The office is dead. Long live the office.

None of us have managed to avoid to be somehow affected in our work life in the current pandemic. Whether you are allowed or not to go to your office, or if you are stuck at home, or not being able to do normal things like trainings, customer visits on site, meet your old time colleagues, we are all in one way or another affected.

Most of us have been through the same painful stages of setting up a poor "home office" workplace, struggling through unpredictable VPN-connections, bad hairdays in Videocalls and kids at home who sits in your lap while you do that monthly staff meeting.

In short, many of us have been at home longer than we ever expected and now it starts to become either your comfortable life or your worst nightmare.

During these last 8 months there are some companies who starts to declare that this might be your future, dear coworker. We can hear the famous “The death of a salesman” echo from the past, even technical sales will be moved online and there is no more need of travel. This was already predicted to happen to all sales companies and have now got an extra boost during the pandemic.

Let me express some doubt.

There are several issues here but the three major ones are the psychosocial environment, leadership and the sense of belonging.

#1 The psychosocial environment is already a challenge and includes everything from lonely people who have their only lifeline to a social context at the office, all the way to people forced to work in small apartments together with a whole family or people who happily drink too many beers on a weekday way too often just because no one at work will notice it. Isolate people for a long time and they will develop many habits and deceases that are just because of the isolated environment. This will, on a longer term, give challenges for employers in particular and the society as a general. People are getting more of these psychosocial disorders and it will be a challenge we have not prepared for.

#2 Leadership will be a major challenge if people continue to work from home. It is already a tough task to lead people in modern and high performance organizations even if people are accessible in the dayily work, being close in the office, but with a distributed staff, leadership will be a tough nut to crack. Besides this, one main task will be to solve the silo to silo communication. Do we have to organize ourselves differently? What kind of tools and structures do we need to create in order to support the task of leading more or less complex organizations when people are not physically present?

#3 The sense of belonging is the third aspect. This will be a major challenge at the employer side. Staff who are working remotely is a well-known challenge for consultancy companies with long engagements at customers sites. This situation is worse since there will most leikely be a looser and looser connection between the employer and the employee, as time goes by. The bonds fade away and the culture, loyalty or whatever you choose to call it, will slowly erode. This will mean that your willingness to walk that extra mile will definitely go down and things you previously did to support colleagues in another department are no longer that obvious to do. Aside from the internal efficiency, people will be easier to attract by competition. So watch out!

Motivation is everything

All these three factors mentioned above will somehow relate to the famous Herzberg’s Motivation Theory model (or Two Factor Theory) that argues that there are two factors that an organization can adjust in order to influence motivation in the workplace, either Motivators or Hygiene factors. There is a risk that we after many years of increasing motivation, engagement and improved work life quality now will fall back. In fact, a research of Gallup has shown that the engagement of employees was in average only 13%, even before Covid-19.

What we have not seen yet, I think, is the long term effects of having people work from home. Many will argue that this a very good shift in attitudes towards home office and I fully agree. What we should observe is the change of attitude of employers suddenly trusting employees to work from home. Not being anti-distance but pro-flexible.

In summary – drastic and structural changes to the physical work place should probably wait but the evaluation of the psychosocial as well as the motivational environment must be monitored and evaluated continuously. There is, otherwise, a ticking bomb we see, not an efficiency gain in office space.