Meaningful Platitudes Edition VIII: The Future of Work is Now-ish

I’ve been thinking a lot about commercial real estate. It’ll make more sense why shortly, but even I am surprised by how fascinated I am by the intersection of physical space, productivity, human behavior, and work. Since the onset of the pandemic, the future of how we work has been a bit of an obsession of mine (the bonus section has more links than usual and I exercised restraint) in part because it’s a topic that invites a lot of opinions but lacks substantive data and enough nuanced discussion of tradeoffs.

One clear example of that is the commercial real estate market, generally, and for us specifically, because as of July 2023, we’ll be moving out of our downtown Boston headquarters into a more flexible set up, while we are also planning to make some investments in our Netherlands HQ to give that office a well-deserved glow up.

This is a summary of the philosophy behind the system of work that we are moving toward:

The goal of this system is that more BlueCrew will see other BlueCrew in more meaningful, impactful, and productive interactions than under our current arrangement. That will mean a mix of regional events throughout the year that are intentionally designed for various purposes, from fun and bonding to education and training. We’ll be heavily leaning on the lessons from The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (which we read in December 2022 for book club and I find applications for EVERYWHERE) on how to gather well and, fun fact, it’s a lot harder than you might think. She writes,

“In all my gatherings, whether a board meeting or a birthday party, I have come to believe that it is the way a group is gathered that determines what happens in it and how successful it is, the little design choices you can make to help your gathering soar.”

For this system to be successful, we will all need to adapt how we work. This is a collective change that will require different investments in and use of infrastructure, processes, and tools – some of which you may already use and feel comfortable with today and some that you do not.

My expectation is that more than anything, this is going to require considerably more planning and coordination than any team or manager has done to date. It will require thinking much further ahead, sticking to budgets and agendas, and using collaboration tools for documentation and communication in new ways.

One of the great challenges with this work stuff is that measuring it is hard. There’s a brilliant professor at Stanford named Nick Bloom who studied remote and hybrid work well before the pandemic and so has a uniquely longitudinal view on productivity, management, and business uncertainty. Another incredible thinker, Dror Poleg , has been writing about the office, cities, and the future of work pre 2020 too (and is writing a new book now). Neither has clear cut answers about how to measure the impact of these massive, intersectional shifts.

Unsurprisingly, neither do I. But I do have a strong conviction that we will need to develop our own measurement framework, inspired by others but attuned to us, so that we can make the best decisions possible over time given that we cannot optimize for everything. This will be a challenging but it will be critical. I will likely write more about this in the future as it develops.

One thing that brought all of this together for me was a history lesson from historian Judy Stephenson. She explained that the concept of a “workplace” has evolved over centuries; in fact, three hundred years ago after the Great Fire of London, marketplaces decentralized where people worked and often meetings between merchants and craftspeople, etc. took place in people’s homes.

Yes, we are in the middle of a grand experiment with far-reaching implications and the modern discussion about work is actually just one of many chapters about how work and home intersect.

History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.

Some of my favorite and most enjoyable (but by no means exhaustive) thinking about the future of work and cities for those interested:

1. [read/listen] “How American Cities Can Avoid the “Urban Doom Loop ” – Plain English
2. [read] Luxury Construction Causes High Rents Like Umbrellas Cause Rain – Noah Smith, Noahpinion
3. [read/listen] “The Office is Dying. It’s Time to Rethink How We Work ” – Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Warzel on the Ezra Klein Show