I went from having my own office in the 90s, to cubes, to bullpens, and then more and more open open office setups, then recently back to a cube and finally now in a private office.
Anyone who says productivity, focus and happiness doesn’t take a huge hit in open office settings is fooling themselves or lying to you. Cubes are okay, bullpens (5-10 folks with spaced out desks) were hit and miss but largely hit, but open office is utterly ruinous for getting work done. I loathed them when I was first forced to sit in them, I hated them every day after, and I hate them now looking back on them.
I understand the desire to keep real estate costs down. But at the very least an office worker should get something like a cube, and yeah offices are best. Especially with hybrid work likely to stick around indefinitely meaning more VC meetings either companies are going to have to redesign their offices to build a shit ton of conference rooms (LinkedIn did this and it actually sorta works) or give people more auditory and visual isolation in their private workspaces.
even ignoring productivity of workers, I don't see why most companies wouldn't prefer to cut down on expenses like office space. Some industries will always need a chunk of their workforce in office, but even downsizing office size helps. Plus you can recruit almost globally for talent and employees don't have to deal with long commutes which are going to drain people mentally
You can't even claim remote work doesn't scale, there are multiple billion dollar public companies that are remote first and basically every company continued to function just fine during the pandemic
Power. Management really doesn't give a shit about being the most productivity, in reality those who have been deemed "above workers" want to feel that way and be able to observe their serfs in the field toiling away. It absolutely terrifies them that having a task master breathing down the neck of workers may not actually be necessary for things to get done, because why else did they spend 2 whole years paying 150k for that MBA from an Ivy League if their role is truly pointless.
Dealing with all these contradictions is very hard and may require a review of how we imagine "work" on a societal level, so it's much easier to force everyone back into the office and sweep it back under the rug.
in theory it should solve itself, companies that adapt or new companies that form will be more efficient and cost effective and put these other companies out of business.
In the short term these people can use words to justify decisions but eventually it will show up in the bottom line and everybody will find out which model is superior
This is discussed very heavily in economic theory. Basically possession of capital is such a powerful advantage it basically destroys a lot of the adaptation that should be forced. You see this a lot with VC companies, like Uber needing to subsidize every ride or Internet providers monopolizing by endlessly buying each other and merging instead of improving customer service.
Can you elaborate on this or offer some resources to learn more? This squares with my experience, but I haven't seen this thought specifically elaborated on. I am very interested to learn more.
This would be an excellent example of a market failure and a key area of policy research.
> Anyone who says productivity, focus and happiness doesn’t take a huge hit in open office settings is fooling themselves or lying to you.
I work way better in an open office, but I fully acknowledge that I am not likely your average worker.
The problem with open offices is that you only get one option: be around everybody.
My company has something like 15-20 offices anyone can use at any point with a big open floor in the middle for collaboration. That is in combination with a flexible WFH and office culture. Best of both worlds IMO.
I remember when I worked for a large fortune 50 company, once we had an old school exec up there, and he was introduced as "the guy who brought the open office to our NA locations"
It was supposed to be a positive thing (certainly the management team saw it as that) but there was silence. It was really weird, actually.
"Those praying for its awakening (basically, everyone in real estate) need office workers to return."
That includes the author, who is a partner at a real estate firm. The livelihood of these people is very much dependent on making sure their buildings are occupied - but for the would-be occupants, what's the benefit?
I have a private office already; it's in my house. It's quiet and comfortable. I don't have to deal with a commute or noisy coworkers, and I'm able to be extremely productive. My quality of life has improved tremendously as a direct result of working from home, and no "carrot" of private offices or "stick" of a forced return will cause me to give it up.
It depends on a million things, of course if you live across the street from your office you're a special case. Most people have to spend at least a few hundred dollars a month commuting if they go into the office with fair frequency.
$4-5k/yr can get you a decent bit. Remote also means you don't need to live in the city, so that cost is easily offset by moving into a more affordable area.
Moving to a different town is a big disruption which at least i won't do just to be able to afford a big house. Not only do you lose the option to come in to the office (which is a good option to have even if you prefer home office most of the time); some people just prefer to live in big cities.
> but for the would-be occupants, what's the benefit?
Learning the crucial skill of socializing with other humans, in real life. I suspect a lot of the self-reported misery and disconnectedness they report is due to being more and more online with less actual human interaction.
You're right of course, at the individual level. But on the macro level something is clearly broken with Gen Z and their ability to interact in social situations. Anything that can get them interacting with humans more on a regular basis, I think would be a net society benefit. They are literally rudderless and it hurts to watch them be so miserable because it is entirely fixable. The lives they lead are not natural and it is messing with their humanity.
Remote work is a tradeoff. The primary issue with commuting to an office is the costs are too damn high. The benefits are primarily collaboration.
I'd be happy to come into an office. What I don't want to do is spend 2 hours in traffic to be present for 8 hours in an office, where I get maybe 3 hours of actual productive work done, and be forced to spend a ton of money I wouldn't normally need to spend on commuting expenses.
It's much more attractive and possible to solve the remote collaboration problem than the "reducing the costs of the commute" problem, which seems unsolvable by design. Most of the costs of the commute are intractable or designed to extract money out of commuters.
I haven't seen a lot of empirical work on this. Loooooooots of hand-waving by those who try to justify in-office work, though. Not much consideration about the opportunity costs and tradeoffs though.
> The ability to break off and sidebar convos is about the only piece I miss with in person.
I agree! Weird that it's still largely unsolved (there are some experimental apps like Chatmosphere or WorkAdventure, but nothing people actually use at scale).
