They then find out that that’s not what workers really want. So they move back to the office. But they also discover that that’s not what they want either. And so they’ll ultimately wind up with a hybrid model – like many are already practising today.