What your office’s design says about its policy on remote working
One thing has been made clear during the debate about whether distributed work should survive the pandemic that originated it, or if we should return to the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five office routine. Well, we now have the technology to enable us to work from anywhere, so it’s time employers faced up this new reality and started adapting.
Obviously, there are still people who use specialist machinery, or deal with the public, but a high percentage of people can now do most of their work from home or wherever they see fit, so if companies want them to return to the office, they will need to come up with some compelling reasons.
What are those compelling reasons? Employers are no longer talking about higher productivity, because it has been proven that people get more done when they organize themselves, and do not lose hours of valuable time commuting back and forth to the office. Instead, employers are now talking about corporate culture, cohesion and group feeling, or even innovation (a myth, albeit a very deep-rooted one). The message is: come to the office because you need to see your colleagues and avoid feeling disconnected from the company. But the subtitles read: “come to the office, because I want to keep an eye on you”, an approach inherited from the workshops of the Industrial Revolution.
