Your office isn't a great place to work anymore
Readtime: 3 minutes
You finally got everyone back into the office.
And now half of them are sitting at their desks with headphones on, taking Teams calls with people sitting twelve feet away.
Walk into any office in London right now and this is what you’ll see:
Rows of people on video calls.
Meeting rooms full of one person each, talking to a screen.
Most companies have settled the big question of how many days people should be in the office. Three days, four days, five for some.
Which is fine. But I think it's solved the wrong problem.
The point of the office has changed. It used to be where you did your work. Now it's mostly where you do your Teams calls to talk about the work.
And that’s not a good change.
The collaboration myth
Open-plan offices were designed for a world without video calls, and a world with far fewer meetings. They assumed the people you needed to talk to were in the room, and that you'd talk to them in person, occasionally, between long stretches of actual work.
Over the last few years, most meetings have become remote, and the total number of meetings has roughly doubled. The argument for open-plan offices has collapsed.
The original sales pitch was collaboration. But now most people put their headphones on the moment they sit down, either to block out the noise or because they're joining a call. The collaboration mostly happens in scheduled meetings, in meeting rooms, or on Teams.
And the rooms themselves are part of the problem. Most people take their Teams calls at their desks, which is part of the noise problem to start with. But the moment you actually need a room – for a sensitive conversation, or because you're actually meeting with someone in person – every meeting room in the building seems to be booked.
Then there's the hot desk situation,. You're meant to book in advance, and if you don't, there's a scramble that morning for whatever's left. And even when you do book a desk, you frequently end up nowhere near the people you came in to see. A lot of people tell me this is the single most annoying thing about office life in the last few years.
All of which suggests the office is not a great place to work.
The cost of being interrupted
A related point is that the cost of being interrupted is bigger than most people realise.
Every time someone walks past your desk to ask a quick question, or you overhear half a Teams call, or someone two rows over starts laughing at something, you lose your concentration. And with, your good thinking.
You don't just pick it back up where you left off. It takes time to get back to where you were. Sometimes you never quite get there.
So you end up with a strange situation. You've come into the office to do your work, and the office itself is making your work hard to do.
The worst of both worlds
We've ended up with the worst of both worlds. All the noise and interruption of the open-plan office, plus the isolation of taking most of your meetings on a screen anyway.
So the right question probably isn't how many days people are in the office. It's what is the office actually for?
And maybe the most expensive part of the open-plan office isn't the rent. It's how it makes quality thinking impossible.
Worth thinking about
Which makes me wonder whether the sensible move is to go al the way back to the old way of doing things. Actual offices, with actual doors, for most people.
It used to be normal, because work that requires you to think needs it. We seem to have decided somewhere along the way that this was inefficient. I'm not sure it ever was, but it’s even less so now.
I don't think we'll go all the way back to everyone having their own room, but I do think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
The big return-to-office decisions have mostly been made. The conversation we need now is about what the office should actually look like once you're in it.
If you have some thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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