People Don’t Like Their Offices Anymore
Everything about “work from home” or “return to the office” has already been written. There is an abundance of literature, organizational research and consulting advice[1]. Nevertheless, since my partners at Zentyment insist that I write a weekly essay about topics that relate to our business - and this does in some vague way - I am adding 2,000 words to the topic.
When it comes to the question of where — as in which location — we are going to work in future, there are at least two camps, and they tend to disagree.
Workers want the flexibility to choose where to work (i.e. from home, from the beach, from a foreign island), on what days (i.e. never in the office on a Friday) and in which form (i.e. with their dogs).
Employers like to see their people working, and they have all this expensive office space (4.8bn sqft of rentable office space in the US[2] — about the size of Fresno or San Jose), so it makes them very uncomfortable to know that their people are walking their dogs around the city, dressed in yoga pants at 10am, queueing for a chai tea latte.
And there are the city planners, seeing their business districts getting abandoned, public transport going unused, restaurants and hotels closing, stores moving to the suburbs and a once booming commercial real estate industry going into recession.
No camp seems to care about the other and so some bosses wonder whether a little coercion might help to go back to the good old days[3].
How big is the problem?
In the US, there are ~165mn people “in the labor force”[4]. Those are the people with a job or without a job, but actively looking for a job (~5.7mn), whether part-time (17% of 165mn) or full-time, employed by someone else or self-employed (~15mn).
There are also ~100mn people who are “not in the labor force”, either because they are students, retired or simply don’t want or need a job. The rest is under 16 years old (~70mn) and doesn’t belong to any one of the two groups. The two groups and the under 16-year-olds add up to ~330mn, which is the entire population of the United States according to the last census[5].
It is safe to assume that most of the people who are not in the labor force and the under-16-year-olds don’t need an office outside their home. Of the 165mn people in the labor force 65mn are in jobs that are performed by sitting at a desk while making phone calls and entering text or numbers into a computer (“management, professional and related occupations” in the BLS monthly employment survey). By the way, ~21mn people work for the government, 87% of them working for state and local authorities.
Not all the people in the labor force have a dedicated office or desk, but maybe 80%. Many of them have always been remote — many working from the rural hinterlands — 20% to 25% on average.
Now 100mn of the 165mn do kind of real work and are not just sitting in an office: they are in services (from child-care to cosmetology), sales, farming, fishing, construction, production, transportation. We can assume that only 10–20% of those people get to sit down in an office from time to time.
This gives us a not so easily refutable number of 60 to 70mn people with a desk in a commercial office building, waiting for them to sit down to make a call or write an email.
We can safely state that this is an issue of societal dimensions, and it affects at least 1 in 5 adults and almost 50% of all families.
Should I go (to the office) or should I stay (at home)?
As I wrote, that question depends on whether you are a boss or someone who reports to one. But there are other factors, and “people” is not a homogenous group. On average, people may prefer to spend 3 days at home and 2 days in the office, at best. But on average, the income per household in the US is $67,521 according to the 2020 census[6] and that doesn’t even pay the rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Manhattan (it’s actually the median income, but close enough — thank you Magnus).
In a Venn diagram of workers’ and employers’ interests, the circles don’t overlap much. Nevertheless, there is a cost to both sides from ignoring each other’s legitimate interests and a benefit from supporting the rules of community. I may be an awesome bike-rider who can drive safely through red lights, but it inspires bad behavior in others who are not as awesome as I am. In the same manner, you may be the most self-sufficient worker since Sisyphus, but your occasional presence in the office may help others to become as awesome as you are.
I know a few normal people who used to go to an office regularly and some still do. Here is a list of things which they like and dislike about the office, with no claim that this list represents the entire nation’s state of mind.
I also know a few bosses and I have been one at various stages of my life. Bosses have reasons to dislike their office too. They have to commute, and they don’t like that, I guess. Without any claim to completeness, here is what I hear from them:
What can we do?
It’s a fundamental and irreversible culture change that occurred during Covid. Once people walk out that office door, they won’t come back in the same way. Men took off their ties (in the office) in the 1990s, now they will neither wear a tie nor come to the office every day.
Coercion, as in “you have to be in the office 3 days a week or you won’t have a job” may work in some places and for some types of people (i.e. investment bankers at Goldman Sachs or lawyers at Pearson Darby Specter), but not in general. How do you control people’s presence? Are you going to fire the high performers if they don’t show up on a Thursday? What about yourself — it seems like you have been taking it a little easy too as of late.
As a post-Covid economy (are we post?), we seem to have moved from a simple “everyone back to the office 3 days a week” to more differentiated rules that respect the nature of different jobs. But differentiation is hard to do, prone to discrimination and creates a nightmare for those who are tasked with the execution.
Some people have already come back or were never gone because they aspire to be the future leaders and moneymakers. Others prefer to remain under the radar screen and never had career ambitions, so coming back is more discomfort than opportunity to them.
As always, I am much better at analysis than at devising comprehensive solutions here. Hence my concise advice is:
1. Recognize that our office culture has irreversibly changed. We won’t go back to the old model.
2. Since people like working from home, make the office a second home. Make it pleasant and a place to live and work. That includes dogs.
3. Don’t expect people to show up at 9:00am and not leave before 5:00pm. Traffic is easier to beat outside those hours and a 4-hour day in the office can also be productive.
4. Don’t expect people to perform work in the office that can easily be done at home (populating spreadsheets). Let them focus on the parts that are better done in the office, like creative brainstorming meetings or other in-person fun stuff.
5. Deliver the benefits to people that they expect from their presence in the office, such as inspiration, coaching, learning and good technology.
6. Talking about technology — provide the tools that reflect the new hybrid reality. Collaboration has become harder, and it is not just about Zoom conferencing or Sharepoint. There is a new generation of tools that has been boosted by the culture change, and they are in design, messaging, voice&video, calendar- and meeting management, documentation, project management, context & search or low code/no code development. Take a look.
[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349772/going-back-work-office-worth.aspx or https://www.gallup.com/workplace/357779/bet-desks-empty.aspx
[2] https://www.us.jll.com/content/dam/jll-com/documents/pdf/research/americas/us/jll-us-office-outlook-q3-2022.pdf
[3] https://nypost.com/2022/08/25/why-jamie-dimon-is-quietly-clamping-down-on-remote-work-at-jpmorgan/
[4] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t13.htm#cps_empsit_a10.f.1
[5] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
[6] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html
