Is this the end of office life?

The office of the future looked very dif­fer­ent five months ago. In Jan­u­ary, Face­book announced plans to hire 1,000 staff mem­bers to fill their new £1‑billion Lon­don HQ. But by May, the com­pa­ny had said half their future work­force will be per­ma­nent­ly remote.

This is just one exam­ple of how the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has blown apart com­pa­nies’ con­cep­tions of “the office”. Bar­clays boss Jes Sta­ley has said “the notion of putting 7,000 peo­ple in a build­ing may be a thing of the past”, while Shopi­fy founder and chief exec­u­tive Tobi Lütke tweet­ed his com­pa­ny will become dig­i­tal by default. “Office cen­tric­i­ty is over,” he pro­claimed.

Flex­i­ble work­ing is noth­ing new. A sur­vey of 229 organ­i­sa­tions by US research firm Gart­ner found 30 per cent of employ­ees were already work­ing from home at least some of the time before COVID-19 struck. Since the pan­dem­ic began, that num­ber has jumped as high as 80 per cent.

“I think that some­where between 15 to 20 per cent of the work­force that was pre­vi­ous­ly in a work­place will not be com­ing back,” says Rich McBee, chief exec­u­tive of remote net­work per­for­mance spe­cial­ists Riverbed. With this in mind, it’s hard to dis­agree with Lütke’s hypoth­e­sis, but if office cen­tric­i­ty is over, what does that mean for the office?

The workplace in the age of flexible working

“A lot of the trends that were on the way any­way have mas­sive­ly accel­er­at­ed,” says John Drum­mond, chair­man of work­place strat­e­gy experts Cor­po­rate Cul­ture. “We’re going to see sev­er­al short-term, prag­mat­ic changes and one is that more peo­ple will work from home.”

This could mean an end to the clas­sic com­mand-and-con­trol method of work­ing, espe­cial­ly as flex­i­ble work­ing seems to improve employ­ee pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, specif­i­cal­ly in Generation‑Z staffers, 60 per cent of whom have become more pro­duc­tive dur­ing lock­down, accord­ing to a study by Milkround.

Some­where between 15 to 20 per cent of the work­force that was pre­vi­ous­ly in a work­place will not be com­ing back

“I think you’re going to see flex­i­ble hours and out­put-based work ver­sus hourly work,” says McBee. “What enables that is hav­ing at-office capa­bil­i­ty in your home office or from wher­ev­er you’re work­ing.”

That means invest­ment in con­nec­tiv­i­ty and net­works for those work­ing flex­i­ble or com­pressed hours, as well as increased col­lab­o­ra­tion between employ­ers and employ­ees on the poten­tial health pit­falls of remote work­ing, such as burnout or back pain. Just last month, Google chief exec­u­tive Sun­dar Pichai announced plans to pro­vide work­ers with a $1,000 grant for at-home office equip­ment and fur­ni­ture.

“The ‘indi­vid­ual cube’ of yes­ter­day can be your home office,” says McBee. “It’s pri­vate, you’re work­ing, you’re con­cen­trat­ed. Then, when it’s time to col­lab­o­rate, the human-to-human inter­face will be done in a pseu­do-office envi­ron­ment.”

Drum­mond says this presents a phe­nom­e­nal oppor­tu­ni­ty for com­pa­nies to rein­vent the work­place in a work-from-home world. “The key ques­tion is what is the work­place for?” he says. “There’s a mas­sive new oppor­tu­ni­ty for inte­ri­or design­ers and archi­tects, not just for the design of office spaces, but for the design of entire com­mu­ni­ties, neigh­bour­hoods and cities.”

Designing the office of the future

If the office of the future looked dif­fer­ent five months ago, try ten years. From Google’s sleep pods to Apple’s on-site well­ness cen­tre, the old future office was designed for peo­ple spend­ing all their time at work. Now organ­i­sa­tions are hav­ing to rethink office design for employ­ees who want to spend more time at home.

“Com­pa­nies may choose spaces which are more about col­lab­o­ra­tion than focused work, so I think we might see a pro­por­tion of desk space decrease,” says Gue­naelle Wat­son, man­ag­ing direc­tor of office con­sul­tants 360 Work­place. “These spaces could become more agile, col­lab­o­ra­tive work areas pro­grammed for dif­fer­ent teams to use.”