Other than that, collaboration is perfectly fine or better than in person. Looking at and interacting with the same screen is a good bit more comfortable [with MS Teams] than in person. VSCode liveshare is better than sitting in front of the same computer. There are so many small things you can do remotely you can't do in person.
The ability to read social cues in person is so vital to our survival that they are instinctual - babies can pick on these cues without any prior exposure. Yet remote workers are struggling with these very things. That should disturb anyone and hint that the burden of proof goes the other way - we need to prove that virtual-everything relationships don't have a negative impact on society before we go all-in on it for a generation.
Well, the article is a single anecdote; because it glosses over a more important obstacle:
> freeing the techies to move much farther away, ... Even if office space were as comfy as home and more fun than free beer, a couple hour drive would be a deal-breaker.
What would get me back into the office (almost) every day? A flying car. I'm not kidding. I want it parked right outside of my house every morning, and I want it to fly at 120mph, land directly on the roof of my office, and then go park itself.
And, yes, I stress the word house. I'm not living in shoebox apartment built next to a train station as some political compromise. I'm a talented engineer, so I expect an upper-middle-class lifestyle with plenty of room for my kids to play. I don't want to deal with traffic, or transferring between trains, or the long walk / bike ride / drive to/from the train station, or shuttles.
Think I'm being unreasonable? I'll take my talents elsewhere, thank you.
I'm a millennial not Gen Z, but there's absolutely nothing that can be done to get me to go to an office. Well, I guess I would if I absolutely had to, if no remote jobs were available. But that seems quite unlikely. I don't want to commute, period.
This is exactly it. WFH is simply inherently superior to commuting, for many of us. If remote jobs exist, we will take them until they don't, but competition for workers makes me optimistic that they will. It'd be like asking "What would it take to get workers to accept a job that doesn't provide health insurance?" and then being surprised that workers will choose jobs that offer that benefit over jobs that don't, unless somehow there were no jobs with that benefit.
Going back to the office with the technology we have now seems silly to me. While Zoom and Slack won't give you the same level of collaboration if you were in the office, it gets you about 95% there. I recently became a manager and talking to other managers there seems to be a slit between those that want a return to the "old times" of office work and those that have fully embraced "remote work". I tell all the managers that want a return to the "old times" that remote work is the future and they need to adapt to it. Sure there are compromises, but the benefits across the board are insurmountable.
I finally retired in 2021 as I was working too many hours. At least the last year was at home, so I could avoid the hour commute. Most of the people I needed to meet with were 3000 mi away from me anyway, my immediate team sat around me, but we still talked on slack all day anyway. There was little reason to be in the office. WFH saved me a lot of wasted time, although I missed having lunch with people every day, and teaching new team members what we were doing on a white board was handy; otherwise nothing else helped.
In my long career I saw every kind of environment, cubes, open office, bullpens, private offices, and shared offices. I could cope with any environment and still get work done, sometimes having everyone you needed within spitting distance was useful for quick questions, but not everyone is good at task switching, so it's not always helpful. I found my best productivity was quiet + instant comms (such as Slack). When the people you need to talk with are spread out over multiple time zones, being in an office, especially and open one, is terrible, especially if people insist on having calls on a phone or computer with a mike. Hearing 10 meetings going on at the same time is a killer.
Offices are nice if you can close the door, but who gives you offices any more? Companies seem to prefer cramming people into sardine cans these days.
If you want me back in the office you're going to have to do better than my setup at home, which includes these benefits:
- No commute
- Healthy food of my chosing available
- I have a non-shared bathroom thats clean which includes a shower I can use whenever I want
- I have a Quad monitor setup and 4 GPU servers and a Gigabit LAN
- I control the temperature
- I am across the road from a gym and a pool
- I have very little / no interruptions and noise
- I can play music as loud as I want
I know there's no office in the world thats going to come close to these benefits, so why would I? To satisfy some ancient, out-dated, real estate conglomerate who hasn't innovated in 100 years? I dont care about them, my health and happiness is more important, these old businesses who don't move with the times can die, that's the point.
> Even if office space were as comfy as home and more fun than free beer, a couple hour drive would be a deal-breaker.
Private offices on a spoke with a collab/whiteboard room for a hub are the most tempting form of office space to me, but that still presumes that
1) my entire team is in one location. If we are going to have at least 2 people remotely, in order to not treat them as second class citizens, we all should be remote and only use remote-capable tools, which kills whiteboards
2) my commute is not crazy. It's really, really hard to compete with zero commute at all every single day. Nothing more convenient than doing the quick laundry / lunch prep / seeing family tasks
Coming back to the ~~bullpen~~ collaborative open plan office where we have nothing but L desks and nerf guns is not that tempting to me.
It's not the physical space so much as the time. If you calculate _all in_ times for commuting (getting ready, travel, gas, wait, walk to/from transportation) most commutes are easily an hour on each side of the work day.
Make it three hours a day. Grooming, picking pants, packing computer, etc, those all take time. If you're working 8 hours, you're spending 3/8 = 37.5% of the time not building value.
Ivan Illich calculated that if you added up the time it took you to drive your car, park it, maintain it, and work to pay for it, it would work out at 4 MPH. That's walking speed.
So basically the car is free from a "waste hours of my life" perspective and you get the added convenience of being able to be a lot more flexible about when you waste that life and not having to walk in the rain or jump though extra hoops when moving stuff you can't just carry.
When I go into the office, it's 90 minutes by commuter rail (with very limited service hours) plus another 30-45 on the subway (when it's not on fire), then another 15-20 minutes walking. Each way. I'm mentally wiped my the time I get in. Most of my job is WFH, and I'm only going in when I must be in the office.
I'm fortunate that I can shift some of my work time to my train time, but it's still a big chunk out of my day to just move around.
