Ditch the hoodies: It's time to get back to the office

Apart from the water cooller's indigestive gurgling, they’ve been silent for months: glass and steel Mary Celestes, each one frozen in a pre-Covid world of work that no longer exists. 

Will we ever love our offices again?

Even before lockdown, our relationship with our offices had been going through a rocky patch. While they remained steadfast, we'd been getting itchy feet. Their obsession with status and their unwillingness to try out anything new was starting to get under our skin. Jealously we would watch as exciting new alternatives sashayed into the neighbourhood: WeWork with its cool co-working vibe; hipster coffee shops promising caffeine and no-questions-asked Wi-Fi; grungy factory lofts where meetings were off limits and pinball machines outnumbered PCs.

No wonder that as soon as the pandemic struck, we would leap at the chance for a trial separation. It’s not you, it’s us, we told our offices, guiltily.

Several months on, we’re filing for divorce. Since March, half of all workers have abandoned their offices to work from home. Some may never go back. According to Gartner, 41 percent are likely to remain working like this. For them, WFH is about to become BAU.

Financially, remote working seems to make sense. Offices are costly affairs, requiring armies of cleaners, technicians, maintenance operatives and receptionists. Working from home neatly shifts these overheards from the employer to employee.

Advocates of home working claim that WFH is also more productive, with no gossiping or office politics to distract workers. From now on, 16 percent of firms say they'll only be recruiting home-based staff.

But I’m not convinced. I believe that offices are an essential component in our organisational ecosystem and that once our fling with remote working has fizzled out our love for them will return. If anything, stronger and better than ever.

First, offices are the best places for building and maintaining work relationships. Teams and Zoom are good for facilitating meetings, but since when has anything productive come out of meetings? In any business, it’s not meetings that drive innovation, but the informal conversations that go on before and after them. From these brief encounters and shared sandwich platters, world-beating teams are formed.

Second, offices are essential for developing the careers of the young. Working from home is fine if you’re an uber-networked Baby Boomer, but for Millennials, starved of contacts, role models and wise advisers, the experience can be disastrously isolating. How do you impress the boss if you've never met her? How do you get to shine when your working day consists of endless Zoom calls that vanish the second the meeting ends? No wonder companies are beginning to worry about ‘cultural drain’ among their new employees. 

Most of all, our offices are integral to who we are, and who we want to be.

Earlier this year, I gave a talk at the headquarters of a big London law firm. Their offices were as plush and elegant as any Medici palace. Gliding from one beautiful salon to another, I kept wishing I’d worn a better suit – that I owned a better suit. Which of course was the idea: offices like these are designed to make you want to dress smart, to up your game, to be your best. 

That it’s all an act, a coup de theatre, is part of the appeal. The writer Lucy Kellaway called this the “great artificiality” that we buy into when entering offices:

“We pretend that our clothes are always in order and that we are entirely professional and impersonal. Whereas probably in our heads and definitely in our homes there is an awful lot of unravelling and farting going on.”

For Kellaway, wearing a perfectly ironed shirt or elegant business suit might be contrived, but it’s also one of the delights of working life:

“It allows us to be a different person. And we’re all so fed up with who we are, the opportunity to be someone else, someone a little bit more impressive, is just so tempting.”

This is why I think offices are here to stay, albeit with some tweaking. We need them because they allow us to be different from who we are at home, and vice versa. Our dalliance with home working has been functional but ultimately uninspiring. If anything, it’s shown us what we’ve been missing – smart clothes, impressive surroundings, adult conversations, the chance to have meetings without being interrupted by kids, cats, and Amazon deliveries.

Seriously. Ditch the hoodies. Time to get back to the office.  

Copyright: Paul Redmond, 2020

This article first appeared in Graduate Recruiter (ISE, 2020)