An office with no chairs
An office with no chairs
One of the core tenets of the corporate world is that people go to work in offices. For all of the change to tools and technology to support people at work, through habit and expectation, that has never really changed.
It is proof that it’s immeasurably difficult to break habits.
Most offices are essentially big waiting rooms for meetings. You do your work waiting for the next time you have to go into one of the other rooms to talk to other people who were themselves waiting. A lot of offices have permanent desks (or in the case of universities, tiny tiny offices) where ironically, people try to make them look like home with cups and pictures of their family.
A world with Covid meant that for the first time, the habit was broken ushering in the age of Zoomification. Everyone was at home so we just had to get on with it right?
Post-pandemic everyone is now struggling to put the genie back in the bottle. Thinking about creating the right model to balance the benefits (and the huge demand) for working remotely against the concerns of what that means. Some people love it, some people hate it, but the shift in the debate is from proving why you should work at home, to proving why you should go to the office.
What I do know for certain is that this is not a job for technology or the COO. Some managers are demanding a full return, some are running around organising technology and blended models, and the worst have a spreadsheet and a list of names and preferences.
There is something of a Groucho principle for working from home. Groucho Marx famously wouldn’t want to be in any club who would take him as a member. He would perhaps understand the broad rule that people who are the most keen to work from home are often the ones you might least like to be at home. Just asking them then is maybe not the right question.
So then; what is the right question; what problem are we trying to solve?
It should not be how do we replicate our jobs that we have today at home rather?, what do we do in our jobs and especially what we do in the office. We have a once in a generation opportunity to redefine how we work and define what an office is. This window will last only as long as it takes to build up new habits. Every company has the chance to push a reset button on their culture without the immovable force of tradition.
Why not start with the office itself and ask ‘what is an office?’
Imagine you went into your office tomorrow and took every chair and every desk out of your office, shut off the wifi and removed the power points.
You would be left with lots of walls, the amenities of the kitchen and a range of local coffee shops.
Ask yourself the question of what you would do with your staff? How much time could you fill before everyone had to go home? What would people use it for? If people couldn’t sit down by themselves to get on with some work, what would they do?
I would contend that there’s almost nothing you couldn’t achieve in that format and probably lots to gain
Maybe start with some principles for your office
1) People in the same place should be together – you can sit by yourself at home so when you are beside people, you should be doing something with them. Talking, sharing, working on a problem etc.
2) An office a day helps you work, rest and play – or maybe once a week. An office isn’t just about work, it supports the creation of a culture. It allows people to engage with friends they happen to work with, and it gives them a different environment. The experience of not leaving your house for weeks on end with limited engagement with others is not a theoretical thought experiment anymore.
3) An end to organisational laziness – we are all lazy with planning what goes on in an office. We can make a nice place to go but we don’t respect the value of people and time. Because everyone is there, you may as well have a meeting. If you have to plan out what people do when they are together, you’ll start to put an explicit value on people’s time.
4) Respect the intangibles – alongside my office with no chairs would be a large coffee shop/juice bar/members club. All those little conversations that are important to have, all of the little side chats and eavesdropping.
What is really gets down to it that there are four elements in your work life that should be treated differently. There are
- things you know what to do and you just have to sit down yourself and do them,
- there are tasks that benefit from help and people working together,
- there are things to be discovered and discussed which you don’t know the answer to, and finally,
-there are the moments with your friends and colleagues where you share and learn things.
The balance of everyone’s job is different which is why there can never be a one-size fits all for how to create an office. Maybe you have to be in the office once a week, maybe once a month or maybe all day everyday. The challenge and the value is in taking the time to build a model which works for your organisation.
You could start by imagining no chairs, and go from there.