I like taking light rail, and on days I go into work, it is understood to be 10 to 4, and mostly spent chatting to people (about software largely but not necessarily this sprints top tasks).
I used to run a consultancy that developed software and managed IT. We benefitted greatly from having private offices (1-2 people) combined with common areas for impromptu discussions. Our signal for do-not-disturb was a closed door.
I have since visited many trendy open floor plan offices and I think they are ridiculous. There is no way to focus and create value.
If an organization cannot afford private offices, it is probably not creating much value. If it can afford private offices and chooses to put everyone within earshot of each other, it is leaving productivity improvement on the table.
As a contrarian who doesn't love WFH this is spot on. A purpose-built place designed just for working where I can be hyper productive - yes please! Being able to focus while I work but collaborate/socialize/have lunch with colleagues is the ideal.
Living in a city where space is a premium, a functional home office takes up valuable space and is an eyesore. My wife and I both want big monitors but don't want our house to look like a coworking space. We don't necessarily want to be there every day when the kids come home from school.
My company gives a generous WFH stipend for equipment and furniture but its still essentially be donating part of my house to my employer. I'd much rather they foot the bill for the office.
I had a private office in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was a great benefit, one could close the door to indicate you were thinking and then open the door to show you were up for talking. You could also start to work in a note book or reading code printout or something, and leave it in a pile and then get inspired a week later and pick it up again where you left off. I was at a company that had a lot of innovation and years of doubling times of three months. I would go in more if I had an office. Also if I had some influence over the thermostat, and what I consider descent coffee (that at least has gotten better even as they strip all dignity away from the working space). I didn’t read TFA. I also, Gen Z is underrated. Y’all work plenty hard, just less stupidly and less for empty tokens of virtue, but given intrinsically interesting work, and wow.
Just because some engineer said he thinks giving everyone private offices is the answer doesn't make it the right answer. You know, the whole "If I asked the customer what he wanted he would have said a faster horse' thing.
But it's very clear that the current situation is not working and needs to change.
I told my CEO that our open office setup sucked and if they invested in making it a nicer space more people would come back. He ignored me and talked about converting the space that our sublessee vacated into more conference rooms. That made me angry, but then I found out that he isn't renewing our office lease and has hired some workplace consultants to figure out the best path forward. They're going to get a new, smaller space and figure out how to best handle a workforce that is never required in the office. Only the people that want to come in will come in.
The only problem I foresee is that if they make our new space too nice, more people are going to start coming in than they planned for. LOL.
private office, good coffee, leftovers and a full fridge, coffe break with a wonderful woman, good speakers, mic + stand + sound-card with noise gate = no headphones, expensive chair.
If your team is distributed anyways the only thing good in the office are informal chats and the commutes if you can ride a bike.
I stopped biking when Covid hit and ugh it shows. Now when I walk to the grocery store, I am breathing hard.
I forgot about left overs, or food to my taste, it that is a big thing. I am a picky eater, and haven’t had much food even when they were burning money for fancy food.
My commute takes me between 2-3 hours a day, and costs me thousands a year in fuel costs, extra insurance costs (since I need to have commuting cover), and car depreciation.
On top of that, I get 2-3 hours a day less with my family. In the winter that 2-3 hours might actually mean I don't see daylight until the weekend! Plus the stress of commuting, encountering unexpected traffic, etc!
Then at home I have far comfier office (with a much more ergonomic, comfortable, and health-supporting chair, desk, etc), a private bathroom, I can work in whatever clothes I want, I don't have to worry about being in for deliveries, I have a full kitchen and a stocked fridge, freezer, pantry... I could go on all day about the benefits.
There's nothing that can be offered that would make me want to work in-office.
The costs and absolute nonsense of requiring a commute outweigh almost any benefit of daily in-office presence.
A study from decades ago (I wish I could find it again) found that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers teams perform worse. It basically correlates to whether the managers focus on results that matter, or on intimidating their workers into doing things that look like work (butts in chairs, not browsing, few breaks, etc.).
I'm thinking that the famous Steve Jobs 'insight' about building the offices so that people from different teams would have chance encounters is BS, especially since Apple now reportedly so heavily silos their information.
And want to save real estate? Far cheaper to give every employee an unheard-of $4K/yr equipment budget than to pay $66/SqFt/yr office space in SF (excluding utilities, insurance, etc.).
Any executive that doesn't get this is just dense, and I'd argue, unsuited for their office.
Some people want to go back, but forcing return to offices is a hostile act to me. There is literally nothing companies can do to get me to return to an in office requirement. Wfh for me is saving over 10 hours a week in commuting that I am able to reinvest into mental healthcare and hobbies that dramatically improved my life. Everytime these stupid articles come about: hey, don't you want to go back to mandated office time? The answer is hell no. Let's tax my wellbeing so assholes can justify their non earning assets or inability to cope. Not my problem, and should my employer attempt to infringe on my life then I will find a new path.
I've been called entitled. Whatever, but at least I'm happy and more importantly productive. Anecdotally, I am more productive than our sleazy wanting to mandate returns to office for all middle manager.
So I could drive or take the bus to the office. After an hour or so I'd be working in an open-plan quarter-occupied room with overhead florescent lighting that has always been a migraine trigger and a worse setup than I have at home. All of my meetings would be on Zoom.
A private office would be the bare minimum for me to go in, since it still has to compete with my private home office. But it doesn't get me those two additional hours of free time every day.
Interesting that this question is being asked specifically to deal with land owners losing money on vacant office buildings. In a city with a tremendous housing crisis, maybe try converting some of that space into housing? You could even double up the purpose. People can work from home in the same place that used to be an office. Everyone wins.
