The value of working in a physical office
＊This article was originally written in Japanese by our CEO, Yoshihide Arai in August, 2020.
With this summer extreme heat and COVID-19, working remotely is finally starting to feel more efficient these days.
There is no lack of talk among my fellow executives about the decision and implementation of partial office cancellations in the early days of this pandemic, including the gradual shift to free addresses and encouraging remote work to reduce office use by up to 50% in the future to increase profit margins.
From this point on, based on my own experience of focusing on organization building and culture development, I feel that strong organizations that continue to grow and adapt to change are more likely to focus on face-to-face communication and the atmosphere of the workplace environment.
Even before this global pandemic happened, we had been operating our organization in a way that placed great value on the autonomy of our employees, allowing them to work remotely and to come and go as they pleased.
It is true that remote working offers a variety of benefits, such as the ability to concentrate on something to be done, meetings are easier to conduct in a short amount of time and meetings are easier to focus on, and sales activities can be carried out extremely efficiently because they do not involve travel.
More than anything else, it would be great for business owners to be able to reduce office costs. For IT companies that do not have a lot of fixed costs, office costs are often the second largest cost after labor costs, and being able to reduce these costs directly translates into higher profit margins.
However I feel a sense of urgency here.
I’ve been running my own company for 17 years, and while I’ve seen many corporate management up close, I see tremendous value in the innovation and collaboration that comes from incidental communication in the office, as well as the development of human resources, increased engagement, instilling values, and fostering a culture.
Focusing on logic and rationality in corporate management may temporarily increase profit margins and operational efficiency, but when considering the growth and evolution of a company over the span of five years and ten years, I think we should still focus on face-to-face communication.
Of course, I don’t deny the possibility that even online communication can be supplemented by building a virtual space like a real one and making full use of communication tools, and I think we should try and work towards that, but on the other hand, many companies seem to be churning out offices and cutting back on office space from a short-term perspective of operational efficiency and cost reduction.
I feel that such an enthusiastic organization, where people meet in the office with like-minded colleagues and engage in friendly competition to create something new, is the kind of organization that will be strong enough to survive in this era of unpredictable change. This may sound like a very old-fashioned way of thinking for a manager of an Internet company, but human nature has not changed much over the years.
It is not just a matter of “doing a job” or “completing a task”, but also “trying to accomplish something”, which is not always straightforward. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to have a strong policy and to run the organization from a long-term perspective.
Instead of just sending employees to the office, even in a situation where you can work freely anywhere at anytime, I want to continue to focus on creating such a workplace, where they can always have their own workspace, where they can find reliable colleagues they can trust, where they just feel driven to go to work, and where they can work better and can get more done in the office.
