What is an office? Is it simply a building where people work, or does it have a deeper purpose?
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My own experience working in an office has been tragically brief, but I've been to just about every kind of office you could imagine as a journalist: the glass skyscrapers of The New Yorker and Esquire, bleak government departments in Tokyo, a neon-lit startup warehouse in Austin, an old-time law firm here in Toronto, a dusty room in a crumbling Italian film factory, the sprawling Bay Area headquarters of Facebook, Google and Yelp, and someone's basement in the suburbs.
The blood-stained back rooms of Mennonite meat-packing plants in Bucharest and rural Paraguay were very different in location, size, facilities and general atmosphere, but they shared basic features: walls, lighting, chairs, desks, computers, printers, paper, whiteboards, pens, coffee and water.
As people realized they'd be working from home for more than a few weeks, they created increasingly elaborate home offices. Stacks of boxes were replaced with desks, dining room chairs with more supportive ones. On the other side of the screen, we witnessed art, plants, LED ring lights, and $300 noise-canceling headphones transforming humble bedrooms, closets, and living rooms into respectable home offices. But while this was a vast improvement over Melanie's previous efforts, which consisted of strategically placed cushions on the couch, bed, or bathtub, I continued to feel something was missing. Something was still missing. Could it be the office itself?
“I got a crash course on how much work it takes to create a stable and reliable workspace,” says Alex Soojung Kim Pan, a Silicon Valley consultant focused on the future of work and author of books such as “Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less—Here's How” and “The Distraction Addiction.” “One of the challenges of remote, mobile, and location-independent work is that an office or other dedicated workspace can provide a degree of robustness and seamlessness.” According to Pan, the core physical function of an office is to provide a physical space that clearly defines the mental boundaries between work and non-work life. “A good, well-designed office should help you concentrate while you're there and forget about work when you're not,” Pan says.
“One of the biggest mistakes we made over the last 20 years was confusing technology's ability to carry our work in our pocket with the categorical imperative that erasing the boundaries between home and work life is a good thing.” Without a defined physical space for work, it expands to fill whatever gaps there are, taking away time from other parts of our lives: leisure, family, nature, love, what were previously considered “home.” “All of this should act as a warning that while it's cool to show up to a Zoom meeting in a tie and boxer shorts, maybe you're not cool enough to go somewhere and focus for six hours and come back,” Pan says.
In fact, the office is full of analog tools that can help make work more efficient.
The professionals who could work comfortably from home were those who engaged in “knowledge work,” a broad category of economic activity that appeals to anyone who does most of their work with their head on a computer rather than manipulating physical objects (boxes, machines, food, hammers). While certain categories of knowledge workers benefited from highly focused, solitary work (e.g., book authors and software programmers), most knowledge work required constant interaction with a diverse group of colleagues. Marketing, sales, strategy, management, and countless other economic activities that take place in an office are more fluid, less personal and more direct, and more conversational in nature. They benefit enormously from work done in close proximity to others in shared spaces.
A few months after starting to work from home, Warren Hutchinson and the partners at ELSE were faced with a choice: the lease on their abandoned London office was coming up for renewal. Though the company was doing well financially, ending the lease presented an opportunity for ELSE to move to fully remote work, saving a lot of money in the process. “We were happy with remote work,” he says. “But we still asked ourselves, 'Should we continue like this?'” The answer was yes. There were practical reasons. Hutchinson had a big house in Cambridge, while his younger employees in London lived with roommates in small apartments, and employees with children were still trying to work in the hustle and bustle. Soon they would be able to meet with clients, but Hutchinson realized that the work would have to be done in a physical space that ELSE controlled. “In our work, we're often working on things that are strategically important to our clients,” he said, explaining that the process of understanding what clients actually want ELSE to build (rather than what they say they want) and then proposing, refining and building solutions based on that is essentially a series of ongoing conversations that must continue moving forward.
“You don't hire us to take your ideas or surprise you with great designs. You don't want to be a surprise. Ideas die quickly if you don't push them or have a hand in their creation,” Hutchinson says. “I can't tell you how much ideas have cost us since we went remote. How many have been forgotten because we weren't there when great ideas were born.” Everything now takes twice as long online compared to when we had face-to-face conversations. In person, he would regularly pitch ideas, instantly read the reaction on the client's face, and then change, revise, and improvise on the spot depending on the client's body language reaction to the idea, Hutchinson's charm, and the salesmanship of his team. “Those things are absolutely critical to what we do,” he says. “And you can't do that properly online. You can use the best digital tools, but they're all makeshift. It's not real. We're not building things together mentally because none of those tools can bridge the emotional gap.”
