No more Office Ever Again?
Across the world, more than 3.5 billion people are in a state of lockdown. Millions of people, who just a few weeks ago, used to commute to work, head to office buildings, ride up the elevators are not rolling from bed to table and in the best case, bedroom to the living room.
And no doubt, there are many aspects of our old life that we miss. I for one, miss going to the office, I miss meeting the people, the banter, the smiles, the brainstorming, the discussions. Whatever said, and done, it’s not the same on zoom or hangout.
But do I miss working on my table on my computer in an office? Do I miss the long commute and the traffic, and do I miss 6–7 hours of each day staring at my screen answering my emails from a shared public space with folks sitting next to me. Absolutely not.
The COVID lockdown laid bare the prevailing misconception regarding work, the concept of coming to work on time, or say early to show diligence or just the idea of being present in the office. We have new definitions of work from home, work from bed, work at odd hours, hell even work itself.
I hereby, divide work in two categories: collaborative & noncollaborative.
Collaborative work is something that strictly requires more than 2 people and in the ideal scenario will be done by a group of people say 5–6 sitting in a room with a whiteboard brainstorming about some problem.
Noncollaborative work spans everything that requires just oneself or maybe one more person. Answering emails, writing, clearing invoices, excel sheets, a good 60–70% of our work is noncollaborative work. Just we and our loneliness :)
It makes me wonder, where the concept of office even arrived from, when more than half of our work is and can be done, especially in 2020, by an individual and his or her computer. Why did then so many of us, just a couple months prior, woke up, dressed up, burnt gallons of fuels, went to another building, to essentially end at the same work table as home.
By extension, of around half of our work being non-collaborative, we need to spend around 20 hours per week in office compared to the previous wisdom of 40 hours, and the global office rental space needs to be only half its current capacity to serve our work needs.
And by extension, that office is essentially required for collaboration, meetings, and whiteboards, maybe we redesign our office spaces away from rows of workstations to walls of whiteboards and tables and chairs and couches.
Across the world, millions of people are working from home, now more weeks, and despite some hurdles, many of us are working pretty fine. For all of us in those successful work from home jobs, that expensive office expense in our books, its time we transfer that to home-office setup allowance and shrink our workstations and reshape our rental spaces for brainstorming and chilling rooms.
I wonder if the idea of offices has simply transported over eras from shops: the public place of 1 to many transactions to meeting rooms: a public place of 1:1 transaction to “an office”: a public place with one person working on his or her desk?
