The Future of The Office
Hot take — everything those in charge of the return to office strategy are telling you is to validate their own decisions. Even the articles, the data, the anecdotal evidence they share. It is to back up their choices, or their employer’s choices.
The only thing we all truly know is that people want choice. If you dig into all the data that’s out there, you’ll see the evidence around choice. Some people want to go to an office, some people don’t. Some people want to work from home primarily, but they’d like an office to go to sometimes. Some people want to be able to choose where they go and when. Nowhere have I seen that anyone wants to be told where to work from and when. They want choice. And they want to be in control of that choice.
We’ve kept our Boston based HQ open since Summer of 2021 because we heard from a few people that they’d like access to it. When I surveyed people half of the team said they might use it 1–2 days a week. Now I could have used that data to prove that we had to keep an office and that we should start telling people to go back into it and validate retaining it. Half the team wants it! Instead I’ll be honest and say 1–2 people use it a week. An office for 40 is being used by 1–2 people a week. But I get it. Because I have even been able to drop my stuff there for a day so I could meet colleagues and friends in Boston and not have to break up my day commuting it. Choice. I know it is there if I want to use it, and that feels like I have some semblance of control and flexibility from my employer.
The thing about flexibility is that it will always look different for each of the people that work in your organization. Rarely will two people want the exact same thing. So what does that mean? Someone, or a few someones, won’t get what they ultimately want. The other reality is that most companies can’t build policies and approaches around return to the office that serve everyone. Can the Twitters of the world keep their large sq. foot office spaces in several major US cities and give people the ability to work remotely? Yes, they can. But most companies are not Twitter.
Can we stop pretending we know what people want and what is going to work? We don’t! And while we’re at it, let’s stop making this a generational issue too. No one generation knows what another generation needs or will be missing from an in office culture.
We’re at the very beginning of a long journey into a new flexible, dynamic and employee driven world of work. Let’s try some things out. Let’s get flexible and be open. Let’s keep listening to employees and being honest about when we can’t deliver on what someone wants. The future of the office is unknown, and it is time for us to get a little comfortable in that uncomfortable grey area of not knowing.