I don't think it's an accident that a principal at a real estate firm thinks the way to get people back in the office is to give them a lot more square footage lol. But more seriously, I think if you really think being in the office is important (usually for mentorship reasons) then the most important things are to figure out how to make hybrid work.
To echo the rest of the comments, hybrid is fine if and only if I get some kind of private space in the office itself, a cube is OK, a desk with partitions is OK, but I want to be able to isolate myself when necessary. A layout where someone can creep up and tap me on the shoulder? Not OK. Open plan where I can watch other people picking their nose? Not OK. But whiteboarding and social collaboration work best face-to-face, and I'm up for that, at least part-time.
Our CEO has emailed around asking people to come in 2 days a week from next year, but the offices are open plan. This means my Q1 2023 to-do list now has 'find a new job' at the top of it.
I haven’t heard mentorship as a key reason, but that’s interesting.
For me it’s the white boarding. Wow did I miss whiteboarding during the pandemic, and I never found an online version that worked as well as 2-3 people working on a whiteboard. I just about cried the first time I got to do that in an office again.
> ...For me it’s the white boarding. Wow did I miss whiteboarding...
Thank goodness i'm not the only one! Honestly, the only things that i like about office work are white boarding, and lunch with others (or alternatively grabbing an occasional beer...basically socializing regardless of how it happnes). Everything else about working at a physical office space is awful. It doesn't matter if the building is some old, falling-apart relic, or a sleek, modrn office....all of them are awful...and the things i noted above can be achieved in any cheap oiffice space - including ones where everyone has their own private space/office.
The only thing to get me back into the office is beyond the control of an individual company. Without proper public transport and fast commutes, spending 30+ minutes to commute to some area with barely functioning american transportation is not worth it. Every office is at least 45 minutes from anywhere i want to live, and god forbid I switch companies
It didn’t take the pandemic to work out that people prefer small/individual offices. It took the pandemic to give employees the leverage needed to speak up and say that if you want people back in then give us offices. I’ve never had such a hard time working as I did in an office of 30 people. At least I could put headphones in.
Gotta be honest - I didn't care much for the commute, but I would actually prefer a (real, honest to god, with a door) private office to my current work from home set up.
There’s really nothing specific about Gen Z in this post.
I’m Gen X, and have spent most of my career in open office spaces. I’ve been WFH since March 2020 (in a small one bedroom apartment, with my girlfriend in the same room). I generally don’t miss the commute, and open offices can be distracting, but in my case it’s weird working on mechanical and industrial design of hardware without a dedicated space to collaborate. My current company doesn’t even have a real office.
In the past few years, I’ve moved to fully cloud based CAD, and Slack, so it’s a bit hard to compare to the before times (and I’ve also changed jobs). Those aspects help with WFH, but there’s still no substitute in my field for touching/seeing/using/testing real stuff together in person.
Going in to do video calls makes no sense because the office video setup cannot realistically be made better than my home setup.
It needs to be 100% in-person, because that is better than video calls.
It's like, imagine that I arrange to meet a friend in a pub, but he suggests a phone call instead. I can go to the pub and make the phone call from the pub. But why?
The commute is a non issue, put the office in the city centre and I live within max half an hour of you. That's the entire point of cities.
I don't particularly care for the argument that others post here along the lines of "I live hours from the office/in another state/whatever". That's fine, I don't go to the supermarket in the next town over either...
> It's like, imagine that I arrange to meet a friend in a pub, but he suggests a phone call instead. I can go to the pub and make the phone call from the pub. But why?
The insane commutes make it a nonstarter. If I could get to the office in 20 minutes or less I would go. But in Miami it takes me at least 45 minutes to get from my suburban home to Brickell. In god damn Mad Max lunatic drivers traffic mind you.
My company largely abandoned the use of office buildings all over the world. I can't imagine how much money they are raking in because of it. Why anyone would want go back to that (besides real estate owners), is beyond me.
Interesting. Most of my Gen Z friends, especially those in consulting, are frustrated that the projects have gone fully remote. It's not fun working long hours on Zoom with people you might never meet in person.
I think what is still missing in the home office is codification, just like real life social interaction are codified. But it will take time.
* door open in private office: I’m available. -- People should get the habit of setting their status properly in slack or whatever they use
* visual contact: when I talk afk, people look at me. -- Our tools must become better for this and multiple Screens must become the norm. One screen must always show other participants video in a call, this screen must have the camera mounted just above it.
* audio: in the office, when someone talks, everyone gets spatial full band audio. And no dogs barking. — noise cancelling in videoconferencing has become amazing, and I even see spatial audio starting (sound coming from the position of the participants video on the screen). But Bluetooth audio quality still sucks and people still use sucky headphones with bad microphones. Here again, there should be a regular mandatory checkup with IT to ensure everything is set up as good as possible in home office to ensure best possible audio to coworkers.
* appearances: in the office, there are no virtual backgrounds where half the headset keeps missing, I don’t have to worry about what’s in my background. — here again, employees should receive training on how to set up their home office. You have kids? Put the wall behind you. Agree on a visual "do not disturb" sign at home and stick to it. And for the love of god please dress up a bit and groom. Yes it costs time but it is part of social interaction and signals respect and attention to others when on a video call. Plus you will be more inclined to turn video on if you look good.
Home office must become a norm with its codes as well, just like working in the office. We're not there yet and that's why it's painful at the moment.
I can enjoy my fully paid-off house in a beautiful place or I can go back to spending tons on rent or a mortgage? I hope the author understands that wfh is worth easily 50k+ a year to me and I suspect many others.
