Redundancy in the Hybrid Workplace: Rethinking Home Offices and Office Spaces
Alexandros Lioumbis
Future of Work/IP/AI/Innovations | Founder | Patent Manager | European Patent Attorney|
The data storage analogy
Once upon a time, in a land not far away, digital files were typically stored locally, at our computers. Duplicates were made using removable storage media, diskettes, hard drives, USB sticks and the like to avoid loss when a device was damaged. Then the Cloud became a "thing" and now everything important is stored in lands far-far away, in underwater data centers off the coast of exotic islands, or in underground nuclear bomb resistant bunkers in remote sparsely inhabited areas.
What allows as to trust such systems for keeping our files is the concept of #redundancy. Redundancy in the cloud is a critical concept for ensuring continuity, integrity, availability and resilience of data. It involves creating multiple, duplicate copies across different data centers and regions so that if one fails, the others can continue to operate to avoid permanent loss.
Once upon another time, just before the #pandemic hit, most knowledge workers used to work in places called "offices", during specific hours of the day that were considered as "working time". At times, people used to take work home, when a critical deadline or another inconvenience occurred. But "the #workplace" was the office, and there was very little dispute around this matter.
But when the terrible pandemic hit, something surprisingly wonderful happened. The whole world discovered that for years, we were unconsciously building a vast network of workspace redundancy infrastructure that would guarantee continuity, integrity, availability and resilience of the "workplace" even when it was impossible to visit an office. And that infrastructure was the "home office".
But when the terrible pandemic hit, something surprisingly wonderful happened. The whole world discovered that for years, we were unconsciously building a vast network of workspace redundancy infrastructure that would guarantee continuity, integrity, availability and resilience of the "workplace" even when it was impossible to visit an office. And that infrastructure was the "home office". We all realized that we had the means, the space, the tools and the technology for online processing, communication and collaboration. In a twist of fate, "the office" became the redundant space, much like our phones and computers are perceived as the redundant storage means for our files.
What is the level of "workplace redundancy" achieved by our home offices has never been studied enough, at least in those terms. For simplicity, let's consider a city where the average household size is (3) three people per household (the actual is 2.2 in the EU and 2.51 in the US). That means, and it was more or less proven during the pandemic, that there are about 3 (three) "home office workspaces" in the average household. Now let's assume that, on average, the household is occupied by two adult knowledge workers and a school-age child. Both adults have their working-hours office space and the child has school-hours space at school.
The redundancy type
That means that, on average, the "workspace" redundancy is of the 2N type, N being the number of employees. 2N type means that a complete duplication of every space component is present. 2N redundancy is used for mission-critical systems that cannot tolerate any downtime. This was pretty much proven during the pandemic as it provided a full failover capacity for most knowledge workers and school children.
How are we treating this newly discovered workplace redundancy now?
How are we treating this newly discovered workplace redundancy now?
The answer is: poorly.
Again, let's take the analogy of the file storage scenario. When we store a file in the cloud, one or more duplicates are created in remote data centers, and we don't actually care where in the cloud this file is stored. In fact, duplicates can "travel" freely from one data center to another, old data centers can become obsolete and new data centers can be created, and we would have absolutely no idea that such events have occurred. Actually, we expect that our files are not "rigidly" stored in certain and specific dedicated places as this would go against the concept of data integrity and availability and specific data centers could become selective targets of hacking or destruction.
In the workplace analogy, having our own dedicated desk at the office and our own dedicated workspace at home, is analogous to having a file stored at specific data centers and in specific folders in those data centers. It couldn't be more rigid.
The distributed workplace
How can we apply a less rigid approach in the workplace analogy?
The answer is simple: By creating a distributed workplace. A workplace where each space can be occupied by more than one person and where each person has access to multiple workspaces to choose from when deciding to perform work.
The answer is simple: By creating a distributed workplace. A workplace where each space can be occupied by more than one person and where each person has access to multiple workspaces to choose from when deciding to perform work.
This has, to some extent, already happened in many offices where the dedicated spaces have been replaced by non-dedicated ones and where employees choose (through "hot desking" apps or otherwise) where they will work when in the office.
It has also been applied for creating distributed office spaces and using apps and services like Kadence and Radious that provide spaces around the city and tools for companies to choose and book such spaces.
But although knowledge workers spend approximately 30% of their time working from home, the distributed workspace concept has not yet been applied to our homes. Meaning: we are still too attached and personal with our home-working space that we rarely consider it possible to host others while we have the available space, and we work from home.
