Visiting the deserted office

I went back to the office yesterday after 100 days of working from home. I needed to pick up an old laptop; see if the plants were still alive; check the post and basically satisfy my curiosity about how many of our neighbours had returned to the offices.

But our WeWork in London’s Hammersmith was a ghost of its former self. As I wandered down corridors where start-ups used to sprout and large organisations like National Geographic and Mercedes would house their overflow teams, I passed still, empty offices. Not just empty of people, but of equipment, files, and all the soft paraphernalia of office life that people use to humanise their working space. 

Just clear glass cubicles and echoing corridors. 

No need to book a meeting room – I could have my pick of dozens. Curiosity took me to the other floors – all virtually empty. Only the barista in reception had stuck by her post these past weeks and that was because she could not go back to Romania without enduring two weeks of quarantine there and two more on return.

The only snail mail post was from our bank who seem to want to write to us about the most trivial of financial transactions. When Armageddon arrives, I feel that the automated printers in banks will still be mailing us about the pennies they have charged for performing services we never cared about.

The plants were surprisingly healthy. They liked the solitude and clearly we were over-watering them before the humans moved out. Wifi was better than home as no one else was in the building. The coffee machines still worked, although no one had bothered to reduce the bean order and there were bags of colombian stacked as high as the ceiling. Fridges stood empty and the communal areas with every other seat taped off were devoid of any human life. You couldn’t catch a conversation, let alone a deadly virus.

It was the last place on earth that I would choose to work. I felt jealous of all those ‘commuters’ I passed on my cycle through London on a July morning. The tanned plump man with a goatee beard and sandals who was heading back from the paper shop; the woman in impeccable lycra and ponytail jogging faster than I could ride; working out between Zoom calls. They were all masters of WFH – using that tube time to polish off a report or present to Beijing in the morning, New York in the evening. My office felt about as useful as a sedan chair in a cycle lane.

Sure, I missed the human contact of colleagues, but to be honest Covid has made us more collegiate with stand-up meetings three times a week. That’s three times more than when we were office bound.

And when I got to my desk, plugged in and entered MS Teams I might as well have been at home. The only difference was my background was a bit more ‘officey’ than the others on the call – although I could have achieved the same with a digital background. At the end of the day I emerged from virtual-working to an empty office. My location seemed perverse; instead of commuting downstairs for tea and a chat with my partner I had a ride across London in front of me.

Half of the world is currently working from home, or more accurately they are working from Zoom, Slack, MS Teams and email. And there is much about this new enforced situation that is to like. The balance between work-life and home-life has a finger pressing down on the home scale. You see more of the kids. You eat more healthily. You can take breaks and fit in the odd household chore that used to clutter the weekends.

And for organisations the savings are immense. Law firms for instance spend up to 15% of their revenues on rent, and for many businesses the rent bill dwarfs the pre-tax profit, second only to salaries. Then there is the cost of utilities; no employee was ever grateful because the company paid the lighting bill.

Covid-19 has been the biggest accelerator of WFH and in the months and years to come this will bear fruit as a new attitude to more flexible working becomes the norm. About time too: industrial working hours were formalised during the second world war to ensure factories could pump out the required amount of ammunition and tanks. Licensing hours in the UK were also introduced to keep the workforce sober 9-5. This worked well for factories where presenteeism was essential to deliver the goods. But a century later CEOs around the world have been astonished how productive their staff can be working from home – particularly those companies where demand went up during the crisis such as Amazon, Microsoft and Ocado.

Improvement in productivity has led to a massive mind shift by senior management: Fujitsu and Twitter are happy if their staff never clock into their offices again. Many other service industries are contemplating 3 days in and 2 days at home for non-customer facing staff. Call centres will become distributed, doctors will give up their surgeries.

But all of this depends on one thing: instead of bricks and mortar, access cards and coffee machines, meeting rooms and flipcharts, businesses and organisations are going to demand state-of-the-art digital workplaces.

Consumer-grade tech gave us Zoom calls. But that is only part of the picture. It is all very well to see and talk and share documents online; you also need a place where people can work outside of those meetings. Where the latest file is available to all; where digital assistant do the heavy lifting of booking meetings, formatting documents and organising where they should live; where you can find the best talent in the company to help you solve a knotty client problem.

This is why Microsoft Teams has had such a good crisis. It is the right functionality at the right price at exactly the right time. Zoom has been a runaway success thanks to its simple UX and high stability, but it does not integrate with all the other software applications that staff need to get their job done. MS Teams integrates with half of them out of the box, because they are Microsoft products. And they have integrations with most of the other enterprise applications like SAP, Workday, Salesforce, etc that dominate the market.

Organisations are complex beasts and no two large businesses have identical head offices. In the same way no two digital workplaces should be the same. WeWork and its virtual equivalent Slack work for start-ups because in the early years many companies have similar needs. But whereas Diageo has a whisky shop in its reception and a bar on the top floor, GSK Vaccines has no corners in their laboratories (helps to keep them sterile). All offices are very different and reflect the culture of the business. The same should be true of any successful digital workplace.

So I predict that 2020 will be the Year of the new Digital Workplace. The successful ones will take months of effort to develop and to engage their users. Yet the outcomes will be as splendidly different and diverse as the Empire State and the Taj Mahal.