The office - a chance for a redesign
Have we really thought about offices and how they work over the last 20 years?
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
Last May, Jennifer Senior wrote a piece in the New York Times bemoaning the possible loss of the office as a result of COVID 19 (Farewell, Office. You Were the Last Boundary Between Work and Home).
Jennifer made some great points including:
Working from home has the danger of blurring home and office life even further than it has been blurred through the use of technology.
Working in an office is a social experience as well as a work experience.
That the feedback of routines and rituals is part of self identification.
Going to the office allows for serendipity where you bump into people and have conversations you might not otherwise have.
My view is that all of these things are true but due to inertia they have become accepted and standard and not really subject to innovation and change.
As an example I would like to address the last dot point. A few years ago I was asked to go and help assess The Downtown Project in Las Vegas. This project was set up by the now sadly departed Tony Hsieh to try and revitalise downtown Las Vegas by working on the Three C’s: collisions, co-learning, and connectedness. There were a number of initiatives put in place but one story we were told has always stuck in my mind. Tony Hsieh moved Zappos into the old Council building and one of the things that he did was to lock the doors to the back entrances. This caused a number of issues about fire safety regulations but the reason that he did it was that he saw that large numbers of employees were going into work, parking their cars, entering the offices from the back entrance, and then heading to their desk. At night they headed back the same way. He locked the doors because he wanted people to be forced to go out into the streetscape to increase the chances they would interact with downtown. What Saul Kaplan calls RCUS (Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects).
What this story says to me is that while people talk about the points that Jennifer rightly made in her article the reality is somewhat different and that many people are stuck in routines and interactions that do not make work a great social or innovative place to be.
COVID -19 and the shift to work from home for a lot of office workers has given us the chance to deeply rethink these issues and ask questions like:
What does serendipity look like if we try hard to design it rather than just let it happen in the office?
What does ritual look like if we are going to work from home a lot of the time? (I am a big fan of the little things like if you have a dedicated home office space then getting dressed for work and going out the front door and back in the back door and heading of the office)
If we move to minimal office (which is my preferred model of the future) where we work in an office two or three days a fortnight how do we create connections and interactions that allow new people to become part of the culture?
If we think deeply about these things then I think we can increase the value of the things we get out of being in offices while reducing work travel time, reducing transport emissions, and reducing costs. Then we have to guard against those things become routine and stale.
Paul Higgins
January 4th 2020
p.s. I have been working from home for over 20 years. I also recognise that I have been privileged to do that while many in our society have had to go to workplaces and had increased health risks during the pandemic as a result.