What is the point of the office?

It is hard to escape the fact that the age of remote working is over in the minds of industry leaders.

The bosses have spoken and the mandates have been ordered. Workers worldwide now face dismissal if they fail to comply with mandated office hours. The progress brought about by the digital transformation of the pandemic era is somehow disappearing – slipping away faster than the company card at the pub.

I don’t want to debate the pros and cons of remote working. There’s plenty of academic research that supports it and plenty of reasons workers are demanding it. The inability to do what’s right for workers is a failure of leadership and catastrophic for worker’s rights.

Rather than repeat myself, I would like to talk about the office itself. The bastion of productivity where the bosses can be worshipped and workers rigorously inspected. And at its centre, the factory floor – the open-plan desk space.?

Nothing screams productivity more than the resilient worker, armoured by headphones, camouflaged in the breakout space bunker – powering through microwaved food gases beneath the unending chatter of mediocrity.

Why is it always like this? Why are offices inevitably this way?

The most surprising thing to me from the shift in ways of working and the emergence of the home office space is that the work office has remained unchanged. Everything else has evolved, so it is time for the office to evolve as well.

When leadership makes its case for the return of workers to base camp, they routinely use words like collaboration, learning and inspiration. Important words related to the creative process. Undeniably important words. They say, rightly or wrongly, that the office will enable these things more acutely than a remote environment.?

Again, I am not here to debate the validity of this argument. Instead, I want to examine how offices should evolve to do this better.

At the centre of this entire debate are two important provocations.?

Firstly, if leadership truly believes that the office is their greatest tool for facilitating better collaboration, learning and inspiration for workers, then how is the office changing to enable these things??

Secondly, issuing mandates and forcing people into attending the office is deeply demotivating, so if leadership truly want workers to attend the office more, then they need to offer clear incentives – there must be a value exchange if workers are to go willingly.?

I’m going to invoke the baseball field for ghosts – if you build it, they will come.?

Again, I believe choosing whether to work in an office or not should be entirely up to the worker. They’ve proved they can work effectively from anywhere and they have the tools to do so, so they should continue to have the right to do so.

Putting that aside (again), let’s break down the ways agency leaders could offer a clearer value exchange to workers to draw them back to the office.

Collaboration

Kill the open plan office. Kill it with fire. Rip up the sweatshop factory floor and think about how people work together in small teams. What does that look like? Think about what kind of environments foster the most collaboration. Pods, round tables, closed-off spaces. Variety is beneficial. Creating more diversity in space can lead to more diversity in thought. If you walk around any agency office today you will be confronted by sameness. Bank after bank of lifelessness. Codified conformity befitting the accountants who now run the place.?

Learning

Does your office have a dedicated learning space? The closest I’ve come to finding this in an agency office is when a Planning team took over a bookcase and loaded it with their own books from home. This is a travesty. One of the greatest arguments I’ve seen for getting people into the office is that the younger workers will benefit from mentoring and day-to-day guidance. A lot of people learn on the job from having great people around them. How could the office itself help facilitate more of that? How might the office bring us closer to our clients or to their customers? Libraries, product and audience immersion zones, and experimentation spaces. Mad scientists need laboratories. Craftspeople need workshops.?Build us spaces for learning.

Inspiration

Do you feel inspired when you walk into your office? Sure, you'll know where you are because they've made a neon sign of their logo, but you have Google Maps. Free bananas and a toaster aren't blowing peoples socks off either. There should always be a guest speaker in the office each week. There should be a dedicated space where all manner of creatives and diverse voices come to showcase their work or thinking. Partnerships, collaborations, sponsorships, community integrations. The potential for bringing in a world of possibilities is endless. It just requires imagination – something this industry shouldn’t struggle with. Coming to the office should feel like stepping into an Imaginarium. It should open your eyes, your mind and your heart. I am so sorry, but a beanbag chair and a dusty award you won in 2013 aren’t going to set your worker’s imaginations ablaze.?

If you build it, they will come. If you demand it and offer nothing to incentivise them, they will resent you.

What is the point of the office now? Nothing much currently, but it has immense potential.?

If this industry wants to call itself The Creative Industry and not the place where creativity goes to die, then it needs to rethink its home.