Jokingly of coures...But, i think many silicon valley/startup firms were sort of headed that route....by setting up a kitchen, play room, meditation room/room for resting, etc. ...all at the workp0lace! I mean, conceptually, they would love to have you "live" at the office as much as possible. They'll "pay the rent", but you have to pay to get there. ;-)
Yeah, create a sufficiently better work environment (including commute) than wfh. This won’t involve cattle pens or cube farms…. If you can’t manage this, find alternate employment.
House builders aren't building spaces for the WFH world that are affordable, so most people feel trapped working from their kitchen, living room, or bedroom. I'm currently fortunate that I'm able to have a semi-dedicated space for my office that is relatively quiet and private.
However, the problem is a growing family would probably want 3-4 bedrooms (master, girls, boys, maybe spare). After that, you might want:
* An Office
* A Playroom
* A living or family room that isn't in the excessively noisy "great room"
* A dining room?
That's a lot of space, and many families may not want all of that or any of that, but some might. Yet, nearly every house looks exactly the same and has roughly the same number of rooms in the same layout, give maybe ~5 variations.
People may be willing to sacrifice a larger dining room if they could grab a space in the neighborhood that supplied a dining room-like place.
People may be willing to sacrifice a playroom if there was a place where their kids (of various ages) could meet other kids in a safe way (e.g. a neighborhood room for toddlers).
People may be willing to sacrifice a home personal office if their neighborhood had a "rent-a-private-office-for-not-much-money" a short walk away.
None of these exist in the communities I see being built. There may be open grass parks or a community clubhouse, but that's not the same as the above.
(Yes, I know the list of reasons - zoning, cars, etc. etc.)
I have converted a shed (insulation, power, etc), which gives me an office that is reasonably isolated, but conveniently near my house. This solution depends on having a bit of yard space, a bit of manual skills, and reasonable zoning regulations.
Millennial here, so there might be some generational differences.
One important element of working from an office is that there are other people there I need to talk to. If half of the people I am working with aren't in the office then it's moot, I have to spend all I time in zoom anyway. The threshold for creating value is probably closer to 80%. In practice this means working out of the headquarters, or on the same campus as the headquarters.
Why is this important? New York City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Fransisco, Seattle, Redmond and all the other popular headquarter locations have insanely expensive office space compared to most of the rest of the United States. So companies often choose open office space, which increases the worker per square foot, so they can both save money on office space and fit more people in their headquarters for a critical mass.
Yeah, I'd love my own office or to share a closed off room with my two pizza team. If spending this extra per-worker office space means 35% less people are working in the same building then it might not be a tradeoff worth taking. Working out of an office where half of the people I need to communicate with aren't there will not provide a lot of value because I need to do the same amount of zoom and the same amount of written communication to keep everyone looped in.
On the topic of getting a critical mass, I wonder how plausible it is for tech companies to maintain the majority of their workers in a central location. There's huge infrastructure costs associated with it. Having 50k+ tech workers in a single location will have a massive impact on transportation, CoL and housing. The tech company is now vulnerable to local governments increasing taxes or reducing required services. There is also a vulnerability during a local natural disaster, something we can expect to see more of with climate change.
The private office might help Return to Office pushes in the margin for people that want to reclaim the space they use for their office in home, or do not have a private office at home. For me, I will always choose work from home unless 80%+ of the people I need to work with are also in the office.
Ultimately I think WFH beats the network of satellite offices and overseas extensions many tech companies have built, but doubt WFH beats a centralized HQ. I would love to see a comparison of F500 or Nasdaq companies in their return to office strategies and success, but this data isn't public knowledge. In five or ten years it'll be interesting to map Return to Office policies and stock performance, which might be the final nail in the coffin of corporate offices.
Ultimately, hybrid working is just working alone but in a worse environment.
I think (having never tried it) that I could be happy with 2-3 days in, 2-3 days out, on the proviso that everyone comes in on the same days.
If you don't do that, you're just doing video calls from the office. Every meeting has to be a video call because someone won't be there, and at lunch and other times you can't socialise properly because people aren't there. That just defeats the point of going in.
I think the amount of collab could be filled with, come in as needed and minimize meetings. Prior to the pandemic, the meme was how useless meetings were, and it is still largely true. Quite often, the meeting could have been solved with an email. There is often, just no point of being in a crowded office to fill seats if that isn't comfortable to the person. Coming in to join Teams is just a bad use of time.
Articles like this are out of touch with reality. We left our offices nearly three years ago. Do you think we haven’t hired anyone sense then? Do you think we mandated that they live near a building we’d abandoned?
The reality is we’ve hired people from all over the country. How do you propose we go back to the office? What does that even mean in this context?
Can we cut this going back to the office nonsense? We’ve moved on.
Personally I've found open office problems can be mitigated significantly with noise cancelling headphones (as much as anything to allow me to play music/white noise at a lower, sustainable volume) and a baseball cap for visual focus for the times I need that.
I think having separate shared "quiet" offices is the best way to offer an occasional focused refuge for anybody who needs them.
Dedicated, single person private offices seem anti social and about status normally, though they may be useful to sandbox off the noisy meeting-class of workers.
For an individual to need one 8 hours a day for, say, coding indicates they are on a burn out path.
One of the underrated problems for back-to-office advocates is that the average gen z office worker does not want to extensively interact with all their co-workers.
Anyone who says productivity, focus and happiness doesn’t take a huge hit in open office settings is fooling themselves or lying to you. Cubes are okay, bullpens (5-10 folks with spaced out desks) were hit and miss but largely hit, but open office is utterly ruinous for getting work done. I loathed them when I was first forced to sit in them, I hated them every day after, and I hate them now looking back on them.
