At the start of the decade, the office was officially pronounced dead. The morning commute was no more. The water cooler? A relic of the past. We were told that the future had arrived early.
For a couple of years, we all enjoyed choosing our custom backgrounds for video calls and deciding which pair of pyjama bottoms to wear every morning. Until quietly, something started to happen.
People started working at the office again. And now, if you wander into a city centre on a Tuesday morning, you’ll notice something strange. People dressed in work attire roam the streets once more, a briefcase in one hand, and an overpriced to-go coffee in the other. The office, it would seem, is back from the dead.
But is this a great resurrection that’ll lead to another millennium of 9-5 working hours, watercooler talk, and score-keeping on LinkedIn games, or is it the last gasp of a zombified husk, before it snuffs it for good?
Same Office, New Workweek
The landscape has changed along with the classic workweek; offices are different. On the whole, they’re busier, but you wouldn’t believe that if you poked your head in on a Monday or Friday. On these days, you would be surprised to learn that you haven’t stumbled onto the set of a post-apocalyptic film, whereas on Tuesdays to Thursdays, the place is absolutely heaving; vibrant and chaotic in stark contrast to those two desolate ‘work from home’ days.
So what can we glean from this? We all know that hybrid working has become part of this latest iteration of ‘normal’. Well, I think it tells us that employees are choosing when going into the office is worth it for them.
We’re in uncharted territory – the office isn’t the default option that it was pre-pandemic. It’s become an option that needs to justify itself.
How Can Offices Justify Themselves?
The purpose of an office has traditionally been simple: it was a workplace. But now, in a post-pandemic world, it has some stiff competition in the form of home offices, as a significant portion of the workforce is now hybrid. So, the office must now offer businesses and teams something they can’t get at home.
The best modern offices thrive when they focus on workflows that benefit from being together, namely big conversations and processes that require intricate teamwork and quick, often messy problem-solving.
Optimise the space to encourage collaboration. Row after row of identical desks isn’t really conducive to achieving the best results anymore. Try to create rooms that actually invite people to sit together and talk, rather than hide behind a webcam.
Why Are People Coming Back?
This might come as a surprise to some of the more agoraphobic workers out there, but offices are pretty good at a few things. No – not meetings. I’m sure that many of us are firmly in agreement that most of them can and should be emails. What offices actually do best is the unplanned stuff.
Allow me to paint you a picture: you’re at your desk, typing away normally, when you suddenly overhear a conversation – somebody has a problem. Fortunately, your workload over recent months has had some crossover into this area, and you have the answer to the problem. You get to your feet and wander over to your colleague's desk, where both of you catch up and connect the dots together.
It’s brief, messy, and impossible to measure, but collaborative moments like these are the lifeblood of most businesses.
Do the Ends Justify the Costs?
Offices have never been cheap, but now, your monthly rent agreement doesn’t just magically adjust to your new hybrid work strategy. And now costs are higher than ever – especially in major cities like London. Those empty desks on Mondays and Fridays are wasteful. But forcing mandatory attendance solely to justify sunk costs is dangerous. Your employees will probably sniff it from a mile away, and it’ll risk burning through the trust and goodwill you’ve worked hard to build.
Find the balance. If you’re starting to resent your hybrid workforce because of high rent costs, then downsize and find another office that better suits your needs. It can help prevent friction between leadership and teams, and also make sure that you won’t be on the receiving end of a sternly-worded letter from some tenant eviction law professionals.
Back for Good?
So, to answer the titular question is, astonishingly, neither. This might well frustrate some of you who are reading this, but this is a nuanced situation that hasn’t stopped evolving over the past six years; all I’ve done here is take a knife to it and show you the cross section at this point in time.
The bottom line, at this moment in time, is that offices are irreplaceable for a lot of businesses where bigger teams need to work together. As things stand, they’re going nowhere.
Written by Damien Woods