As she conducted her research, she got the clearest perspective on the value of work from people like Hutchinson, whose design experience spans both the analog and digital worlds. One of them is Jennifer Kolstad, global environmental design director at Ford Motor Company, responsible for the design of Ford's offices in Dearborn, Michigan, and around the world. In many ways, Ford Motor Company defined modern work in the 20th century. It was here that Henry Ford relentlessly perfected manufacturing and time management, instilled the 40-hour workweek, and normalized the notion of work-life balance for Americans. With more than 35,000 employees worldwide, Kolstad and her team (which includes behavioral scientists and neurologists) were able to observe how Ford's work changed as office employees went remote during the pandemic.
“I think this area of collaboration, the conversations we need to have together, is more complicated than we realize,” Kolstad said from her home outside Detroit. “You can do tasks. Software distills things down to the level of human productivity, but when you add a layer of creativity, it becomes really difficult. You have to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues in a certain way.” For much of early 2021, Kolstad and her team were focused on creating a future plan for Ford's offices, including the company's 2 million-square-foot headquarters in Dearborn, which was still under construction. The plan, called “Brain to Building,” drew on the company's real-world experience of transitioning to remote work to ask the hard questions of who should work where, why and when. Kolstad and her team, as well as outside contributors, did this all remotely, using collaborative cloud tools such as the design software MIRO, a kind of virtual whiteboard loaded with interactive features.
“We thought we'd cracked the code” when it came to combining MIRO with other software tools, Kolstad said, but the more time he spent on the project, the more he found his team hitting a design dead end.
“You can work on a problem for a month in MIRO and think and think and think,” she told me. The endless options the software offered—endless revisions, tweaks, colors, features, comment threads, chats, emails—created a giant sand trap for the Ford team: the more digital tools they threw at the problem, the more they got bogged down in the details.
Trust is built piece by piece, through the physical space of the office, a quick elevator conversation, or a walk to get coffee.
Offices are full of analog tools that help us work more efficiently, some obvious (desks, chairs, pens, conference rooms, whiteboards) and some less so (hallways, coffee machines, alcoves outside emergency exits where smokers congregate), but they all add up to one powerful tool: the office itself. “It's not just about space or place,” says Andreas Hofbauer, a New York-based organizational sociologist who studies how architecture firms work. “It's become very clear that the workspace has become a thing, an object that we use to produce knowledge.”
Hofbauer characterized people's daily interactions with the physical environment of the office as an active form of implicit learning, a “distributed cognition” of ideas (concepts, education, information) passing naturally, like osmosis, between things and people. For Hofbauer, the architect he studied in New York, the workspace comprised the entirety of the shared space of the studio, from the desks and conference rooms to the drawings, models, and material samples they walked around throughout the day, providing visual and tactile points of reference that informed not only their projects but other, unrelated ideas as well.
Throughout the pandemic, Hofbauer spoke to many architects who complained about the frustrations of working remotely. Many said it was especially difficult to come up with new ideas. They cited not being able to touch surfaces, move things around, or even see drawings on a colleague's desk. Hofbauer felt they were missing the way ideas take shape over time in a physical, analog space.
Many of these projects, like skyscrapers and large-scale developments, take years, even decades, from initial design to completion and could not come to fruition until all involved — architects, designers, engineers, construction managers, craftsmen, insurers, lenders, developers, real estate agents, urban planners — reached a common understanding. Ideas traveled through that vast network of people, through meetings and conversations, phone calls and emails, but they evolved each time they passed a printed rendering or paint sample of a part of the building and absorbed that information bit by bit.
“It's a slow process, and it works on multiple redundancies based on many people who know each other and have deep connections,” Hofbauer said. The physical repetition of passive exposure built a much deeper understanding of the project than the architects could convey through endless emails, messages, and PowerPoint presentations. The distributed understanding of a complex idea was fundamentally a process of building a collective trust in the idea and the people working to bring it to life.
That trust is built one step at a time: in the physical space of the office, a quick elevator conversation, or a walk to get coffee. “The space needs to become a place of connection, time, redundancy, and repeated contact,” Hofbauer says. “That's what actually builds trust.”
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Excerpted from THE FUTURE IS ANALOG: How to Create a More Human World by David Sachs. Copyright © 2022. Available from PublicAffairs, a publication of Hachette Book Group, Inc.