Warning: Read Before You Go Back to the Office
By Ryan Coonerty & Jeremy Neuner
As needles with vaccines go in arms, so too do executives put pen to paper to decide the future of the traditional office. Some high profile companies have already made their decisions, but they represent only a small fraction of companies and workers. Now is the time for workers and managers alike to have serious conversations about how, when, why and where they want to work. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to align work with the needs of our lives and planet. It won’t be easy.
We know this because nine years ago, we wrote a book that predicted the end of the traditional workplace. We believed that the unrelenting forces of economics, technology and demographics — as well as the fact that almost everyone we knew hated their commute and cubicle — were going to make it so. We were also inspired by the hundreds of members of our coworking spaces who had figured out how to make a wonderful living and life by opting out of the traditional way to work. Although it feels as though a lifetime has passed in the intervening years, it is easy to remember the reaction to our call for the revolution of work — no one cared.
The pandemic may change that. It has exposed the many, many weaknesses of the traditional office spaces that have been ruining lives and our planet for two generations. First, office space is expensive and mostly empty. Second, employees hate it (mostly, see below). Third, it turns out that if you let people choose how, when, where and why they work, they are more productive and happier.
This has been true for a long time. So, one would think that when employers and employees’ interests align, change would have already occured. Yet, as of January 2020, only a few companies were even beginning to offer real, flexible work. It is worth asking why.
Here are some of the forces that resisted the vision of our book and will, in the coming year, push employers and employees back into commutes, offices and an utterly unnecessary and crappy way to work.
First, there are entrenched interests in maintaining the status quo. We underestimated their power, but it is significant. VPs of real estate, HR, and mid managers have a vested interest in keeping people in the office. It gives them purpose and a paycheck. They will be the first ones developing safe office plans before anyone can ask if we need offices at all.
Other managers and executives may allow flexibility in policy, but undermine it in practice. If they, the leaders of an organization, go back to the office, it will create pressure on workers to follow. If the company adopts a flexible or remote policy, it requires that managers model it.
Second, people hate work, but love parts of it. We are social animals. We worry that either we return to work or we will be stuck at home doing Zoom meetings in our underwear forever. That is a false choice, but employers and workers will have to be intentional about meeting that need.
Much of the continued productivity during COVID has been fueled by the social capital built from years of work together. As more new team members come in and others leave, the strains of having not built relationships will begin to show.
The question then becomes are companies and workers willing to collaborate to give people the social interaction they need, but in new and different ways. Instead of spending money on offices, companies can invest in team travel, off-sites, coworking memberships, satellite offices and asking their C-suite and managers to travel to employees rather than asking the employees to come to them.
Finally, the biggest change we need is to adapt or design the policy, culture and infrastructure. Our cities, benefits, and social lives are built on an old way to work. By adapting to the new reality — decoupling benefits from employment and creating public options, reuse of public spaces, and setting legal and societal norms around when we are expected to be working and when we are not, we could create the conditions for society to adapt to a more humane, environmental and equitable way to live.
In the end, work will change. The previous status quo is untenable. The question will be whether companies, workers and governments embrace the changes and build the infrastructure that creates a better way to work or will we be trapped in an unintentional or worse, a cynical, self serving cost-cutting race, to the bottom. We predict the former and worry about the latter.
Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner are co-authors of The Rise of the Naked Economy — How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace and co-founders of NextSpace. Neuner is currently Start Up Curriculum Lead at Google. Coonerty is the former Mayor and current County Supervisor for Santa Cruz, California.