I understand the desire to keep real estate costs down. But at the very least an office worker should get something like a cube, and yeah offices are best. Especially with hybrid work likely to stick around indefinitely meaning more VC meetings either companies are going to have to redesign their offices to build a shit ton of conference rooms (LinkedIn did this and it actually sorta works) or give people more auditory and visual isolation in their private workspaces.
You can't even claim remote work doesn't scale, there are multiple billion dollar public companies that are remote first and basically every company continued to function just fine during the pandemic
Dealing with all these contradictions is very hard and may require a review of how we imagine "work" on a societal level, so it's much easier to force everyone back into the office and sweep it back under the rug.
In the short term these people can use words to justify decisions but eventually it will show up in the bottom line and everybody will find out which model is superior
This would be an excellent example of a market failure and a key area of policy research.
I work way better in an open office, but I fully acknowledge that I am not likely your average worker.
The problem with open offices is that you only get one option: be around everybody.
My company has something like 15-20 offices anyone can use at any point with a big open floor in the middle for collaboration. That is in combination with a flexible WFH and office culture. Best of both worlds IMO.
It was supposed to be a positive thing (certainly the management team saw it as that) but there was silence. It was really weird, actually.
That includes the author, who is a partner at a real estate firm. The livelihood of these people is very much dependent on making sure their buildings are occupied - but for the would-be occupants, what's the benefit?
I have a private office already; it's in my house. It's quiet and comfortable. I don't have to deal with a commute or noisy coworkers, and I'm able to be extremely productive. My quality of life has improved tremendously as a direct result of working from home, and no "carrot" of private offices or "stick" of a forced return will cause me to give it up.
Not everyone has this. Commuting isn't free, but neither is a spare room at home.
It's a lot cheaper in the long run than a commute, all things considered.
$4-5k/yr can get you a decent bit. Remote also means you don't need to live in the city, so that cost is easily offset by moving into a more affordable area.
> freeing the techies to move much farther away, to towns where they could afford four-bedroom homes
I'd be happy to come into an office. What I don't want to do is spend 2 hours in traffic to be present for 8 hours in an office, where I get maybe 3 hours of actual productive work done, and be forced to spend a ton of money I wouldn't normally need to spend on commuting expenses.
It's much more attractive and possible to solve the remote collaboration problem than the "reducing the costs of the commute" problem, which seems unsolvable by design. Most of the costs of the commute are intractable or designed to extract money out of commuters.
I haven't seen a lot of empirical work on this. Loooooooots of hand-waving by those who try to justify in-office work, though. Not much consideration about the opportunity costs and tradeoffs though.
The ability to break off and sidebar convos is about the only piece I miss with in person.
I agree! Weird that it's still largely unsolved (there are some experimental apps like Chatmosphere or WorkAdventure, but nothing people actually use at scale).
Other than that, collaboration is perfectly fine or better than in person. Looking at and interacting with the same screen is a good bit more comfortable [with MS Teams] than in person. VSCode liveshare is better than sitting in front of the same computer. There are so many small things you can do remotely you can't do in person.
According to whom? The real estate partner who wrote this article?
>before we go all-in on it for a generation.
Who is suggesting going all-in on virtual-everything?
> freeing the techies to move much farther away, ... Even if office space were as comfy as home and more fun than free beer, a couple hour drive would be a deal-breaker.
What would get me back into the office (almost) every day? A flying car. I'm not kidding. I want it parked right outside of my house every morning, and I want it to fly at 120mph, land directly on the roof of my office, and then go park itself.
And, yes, I stress the word house. I'm not living in shoebox apartment built next to a train station as some political compromise. I'm a talented engineer, so I expect an upper-middle-class lifestyle with plenty of room for my kids to play. I don't want to deal with traffic, or transferring between trains, or the long walk / bike ride / drive to/from the train station, or shuttles.
Think I'm being unreasonable? I'll take my talents elsewhere, thank you.
Most companies are not that. Probably .05% of software companies would fit the bill, I think.
I'd need a somewhat private space, not a super strict schedule (tho being there for meetings is cool), and it'd need to be a really nice office.
I'd also need to be able to use whatever keyboard, monitor, chair, and desk I want, but that's small costs - but surprisingly hard to get.
In my long career I saw every kind of environment, cubes, open office, bullpens, private offices, and shared offices. I could cope with any environment and still get work done, sometimes having everyone you needed within spitting distance was useful for quick questions, but not everyone is good at task switching, so it's not always helpful. I found my best productivity was quiet + instant comms (such as Slack). When the people you need to talk with are spread out over multiple time zones, being in an office, especially and open one, is terrible, especially if people insist on having calls on a phone or computer with a mike. Hearing 10 meetings going on at the same time is a killer.
Offices are nice if you can close the door, but who gives you offices any more? Companies seem to prefer cramming people into sardine cans these days.
- No commute
- Healthy food of my chosing available
- I have a non-shared bathroom thats clean which includes a shower I can use whenever I want
- I have a Quad monitor setup and 4 GPU servers and a Gigabit LAN
- I control the temperature
- I am across the road from a gym and a pool
- I have very little / no interruptions and noise
- I can play music as loud as I want
I know there's no office in the world thats going to come close to these benefits, so why would I? To satisfy some ancient, out-dated, real estate conglomerate who hasn't innovated in 100 years? I dont care about them, my health and happiness is more important, these old businesses who don't move with the times can die, that's the point.
Private offices on a spoke with a collab/whiteboard room for a hub are the most tempting form of office space to me, but that still presumes that
1) my entire team is in one location. If we are going to have at least 2 people remotely, in order to not treat them as second class citizens, we all should be remote and only use remote-capable tools, which kills whiteboards
2) my commute is not crazy. It's really, really hard to compete with zero commute at all every single day. Nothing more convenient than doing the quick laundry / lunch prep / seeing family tasks
Coming back to the ~~bullpen~~ collaborative open plan office where we have nothing but L desks and nerf guns is not that tempting to me.
