The rise of remote work might be the best thing to ever happen to the office.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic upended our work lives, the office functioned as a do-it-all, be-everything-to-all-people space, balancing desks for individual work with conference rooms for team meetings, and social areas for chit-chat. As a result, it did none of these jobs very well.
We ended up with open-plan spaces where sound carries freely — and with a lot of employees wearing headphones to block out the clamor. There are never enough conference rooms, so employees commute in just to meet over Zoom. It is a space where it is hard to be efficient, yet also hard to be collaborative and creative.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
Fortunately, there is a way out of this morass. Embracing some degree of remote work eliminates the need for so many desks, freeing space that can be prioritized for what offices do best — providing coworkers an opportunity to mingle.
It will take a different mindset on management’s part, but if leaders can embrace the idea that remote work is for concentrating and headquarters is for cooperating, offices might become very different, and vastly superior — more meeting rooms, more social spaces, more natural light, more greenery.
Executives might not be able to shorten the long commutes remote workers are desperate to avoid, but they can rethink what their offices offer employees, and in so doing, make those treks more worthwhile.
The office of the future is likely to be smaller, but nicer, said Diane Hoskins, co-CEO of design and architecture firm Gensler.
She said that some of her clients are adopting this type of layout, paying more attention to amenities that support social interaction among colleagues — Wi-Fi-enabled terraces, coffee bars and pool tables, for example, or common areas with sofas, soaring ceilings and walls bedecked with plants.
Offices are now more likely to be found in parts of town that are closer to transit, or near bars and restaurants where employees go after work. Relying on a communal fridge to foster employee interaction is out. Making the office feel like an upscale hotel lobby is in.
To get employees to interact with each other, companies that provide food and drink should rethink how it is presented, said Ben Waber, CEO of talent analytics firm Humanyze.
Rather than offering pre-made coffee, an espresso machine gives people a chance to chat as they wait for the machine to do its work. Serving food buffet-style encourages employees to sit and linger over their meal, as opposed to pre-packaged lunches that workers can easily — and antisocially — take back to their desks.
The office is likely to become a place where workers return to willingly, if less frequently, if it offers something they cannot get at home — camaraderie.
Yes, a workplace still needs to have some areas for heads-down tasks, but that should not be rows of cubicles or even assigned desks. A better model for many companies would be a library-like room where people sit with their laptops when they need to work quietly between meetings. (There was just such a room at one of my old jobs, and it was beloved for offering a silent refuge where we could work uninterrupted.)
Prioritizing social interaction is why Salesforce decided to reduce its footprint in San Francisco and take a long-term lease at a luxury ranch in the California redwoods; employees are more likely to form meaningful bonds in a space that is conducive to socializing.
It is also why Harley Davidson plans to repurpose its 46,450m2 Milwaukee headquarters, even as the company continues to bring employees together for specific purposes such as product development.
Companies such as these have recognized — at long last — that simply seating people near each other and tearing down all the walls does not foster collaboration. That was always “a fantasy,” said Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, a Purdue University historian and author of Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office.
In fact, research shows that open offices lead to fewer interactions between colleagues. Firms have realized that collaboration and team culture are too important to be left to chance.
That is one reason that Zapier, a workflow automation company with an all-remote workforce, invests in quarterly offsites. The purpose is to encourage socialization over team lunches, group hikes and games, said Raj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the firm.
Choudhury said that employees who interact at the offsites are more likely to help each other when back in the virtual world — an effect that is especially pronounced for women on the team.
Companies investing in nicer headquarters are hoping that onsite is the new offsite. While it might seem like a contradiction to invest in a place that people go to less often, it is the viability of remote work that frees up the office to become primarily a social gathering space.
Of course, it is possible to go too far in compelling workers to fraternize. There is a fine line between fostering the connections that improve morale and destroying professional distance. A friend recently said that after her company announced a team-building exercise at a water park, she started Googling “work-appropriate bathing suits” — a horrifying oxymoron. Maybe stick with the nice sofas and fancy espresso machines.
Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor, and is a former managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron’s and a former executive editor at the Harvard Business Review. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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