With offices being reimag­ined as cre­ative meet­ing spaces and most desk work being done remote­ly, tech­nol­o­gy such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams will be at the fore­front of keep­ing the future work­place con­nect­ed.

Microsoft chief exec­u­tive Satya Nadel­la recent­ly said his com­pa­ny has seen two years’ worth of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in two months; that’s because this dig­i­tal change has been born out of adapt-or-die neces­si­ty, which will only con­tin­ue to be the case in a post-COVID-19 world.

Thus, the need to return to hygien­ic work­spaces will be one of the key dri­vers in dig­i­tal work­place design. “We’ll see peo­ple not want­i­ng to touch things in offices,” Wat­son explains. “That means the office, in time, may become con­tact­less. You’ll be using voice recog­ni­tion to open doors or apps to get your­self a cof­fee.”

In a world where the tech­nol­o­gy is improv­ing every day, the phys­i­cal space is becom­ing less and less impor­tant for for­ward-think­ing and bet­ter-con­nect­ed com­pa­nies. Although meet­ing col­leagues in a vir­tu­al real­i­ty office may still seem like a sci-fi con­cept, it’s not as far off as once thought.

“I think tech­nol­o­gy will get us to a point where that notion of phys­i­cal loca­tion becomes a real ques­tion mark,” says Justin West­cott, Euro­pean head of tech­nol­o­gy and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer for UK and Ire­land at Edel­man. “If you think about where we’re head­ing with 5G and laten­cy, the dou­bling of per­for­mance in vir­tu­al real­i­ty in two years, while the costs half, that notion of the office increas­ing­ly becom­ing aug­ment­ed is some­thing I can see hap­pen­ing.”

Real estate and the digital office

“In a busi­ness like ours, our assets are our peo­ple and the office is the biggest over­head.” That’s why, when COVID-19 struck dur­ing ear­ly con­ver­sa­tions about Edelman’s new Lon­don office, it was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the com­pa­ny to inter­ro­gate what the mod­ern work­place is for.

“There is always going to be a require­ment for peo­ple to come togeth­er,” says West­cott. “Star­bucks used to call them­selves the ‘third space’ and I can see the office becom­ing the third space: you’re going to have your home, your home office and then the office.”

If the office does indeed become the third space, fixed desks could be done away with entire­ly, as could the tra­di­tion­al nine to five. “I think the notion of a ‘day in the office’ may be in ques­tion,” says West­cott. “It might be you come into an office for a ‘thing’, a task, a meet­ing, then you head out to wher­ev­er you want to get your work done.”

Lead­ers like West­cott and Wat­son see the office of the future as a place where employ­ees meet, socialise and seek out the sort of spon­ta­neous inter­ac­tions video meet­ings don’t allow for. Inter­est­ing­ly, both see the office of the future look­ing some­thing like a hotel lob­by.

Some­where between 15 to 20 per cent of the work­force that was pre­vi­ous­ly in a work­place will not be com­ing back

Yet with tem­po­rary providers such as Zipcube and Spaces becom­ing ever­more pop­u­lar with star­tups of the WeWork gen­er­a­tion, many will ask if these lob­by-like office spaces are mere­ly pre­cur­sors to a world with­out offices at all.

Unlike­ly, Wat­son says. “Not hav­ing an office at all would be dif­fi­cult and you’d strug­gle to cre­ate a strong com­pa­ny cul­ture,” she explains. “You can deliv­er the work from home, but it won’t ful­fil the human need for inter­ac­tion.”

Instead, Wat­son fore­sees two poten­tial trends for those look­ing to rein­vent their work­ing envi­ron­ment in the flex­i­ble-work­ing world. Organ­i­sa­tions will either repur­pose some of their desk space into col­lab­o­ra­tion or well­ness areas, or they’ll opt to trade in one larg­er cen­tral head­quar­ters for a num­ber of small­er, per­haps region­al, hubs.

Which ful­fils Lütke’s prophe­cy, in its own way. Office cen­tric­i­ty is indeed over, but the office itself isn’t dead quite yet.