When the average household size is 3 (three), and the average WFH time is approximately 30%, assuming kids go to school every day, then the average knowledge worker is spending alone the majority of the days working from home with enough space around them to host another person. Which explains why loneliness feelings hit 20% in the recent Gallup survey: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/gallups-front-page-oct-17-2024-gallup-ebrhe/.
Co-location at home
If the average household has available workspace on any given day, why not use this workspace for hosting colleagues? Why not apply workspace distribution to our houses, to expand the notion and create multiple available workspaces for everyone in our neighborhood, in our vicinity?
If the average household has available workspace on any given day, why not use this workspace for hosting colleagues? Why not apply workspace distribution to our houses, to expand the notion and create multiple available workspaces for everyone in our neighborhood, in our vicinity?
Imagine a knowledge economy company with 5000 employees in a city like Los Angeles, London or Hong Kong. Such company could correspond to 5 office buildings with 1000 desks each and 5000 homes with 3x5000=15000 home-workspaces, assuming an average household size of three (3). Whenever an employee is working from home, a desk is empty in the office and another desk (or more) is empty at their home.
Optimizing redundancy
That is why we created Coremoting. To include this huge underutilized redundancy in the distributed workplace scenarios. Employees can now leverage their empty home workspaces and use it both to their advantage and to their organization's benefit. By using Coremoting , hybrid organizations can go from a 2N scenario to a N+N/n scenario, where n depends on the hybrid policy and can be a number higher than 1 and close to 2. What does this mean and why is this significant? A 2N redundancy, as mentioned, means that there is a complete duplication of every workspace component, and employees have 1 (desk) in the office guaranteed on any given day (exceptions apply with hot desking etc.). An N+N/n redundancy scenario means that for each employee there is less than 1 (one) desk in the office per employee and the employee can either work from home or from some colleague's home when Coremoting is provided as an option.
What could the effect of Coremoting be on the workplace redundancy subject? The answer is: tremendous.
What could the effect of Coremoting be on the workplace redundancy subject? The answer is: tremendous.
For example, let's assume a minimum 2 days/week in the office policy. This is in line with employee expectations according to Nick Bloom and the latest Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA). According to the same survey, there is a gap between how much employees want to #WFH and what their employer plans are, which fluctuates near 0.6 days. that is, employers would like their employees to be more in the office than they actually are.
Today, organizations maintain most of their office workspaces because there is peak attendance during some days of the week. But many days, the office looks empty. Organizations could, instead of a 2 days/week in-the-office policy, have a 3-days (or more) co-location policy, in line with the Collaboration Mandate that Michael Arena advocates in his recent article. Employees would be expected to not work from home alone at least 3 days of the weekm instead of just being in the office 2 days per week. Some would choose the office (or other hired space), others would host colleagues at home, and others would be hosted by their colleagues at their colleagues' homes. This could on one hand bridge the employee-desire/employers-plans gap and on the other hand allow for a significant reduction in office space.
...with just 5% of the organization's workforce acting as hosts and another 5% acting as guests, the organization can achieve reduction in up to half of the office space and increase of co-location by up to 50%!
With that scenario, organizations can decide to reduce their office space once a desired level of co-location has been achieved through Coremoting , and the reduced office will no longer appear empty during off-peak days. In our 5000 employee scenario, If n=2, then the organization's office space can be reduced in half. With a 3-days per week (40%) co-location policy, assuming uniform distribution during the week, the office would have 2500 desks for 3000 employees (40% of the employees). This requires 500 employees to be co-located at homes, meaning 250 employees will still work from their home, but they would not work alone, they would host one of their colleagues. That is, with just 5% of the organization's workforce acting as hosts and another 5% acting as guests, the organization can achieve reduction in up to half of the office space and increase of co-location by up to 50%! With non-uniform distribution, during peak days the number of Coremoting employees could be a bit higher and in non-peak days a bit lower, but the average would be about the same.
In our N+N/2 redundancy scenario, there is a flywheel effect of:
Sure, not all that glitters is gold. And we have outlined the challenges of Coremoting in our article at Work&Place .
The difference, and Coremoting 's unique selling point is, that we do not approach it from a simple "space" perspective. The purpose of Coremoting is not just to fill the home workspaces. The purpose is to #connect the #colleagues, and have them spend workdays together in spaces that are already available, the home workspaces. That is why Coremoting is using a matching algorithm that not only finds the appropriate space for a guest, but it increases the possibility that the colleagues will have a better experience, as their profiles are matched based on criteria that they introduce in the app.
But this article was about redundancy and how analogous thinking can transfer and appy solutions proven in one field into another field.