Out Of Office

Many of my HR colleagues and clients are worrying about how to get people back to work safely in the office.

 Which employees can return first? What is a good turn-around for separated teams? Can we make doors, lifts and toilets hands free? And are we reintroducing cubicles, so that everyone is in a shielded bubble? How and where shall we put the disinfection products ?

You may wonder if we’re not beating a dead horse….. Are offices still necessary?

As a corporate wellbeing expert I have seen many people in companies struggling with the landscape office. In the My Fenix stress test  we see about 40% of employees who have this source of stress in their top 3. We've known about this nightmare for a while. It kills productivity and concentration. And if a team is organizing a creativity session, they usually do this somewhere else. The idea that it would promote cooperation and communication turned out to be wrong. Nice idea, but it went down in flames. With Covid-19 on everyone’s shoulders and mind, keeping your distance in an environment that is just aimed at bringing people close together does not work anymore.

Is this the final death blow to the landscape office ? This situation is definitely the perfect storm to rethink the way we work and make the right stitch in time.

Now and in the future, companies make the difference through innovation, knowledge creation and cooperation. Teams are only perfect if there is trust, solidarity and inter-connection. Is an office  a good working environment for any of those objectives ?

To answer this question let’s have a dead honest look to what function the office has that justifies the high costs? Renting, furnishing and maintaining a building costs a lot of money. Thousands of people take the same filming path at the same time every day to sit still for too long in a dull environment and do work they can do for the most part at home.

And then I don’t even talk about the  Stressor ranked in the top 2 of all employees…. Traffic jams and the horrible journey we take every day to reach our “beloved” working environment. Killing our time efficiency, joy and our mother earth.

Being trapped between four walls, having to breathe the same stale air day after day, with no hope of relief, all those golden hours of the day, what do we gain as a company with this working environment ?

Offices in general are a pretty new phenomena. They were born in the spring of 1822 from one of the first offices in the world - that of the East India Company in London.

They were and are the administrative equivalent of the assembly line in Henry Ford's first car factories: the workers are stationed in fixed places and the work is ingeniously coming to them. The work is standardized as much as possible, with each employee performing their tasks according to fixed rules.

That kind of environment had a goal: control and efficiency.  Repetitive tasks, micromanagement and mind-numbing rules took every ounce of energy from the people who worked there.

The East India Company soon introduced an attendance book that employees had to sign on arrival and departure. And every 15 minutes in between, yes….. you read it right. Making sure the employee was at its place was more important than what he actually did. Presence before productivity.

In 2020 there were some minor changes to the Office, but they all still root on the old goal.

At the brink of the 4th Industrial revolution we see that jobs who have routine and repetitive tasks don’t have the best future ahead.

Future jobs are creative, human and are using the unique human skill to put different dimensions and numbers together, creating a new product, model or benefit. Something even AI cannot do.

Would we miss the office? The underhanded office politics? The bad coffee and weak rolls? The temperature that is always just too cold or too warm?

Yes. We would miss our colleagues.

Yes. We miss the feeling of being part of a larger whole, where you can come home. The casual conversations on the stairs and by the coffee machine where you can hear what concerns others. You will not find the unexpected meeting with the other person on Skype,Teams or Zoom.

Future offices have long ceased to be a place where efficiency and control are central. Companies make the difference through innovation, knowledge creation and cooperation. The old office does not seem to be a very good working environment for any of those objectives. Ask yourself where your office and company culture is right now ?

The office has passed its best-before date; we need an alternative. That alternative must be a meeting place where employees, customers, suppliers and partners come together. A bustling market square, a melting pot of meetings that becomes the beating heart of the company. The office is dead. Long live The office !

So when you make up your Back to the Office plan make sure you do this in 3 steps ;

1.     THINK why and when is it really necessary to be at the office ? and YES your own personal energy is part of that process.

2.     PLAN your visits to the office so they are efficient and not based upon routine

3.     SECURE all possible measures so we can ban COVID-19 where it belongs….in Hell !