What is the office, anyway?
500 years old, the office has stood the test of time, until now. It’s teetering on the edge of relevancy for today’s workforce but many businesses are clinging on for dear life to this institution
Scriptorium
The concept of the office is far older than you may think, some say back to the 15th Century when monks created a ‘scriptorium’, essentially a desk to copy manuscripts. No LED strip lights and free Camden Ale there a la WeWork methinks.
Remote in 1729?
You have heard of the East India Company, right? They were running… well, East India from Leadenhall Street in London in purposely selected offices. This was around 1729, so the concept of remote work is not new either.
Neither are long hours, office boredom, toxic cultures and managers, so it seems, with accounts and musing littered with disgruntled employees denouncing the latest reduction in holiday, compulsory Saturday working and the Christmas party being cancelled… again! It’s all online.
Lightbulbs and lifts
Inventions like the humble lightbulb turning out to be the bane of office-workers’ lives in the late 1800s as bosses could make you work longer! Lifts made skyscrapers possible and the era of the ‘factory office worker’ begins. Productivity phrases like: ‘In a bid to increase employee-efficiency, lower costs and maximise profits…’ because someone gave the engineer the job of designing the workspace - Taylorism as it became known.
Bürolandschaft
Thank god for mind-altering drugs in the 60s as that’s when things seemed to start to change, the Action Office and even standing desks were a thing (and I thought I was so dope for having an electrically operated standing desk). Bürolandschaft brought funny furniture and potted plants. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t the drugs, I wasn’t there, but for a decade the office seemed to become a tad more interesting.
Cubicles
Then the 70s came along and some bright spark invented the cubicle, seemingly circling back to the Taylorism of the early 1900s - perhaps this was the result of all those drugs in the 60s?
Back to Taylorism?
This looks like a living hell… but it was once how offices were laid out and lasted long after the 70s was over.
Technology
Laptops seem to be the next office evolution - go the 80s - planting the seed of a more mobile work life. Though they were far from MacBook Airs and needed a power station to make them run, and cost about the same.
Email in the 90s was truly a revolution and in 2005 the co-working space emerged, largely due to the ‘In a bid to increase employee-efficiency, lower costs and maximise profits…’ mentality prevailing in offices.
Life imitating art
Jobs, Wozzer, Lazardis and the like then screwed us all over when they turned Captain Kirk’s communicator into a real thing, and the office truly did come home with us. In 10,000 years, archaeologists will be asking why the endorphin gland in early 21st Century humans was so enlarged - and why we all had such overdeveloped thumb muscles.
Steven Bartlett’s slide
As I see it, for about 460 years the office has pretty much stayed the same. It’s needed a serious PR job on it, even with the last 60 years of rapid external influences birthing slightly different iterations - though Steven Barlett’s blue slide and ball pool is my favourite.
The P change
However, that little thing called The Pandemic changed everything. Whether an ill-advised bat salad, the Bond-villan-esk virus release or simply a series of unfortunate events, actually working from home, rather than playing on your PS4, became a thing.
Leaders were forced into extending trust to their employees and managers and perching on the corner of your bed, jammies bottom half shirt top, was the order of the day. Rolling out of bed at 8.45am into your ‘home office’, chucking on a hoodie, once a P45 move was now okay. It was like being back at Uni for some. And we have all heard the urban legends of semi-naked Zoom accidents and errant child star appearances. And let’s not forget the Zoom background one-upmanship that we all tried - the tropical beach scene being the worst.
The world didn’t fall apart
Far from it. It managed to do what 500-years of so-called progress couldn’t - it forced us all to truly reflect on our lives and ask what was important. It forced a revolution in leadership, technology, mindset, mindfulness, sales, communication, transport, shopping, education and parenting, to name a few.
365 in 11
In Steven Barlett’s book, The Diary of a CEO, he refers to an American computer scientist called Ray Kurzweil. In the 1990s, Kurzweil made 147 predictions of which 86% have come true! Bartlett’s recalls, “He (Kurzweil) predicted that if you're ten today, by the time you're 60, you'll experience a year's change in 11 days. In the 21st Century we’ll experience 20,000 years of change.” What will this do for the office that has stubbornly resisted change for 500 years or so?
Steven Bartlett
“In the 21st Century we’ll experience 20,000 years of change.”
In 2073 I’ll be 101 and dribbling into my lap and won’t know or care… So who will?
Gen Z
Soon to be more than one-third of the world’s populous. Future managers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, teachers and, most importantly, teammates.
And they care a lot about work and how work itself needs to change. According to a recent BBC blog, Gen Z: “Having observed older workers experience burnout, time poverty and economic insecurity at the grindstone, they’re demanding more from workplaces: bigger pay cheques, more time off, the flexibility to work remotely and greater social and environmental responsibility. Many of these values were millennial preferences, but for Gen Zers, they’ve become expectations – and they’re willing to walk away from employers if their needs aren’t met.”
Plenty of cake and it’s fine to eat it!
This is a generation that have been mislabelled as anti-capitalist, work shy or most commonly, entitled. It’s not true. If over half a generation of people have seen someone in their household lose a job after grinding it out for years, it is no wonder Gen Z want to have their cake and eat it, in the office or working from home!
What we are experiencing, and not just in the workplace, is a revolution of the mind. Empathy, vulnerability, openness, choice… knowing your own mind and body and accepting it, owning it. Never has there been more knowledge or acceptance that different and diverse is okay, in fact it should be celebrated. Never more has it been acceptable to talk about these challenges and mindsets with your colleagues, and your boss. Dam right. The team I most recently led were fantastic; all different with individual needs, desires and senses of purpose. My 121 conversations covered mental health to church; side hustles, and travel to pooch health. It wasn’t always easy and quite often they didn’t need answers, just to be understood.