That's 10 hours a week.
Which is insane in retrospect.
I'm fortunate that I can shift some of my work time to my train time, but it's still a big chunk out of my day to just move around.
I have since visited many trendy open floor plan offices and I think they are ridiculous. There is no way to focus and create value.
If an organization cannot afford private offices, it is probably not creating much value. If it can afford private offices and chooses to put everyone within earshot of each other, it is leaving productivity improvement on the table.
Living in a city where space is a premium, a functional home office takes up valuable space and is an eyesore. My wife and I both want big monitors but don't want our house to look like a coworking space. We don't necessarily want to be there every day when the kids come home from school.
My company gives a generous WFH stipend for equipment and furniture but its still essentially be donating part of my house to my employer. I'd much rather they foot the bill for the office.
I have good news! All coffee descends as you pour it :)
But it's very clear that the current situation is not working and needs to change.
I told my CEO that our open office setup sucked and if they invested in making it a nicer space more people would come back. He ignored me and talked about converting the space that our sublessee vacated into more conference rooms. That made me angry, but then I found out that he isn't renewing our office lease and has hired some workplace consultants to figure out the best path forward. They're going to get a new, smaller space and figure out how to best handle a workforce that is never required in the office. Only the people that want to come in will come in.
The only problem I foresee is that if they make our new space too nice, more people are going to start coming in than they planned for. LOL.
private office, good coffee, leftovers and a full fridge, coffe break with a wonderful woman, good speakers, mic + stand + sound-card with noise gate = no headphones, expensive chair.
If your team is distributed anyways the only thing good in the office are informal chats and the commutes if you can ride a bike.
I forgot about left overs, or food to my taste, it that is a big thing. I am a picky eater, and haven’t had much food even when they were burning money for fancy food.
My commute takes me between 2-3 hours a day, and costs me thousands a year in fuel costs, extra insurance costs (since I need to have commuting cover), and car depreciation.
On top of that, I get 2-3 hours a day less with my family. In the winter that 2-3 hours might actually mean I don't see daylight until the weekend! Plus the stress of commuting, encountering unexpected traffic, etc!
Then at home I have far comfier office (with a much more ergonomic, comfortable, and health-supporting chair, desk, etc), a private bathroom, I can work in whatever clothes I want, I don't have to worry about being in for deliveries, I have a full kitchen and a stocked fridge, freezer, pantry... I could go on all day about the benefits.
There's nothing that can be offered that would make me want to work in-office.
For example:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-d...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/07/30/private-offices-re...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/01/13/open-plan-offices-...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/29/the-new-fog-creek-...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/03/02/office-space-calcu...
The costs and absolute nonsense of requiring a commute outweigh almost any benefit of daily in-office presence.
A study from decades ago (I wish I could find it again) found that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers teams perform worse. It basically correlates to whether the managers focus on results that matter, or on intimidating their workers into doing things that look like work (butts in chairs, not browsing, few breaks, etc.).
I'm thinking that the famous Steve Jobs 'insight' about building the offices so that people from different teams would have chance encounters is BS, especially since Apple now reportedly so heavily silos their information.
And want to save real estate? Far cheaper to give every employee an unheard-of $4K/yr equipment budget than to pay $66/SqFt/yr office space in SF (excluding utilities, insurance, etc.).
Any executive that doesn't get this is just dense, and I'd argue, unsuited for their office.
I've been called entitled. Whatever, but at least I'm happy and more importantly productive. Anecdotally, I am more productive than our sleazy wanting to mandate returns to office for all middle manager.
A private office would be the bare minimum for me to go in, since it still has to compete with my private home office. But it doesn't get me those two additional hours of free time every day.
Our CEO has emailed around asking people to come in 2 days a week from next year, but the offices are open plan. This means my Q1 2023 to-do list now has 'find a new job' at the top of it.
For me it’s the white boarding. Wow did I miss whiteboarding during the pandemic, and I never found an online version that worked as well as 2-3 people working on a whiteboard. I just about cried the first time I got to do that in an office again.
Thank goodness i'm not the only one! Honestly, the only things that i like about office work are white boarding, and lunch with others (or alternatively grabbing an occasional beer...basically socializing regardless of how it happnes). Everything else about working at a physical office space is awful. It doesn't matter if the building is some old, falling-apart relic, or a sleek, modrn office....all of them are awful...and the things i noted above can be achieved in any cheap oiffice space - including ones where everyone has their own private space/office.
Depending on the work you do, whether it’s client contact or work that involves deep thought, you’re at an advantage by not having a shared space.
Or, you know, not going back to the office as many people insist they prefer?
I’m Gen X, and have spent most of my career in open office spaces. I’ve been WFH since March 2020 (in a small one bedroom apartment, with my girlfriend in the same room). I generally don’t miss the commute, and open offices can be distracting, but in my case it’s weird working on mechanical and industrial design of hardware without a dedicated space to collaborate. My current company doesn’t even have a real office.
In the past few years, I’ve moved to fully cloud based CAD, and Slack, so it’s a bit hard to compare to the before times (and I’ve also changed jobs). Those aspects help with WFH, but there’s still no substitute in my field for touching/seeing/using/testing real stuff together in person.
Going in to do video calls makes no sense because the office video setup cannot realistically be made better than my home setup.
It needs to be 100% in-person, because that is better than video calls.
It's like, imagine that I arrange to meet a friend in a pub, but he suggests a phone call instead. I can go to the pub and make the phone call from the pub. But why?
