The Workspace: Evolving not Disappearing
Much is currently being written about the demise of the office. The first half of 2020 has witnessed an unprecedented experiment in remote working. Around the world, tens of millions of people who previously commuted to and from an office each day, have suddenly discovered it’s possible to do most things without leaving home. Zoom, the poster child of video-conferencing platforms, is now worth more than the world’s seven largest airlines combined.
Many people are now wondering if the switch will be permanent. Once a business has discovered it can function without an office, why would it return to one? Once employees have experienced life without a daily commute, surely they’ll want to continue that way? My previous article explored how radical disruptions can open the door to long-term shifts of this kind. However I suspect the obituaries being written for the office will prove to be premature. The reality is likely to be more nuanced.
The predictions being made today are uncannily similar to forecasts people were making a quarter of a century ago, in the mid-1990s. That was the time when email, mobile phones, instant messaging, the web, chatrooms and document sharing first became widely available. These technologies enabled new kinds of remote collaboration, that were far more efficient than using telephone and fax. It was widely predicted that offices would become obselete, and that cities would lose their role as concentrations of workers.
Personally I was fascinated by the freedom these technologies offered. In 1998 I equipped myself with a Nokia 6110 phone, a Psion Series 5 handheld computer and a modem, then set off into the wilds. I spent that summer living in Cornwall, working on projects with a team based in London. The very first day I sat on a beach with the sea lapping at my toes, tapping out emails on the tiny Psion keyboard, it felt like a miracle. It was hard to escape the sense that something fundamental had shifted, and the old structures would be swept away.
I spent the next five years living and working remotely, with progressively more powerful technologies. First in the Isles of Scilly, then in Australia, in Ghana and for the last two years the island of Stromboli. During this period I was involved with dozens of projects and hundreds of people around the world. The most complex collaboration was a software development project with the School for Social Entrepreneurs, alongside collaborators in London and Norway.
What I learned from this experience is that it’s perfectly feasible for groups of people to collaborate effectively over long periods without ever meeting face to face. However for certain types of intense creative collaboration, a team working together in the same place will achieve more. There’s a particular kind of intimacy, fluidity and group creativity that seems impossible to foster unless people are physically in the same place.
Thus in 2003, when I wanted to start a new technology venture, I decided to move to London and open an office in Shoreditch. It wasn’t quite a conventional office though. My experiences working remotely led me to approach the design and purpose of the office in a different way. Instead of planning it to maximise team efficiency, I approached every aspect of the space to support group creativity and wellbeing. This workspace was effectively the first prototype in a sequence that led to the formation of The Trampery, six years later in 2009.
Technology has certainly improved a lot since my nomadic experiment of 1998–2003. Internet access is hundreds or thousands of times faster, even in rural areas. Collaboration tools like Slack and Google Docs provide more streamlined ways of working together. Video conferencing is free and effortless. However my fundamental belief remains unchanged. For startups, scaleups and creative ventures, survival means constant innovation, learning and adaptation. For businesses like this, the benefit of coming together in the same place outweighs the associated costs and inconveniences.
A second factor that’s important for many small businesses is the desire to establish strong social links with a community of peers. This is what drove the emergence of shared workspaces and the coworking movement. Well-curated physical spaces are phenomenally good at fostering a complex mesh of informal links and shared culture. It is almost impossible to replicate this remotely.
As a result of these two factors I do not think startups, scaleups and creative businesses will stop using physical workspaces anytime soon. But for established organisations, with more than a few hundred employees, the perspective is very different.
Over the past 20 years large corporations have already been shrinking office spaces and encouraging employees to work from home some of the time. This process has mainly been driven by cost saving, but it has also coincided with a cultural shift towards open plan working and flatter hierarchies. Today many corporations only provide office space for 60–70% of their workforce. The offices still tend to be in prime inner-city locations, meaning it is common for employees to commute an hour or more, morning and evening.
I believe the coronavirus episode will accelerate this trend, and may do so in radical ways. We are already starting to see some large organisations announcing a permanent shift to home-working. Others are planning for a significant portion of their workforce to be remote. City centre offices will shrink at a faster rate. Meanwhile a combination of cost saving and pressure from employees (who’ve discovered how much they hate commuting) may lead corporations to establish more “out of town” offices, or partner with workspace providers to achieve the same result.
Everything I’ve discussed so far is about long-term trends. However these will be overlaid with a separate set of short and medium-term factors, that follow directly in the wake of coronavirus. Over the last few months we’ve all learned completely new (anti) social behaviours around social distancing. We recoil from groups. We feel anxious if someone approaches us. Everything outside the home is a possible contamination risk. These behaviours are likely to continue until some combination of reliable antibody tests or vaccination becomes widely available. Even once the threat of infection is gone, the ingrained social distancing behaviours will not disappear overnight.
These short and medium-term factors will dramatically change the way we use offices and workspaces for the remainder of 2020, and possibly longer. At The Trampery we’ve been doing detailed work with our members to understand what solutions they seek from us. As a result of this we are changing the layouts of our workspaces, reducing density, providing new kinds of break-out spaces for anyone who wants to be on their own, installing foot-operated door openers and introducing new collective protocols around bathrooms, kitchens and any other shared facilities. Alongside these changes we are also developing new kinds of hybrid membership, to support businesses who choose a blend of home-working and workspace, whether that’s temporary or permanent.
Returning from my five-year experiment with nomadic working back in 2003 made me look with fresh eyes at the office’s purpose for my team. In the same way, the massive experiment in home-working we’re currently living through will lead businesses to question old assumptions, and look more objectively at the role a workspace plays for them. Many things will change, other things will remain more constant than we expect. It’s going to be exciting figuring out what comes next.
