Is The Office As A Workplace Dead?

The way we're working is changing. No question about that. But how will that reflect on the future of offices/workspaces? Is it time to say good bye to offices?

It's been on my mind a lot lately, and I know I'm not the only one.

For a long time, going to an office, sitting there in your cubicle, private office, or an open floor next to many people for the full day, and going home was the way of working.

People were measured by how much time they've spent in their seats, as managers were too afraid that their employees wouldn't work, if they weren't under constant surveillance. We have known that this approach is wrong for a long time, and measuring employees by performance is the way to go, but still, it's not the case in many places.

With COVID-19 being around for the last 6 months, organisations were forced to adopt working remotely, and it seems most has managed to make it work, and some have even found it to be more productive by eliminating commute time for employees and reducing the usual distractions of someone walking up to your desk to chat.

It feels like there is a shift in remote work being more socially acceptable and in many cases encouraged; a trend that will only accelerate in the future.

Why do we need offices if everything is so much better working remotely? Could this be the death of the office spaces then?

In my view, we miss two very important elements of work, that being can't be easily solved by being remote.

The first element is all the social interactions. We miss the water-cooler chats over the coffee machine, we miss overhearing a conversation that sparks new ideas, the random stories over lunch, and the vibe and the buzz of the office and being around our coworkers. While these social interactions might seem irrelevant at first, they do translate into the team getting more comfortable with each other, building up trust, and ultimately makes the team more productive. And ultimately missing these interactions will end up hurting the company culture.

The second is the collaboration sessions, where teams co-create. We miss the brainstorming sessions with a big whiteboard, the post-it notes, and all the group work that's so easy to do in real life, and yet so challenging to do it over video conferencing. There are many tools that focus on trying to facilitate this, but none of them are really there yet.

So what's the solution then?

I've seen many organisations try to work around this challenge during the pandemic with organising Zoom calls to have lunch with coworkers, or having a "coffee bot" which would pair people for spontaneous calls, or even allocating the first 5-10 minutes of a video call for small-talk.

We've played around with them ourselves at Airtame, and it's been interesting to observe how people interacted in these experiments. Ultimately my conclusion is that the technology that would be capable of reproducing these social interactions is just not there yet.

So that leaves us with this question:

Will we return to the same old office? Or what will the future of offices look like?

There are many opinions out there, but no-one knows for sure.

I do believe that offices will still exist for the foreseeable future, but I also strongly believe that they will be transformed into something else. They will go from being just a place to sit for the full day and work, to become a hub to socialise and collaborate with co-workers, clients and partners.

My prediction is that we'll go away from offering crazy office perks (snacks, foosball, gym, etc) to incentivise people to stay around as long as possible, and instead focus on how to create physical spaces which maximises the chance of collaboration and co-creation while people are in the same space, so they can hit the ground running while working remote.

How this will look in terms of office setup, and technologies involved? I honestly don't know.

As Abraham Lincoln once said:

The best way to predict the future is to create it!

And that's exactly what us in the industry need to do make the future of offices.

I'm curious, how did your workplace tackle this? Have you seen a change in expectations and behaviours? How do you think the future of a workplace will look like? Let me know in the comments below!