The commute is a non issue, put the office in the city centre and I live within max half an hour of you. That's the entire point of cities.
I don't particularly care for the argument that others post here along the lines of "I live hours from the office/in another state/whatever". That's fine, I don't go to the supermarket in the next town over either...
Brilliant! I'm stealing this!
They want to return to the office.
* door open in private office: I’m available. -- People should get the habit of setting their status properly in slack or whatever they use
* visual contact: when I talk afk, people look at me. -- Our tools must become better for this and multiple Screens must become the norm. One screen must always show other participants video in a call, this screen must have the camera mounted just above it.
* audio: in the office, when someone talks, everyone gets spatial full band audio. And no dogs barking. — noise cancelling in videoconferencing has become amazing, and I even see spatial audio starting (sound coming from the position of the participants video on the screen). But Bluetooth audio quality still sucks and people still use sucky headphones with bad microphones. Here again, there should be a regular mandatory checkup with IT to ensure everything is set up as good as possible in home office to ensure best possible audio to coworkers.
* appearances: in the office, there are no virtual backgrounds where half the headset keeps missing, I don’t have to worry about what’s in my background. — here again, employees should receive training on how to set up their home office. You have kids? Put the wall behind you. Agree on a visual "do not disturb" sign at home and stick to it. And for the love of god please dress up a bit and groom. Yes it costs time but it is part of social interaction and signals respect and attention to others when on a video call. Plus you will be more inclined to turn video on if you look good.
Home office must become a norm with its codes as well, just like working in the office. We're not there yet and that's why it's painful at the moment.
However, the problem is a growing family would probably want 3-4 bedrooms (master, girls, boys, maybe spare). After that, you might want:
* An Office
* A Playroom
* A living or family room that isn't in the excessively noisy "great room"
* A dining room?
That's a lot of space, and many families may not want all of that or any of that, but some might. Yet, nearly every house looks exactly the same and has roughly the same number of rooms in the same layout, give maybe ~5 variations.
People may be willing to sacrifice a larger dining room if they could grab a space in the neighborhood that supplied a dining room-like place. People may be willing to sacrifice a playroom if there was a place where their kids (of various ages) could meet other kids in a safe way (e.g. a neighborhood room for toddlers). People may be willing to sacrifice a home personal office if their neighborhood had a "rent-a-private-office-for-not-much-money" a short walk away.
None of these exist in the communities I see being built. There may be open grass parks or a community clubhouse, but that's not the same as the above.
(Yes, I know the list of reasons - zoning, cars, etc. etc.)
One important element of working from an office is that there are other people there I need to talk to. If half of the people I am working with aren't in the office then it's moot, I have to spend all I time in zoom anyway. The threshold for creating value is probably closer to 80%. In practice this means working out of the headquarters, or on the same campus as the headquarters.
Why is this important? New York City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Fransisco, Seattle, Redmond and all the other popular headquarter locations have insanely expensive office space compared to most of the rest of the United States. So companies often choose open office space, which increases the worker per square foot, so they can both save money on office space and fit more people in their headquarters for a critical mass.
Yeah, I'd love my own office or to share a closed off room with my two pizza team. If spending this extra per-worker office space means 35% less people are working in the same building then it might not be a tradeoff worth taking. Working out of an office where half of the people I need to communicate with aren't there will not provide a lot of value because I need to do the same amount of zoom and the same amount of written communication to keep everyone looped in.
On the topic of getting a critical mass, I wonder how plausible it is for tech companies to maintain the majority of their workers in a central location. There's huge infrastructure costs associated with it. Having 50k+ tech workers in a single location will have a massive impact on transportation, CoL and housing. The tech company is now vulnerable to local governments increasing taxes or reducing required services. There is also a vulnerability during a local natural disaster, something we can expect to see more of with climate change.
The private office might help Return to Office pushes in the margin for people that want to reclaim the space they use for their office in home, or do not have a private office at home. For me, I will always choose work from home unless 80%+ of the people I need to work with are also in the office.
Ultimately I think WFH beats the network of satellite offices and overseas extensions many tech companies have built, but doubt WFH beats a centralized HQ. I would love to see a comparison of F500 or Nasdaq companies in their return to office strategies and success, but this data isn't public knowledge. In five or ten years it'll be interesting to map Return to Office policies and stock performance, which might be the final nail in the coffin of corporate offices.
Ultimately, hybrid working is just working alone but in a worse environment.
I think (having never tried it) that I could be happy with 2-3 days in, 2-3 days out, on the proviso that everyone comes in on the same days.
If you don't do that, you're just doing video calls from the office. Every meeting has to be a video call because someone won't be there, and at lunch and other times you can't socialise properly because people aren't there. That just defeats the point of going in.
The reality is we’ve hired people from all over the country. How do you propose we go back to the office? What does that even mean in this context?
Can we cut this going back to the office nonsense? We’ve moved on.
Personally I've found open office problems can be mitigated significantly with noise cancelling headphones (as much as anything to allow me to play music/white noise at a lower, sustainable volume) and a baseball cap for visual focus for the times I need that.
I think having separate shared "quiet" offices is the best way to offer an occasional focused refuge for anybody who needs them.
Dedicated, single person private offices seem anti social and about status normally, though they may be useful to sandbox off the noisy meeting-class of workers.
For an individual to need one 8 hours a day for, say, coding indicates they are on a burn out path.
If the cap and headphones were full time they would be anti social too. They are for temporary periods as needed.
I already allowed for private offices in limited time slots, no need for more than that for most jobs.
Meeting rooms are for collab. And for most jobs there’s no need for collab outside of limited time slots.
If you’re not doing focused work, not doing group work and you’re fine to get disrupted… You could head home as well.
The office printer.