The Office

(In which I ponder its future)

A solitary visit to the office, early June left me in a somewhat sombre mood.  We've had the current office for over three years and, by any measure, this is a good office.  Once it was clear we had to make the move form our rather run down old office, a great deal of effort went into locating the new office and then designing the form and function of the place.  Not perfect and certainly not funky but nevertheless a pleasant, modern and productive place where, unlike the old office (pictured below in its sad, final weeks), I'm not the snot monster several days in a month.

I can't speak for my employer's thinking, but what once looked like temporary changes, brought about by the pandemic, now has me contemplating the future of office spaces and work in general.  Since March we've worked from home with no apparent difference in productivity.  Will the old order re-assert itself, post pandemic?

Of course, there is both a human and economic cost to remote working.  The corporate real estate market has flatlined.  And what about the various services for maintenance, catering, cleaning and so on?  Then there's the people actually doing the work from home.  This affects different people in different ways.  Some will have been missing the human contact from the moment they were sent home.  Even a loner like me eventually misses other, actual humans.  A weekly virtual pub lunch helps a little.

On the productivity side, the change will be affecting everyone differently.  Some will feel freed from the shackles of of the daily regimen, free to manage their time, while others will struggle to be productive without those shackles.  I can see the same being played out in education where self starters will likely have benefited quite a lot from the past four months.

But what about the future of the office?  I see three things happening.  Firstly, the corporate real estate market is by no means at the bottom, yet.  Working from home and working remotely is now more deeply ingrained than I'd anticipated. Whereas four months ago I assumed things would simply be back to normal by May/June, I no longer see a big return to the office in the near future.  What I think we might see happening is WeWork rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its own excess along with other, similar flexible workspace arrangements.  Then again, within days of me writing that last sentence, London's Tech Hub turned out to be the thing that went bump in the night.  What will becomes of Shoreditch's Bullshit Roundabout?

For the individual worker, I see both opportunities and traps.  Being visible is harder for the remote worker.   I find I spend more time actually video calling on Microsoft Teams than I'd anticipated (I'm normally Mr. Instant Messaging).  Being seen matters.  Having something smarter than a tatty WFH t-shirt, from my XXL days, to throw on for video calls, might actually be good idea.  I find I have more of a tendency to over communicate.  I do think the winners in this new reality will be those who take control of their own day to day narrative.

As for the opportunities, when all you need to be productive is a laptop and an internet connection, why not head South for the colder months?  Or even just the occasional change of scene closer to home.  And what's to stop the remote worker from pulling a shift, over a rainy weekend, then spending more time in the garden over the sunny week ahead?

I've always been that little more productive and creative with the right view.  Of course, this assumes travel will be possible in the winter.  Spain has gone from closed, to open, to closed again, for a British traveller, in the face of a few short weeks, while Manchester goes back into a strange kind of half in/half out lockdown.  Nevertheless, the idea of a working holiday appeals.  Photographically, the best times of the day are outside of office hours, so having the normal shift would be no great imposition for this shutterbug.

And what of the old office?  Well that was bulldozed and a number of houses have since been built on the old site.  Yes it felt as sad as it looked in the photos I took over its last couple of weeks with us.  I miss the old office in spite of the fact I was profoundly allergic to the place.  It had character and it always felt quite modern, to me, after the army surplus desks of a previous employer.  The workplace is where we (used to) spend a lot of our lives so I think it vacuous to say the form of it doesn't matter.

©2020 Jason Hindle

The photos? Trident and Lanzarote were taken with a Fujifilm XF10.  The photos taken of the old office, in the run up to to the move, were taken with a Ricoh GR.