Being Happy Counts
Having purpose counts. Taking a lower paid job because it’s more flexible with my lifestyle choices or family is here to stay. And in some cases, the most important thing. In recent months we have all read that some large organisations are pushing hard to get people back in full time. It may not be the balance of power that has changed but the balance of choice has. So in the war for talent, a 4-day week or optional hybrid or flexible working and being able to work from home and in the office is winning out over and extra ten grand and some nice coffee. One recent job advert I saw stated - as a benefit - free parking. Wow! People’s personal life journeys are, rightly so, taking priority to the now utterly flawed thinking around a 500-year-old maxim of work.
50% Will Leave
In a report from Owl Labs, it found that: If hybrid workers were required to be in the office full-time, 36% would go in but start looking for a new job, and 10% would quit. Imagine nearly 50% of those people around you now on the verge of quitting.
Coffee Bagging?
To prevent ‘coffee bagging’ (yep, this is a thing, look it up), your office… no, what you think your office is has to change. And I am not talking furniture or adding a bloody pool table. The fundamental question I think we should all be asking is: why do you have an office? Of course, you could just save yourself a packet and say balls to having an office at all, but that would also not necessarily be the right thing to do either.
Talent and Retention Wars
Big cities don’t tend to have as many issues recruiting and retaining talent, but going hybrid means that same talent pool is now within the grasp of smaller or more remote businesses. Connected with a potential exodus from cities to rural locations, for cost or lifestyle reasons, where you work is no longer an issue. You can think regionally and even globally - great if you have more specialist business requirements and the influx of diversity into the brain and culture pool.
Reflect Your Team
A one-size-fits-all approach to your office won’t work. Leaders and talent teams have to now accept that as individuals, we all want different things from the office space, and perhaps it will be our teams that actually decide what the office is to them. Introverts want space and quiet, summertime means air con, winter could be warmer in the office than at home, especially with the cost of fuel. Parents could want time away from the stress of raising kids. Building work. Noisy neighbours. I wanna work on a beach for a month with my laptop. I wanna collaborate with these guys from the London office. Project-based teams. My gym is close to the office. I have to care for a family member. Schools. I wanna bring my dog to the office (I do every day but like Harry Potter, I work under the stairs. No, literally under the stairs).
The Cost
Not just financial (about £36 per day according to one report I read on LinkedIn) but ‘lost’ travel time and carbon emissions.
In Public First’s ‘Hybrid Work Commission 2023’ it states that hybrid working is worth £13.5bn annually to employees. About £1,600 a year or 5.3% of a median salary. This may raise the question of paying people less for working from home, but that’s another blog methinks.
And there is the financial cost for business in terms of recruitment and retention. This same paper suggests that: Between £6.9bn and £10.3bn is saved annually across the UK economy due to improved retention from hybrid working through recruitment costs alone. So those extra laptops and tech could well recovered with these retention costs alone. They also share that: the average hybrid worker saves 178 hours a year from reduced commuting as a result of hybrid working. In total, this equates to 661 million hours saved across all hybrid workers in the UK.
© Hybrid Work Commission 2023
From the green perspective, obviously emissions are lower but it is a complex issue. An article in the Guardian online, admittedly from US research, says that a reduction by one day a week does not have that much impact, just a 2% reduction in emissions. However, this rises to around 29% for 2-4 days of home working. What does help is if the company has a way to analyse their hybrid working data, they can make further reductions by downsizing or sharing office space. Getting teams to car share by knowing their weekly office attendance routines.
Trust and Culture
So, does all this come down to your company culture? A culture takes work, collaboration and relentless continuity of effort. It also only lasts if the leadership eat, sleep and breath it. Recruit for it. Make it at the core of the business - and not just words either. Perhaps this is only for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies as I saw one commenter post - what are your thoughts?
It will also take investment in technology as an Excel spreadsheet just won’t cut it, especially with more complex remote working or hybrid working operations, field sales teams or multiple office locations and office spaces in a multitude of countries.
Trust is also an integral part of this hybrid work culture - being given it and reflecting it back. Trust with a lack of fear and a culture of progress and collaboration over presenteeism. However, trust comes with responsibilities, needs great communication and a way to hold people - and leaders - accountable to and for their progress. But this shouldn’t be a fearful statement; I personally agree with Steven Barlett’s and James Clear’s take on experimentation, failure and progress. The more you try, the more you succeed. Getting better by 1% every day makes significant difference over the course of a year. More than anything, people want to succeed, have purpose and meaning that is tangible in their work.
The future
So let’s just sit for a few minutes now and image the office of the future. A place that is as diverse in it’s options for use as it is in the people who visit it - and maybe not just a single company’s employees. It becomes a tool to enable every individual not just to work, but to collaborate and be their authentic self.
I don’t think it’a a place where you have ‘your’ desk. But each office is broken into sections for the types of work needed from it. Huddle spaces, quiet working areas, team planning and creative energy rooms. The spaces are transient in nature and built for purpose. You move with your need. You start when you want and you plan your day on it’s purpose and outcomes.
If you need some inspiration, go and spend a few hours at a good flexible working space. They are not just for the solopreneur or start-up, or Gen Zee for that matter. Honestly, it will really open your mind.
Ultimately I will guarantee just one thing: that change will happen. Do it yourself or have it done to you, your decision, and the decision of leaders and businesses. As the Swedish cyborgs say: resistance is futile.
And… it’s not really about the office is it.
Adam Scorey is intheOffice’s Chief Storyteller and Colouring in Expert.