NY Open Office Space

When I worked at Bar­clays, they jammed us in with about 2 – 3′ of per­son­al space on each side. There was some­one oppo­site us, and some­one with­in arms reach on either side.

Even then, space was a pre­mi­um… we were told it was very expen­sive to have us work in NY. They had tricked me… every inter­view I had was in a pri­vate office, even the inter­views with my peers. I made the (faulty) assump­tion that we worked in offices. The (pur­pose­ly?) did­n’t show me where we actu­al­ly worked.

I last­ed six weeks.

Citibank has just fin­ished con­struc­tion on their beau­ti­ful flag­ship prop­er­ty. Mak­ing it open plan to improve den­si­ty col­lab­o­ra­tion. Open plan is mar­ket­ed at a solu­tion to improve col­lab­o­ra­tion but it’s real­ly a cost thing.

I’m not the only one think­ing this, there’s a lot of spec­u­la­tion about NY office space and work­ing from home, espe­cial­ly since we’ve been hit so hard and will like­ly be one of the last areas to open.

What happens?

So, I won­der, how will they put 1/3 of the peo­ple in the same space as before, and jus­ti­fy the cost, when these com­pa­nies could hard­ly jus­ti­fy the cost before the pan­dem­ic?

One-third you won­der? Yeah. These peo­ple are crammed in so tight, that half-the peo­ple would­n’t allow for 6′ social dis­tanc­ing, let alone more fur­ni­ture to allow for dividers between peo­ple. So, one-third is prob­a­bly a bet­ter esti­mate.

Do they get more space?

Do some work from home full time, oth­ers from the office full-time?

Do they rotate?

More space is a non-starter (at least for now; over time, I think the remote trend breaks the loca­tion depen­den­cy… which then allows for loca­tion inde­pen­den­cy to shift from work from home to larg­er remote offices away from HQ).

I can think of real­ly big prob­lems with both oth­er alter­na­tives. I’m a full-time work from home per­son (because I can’t func­tion in an open plan). My wife, I imag­ine, would be as mis­er­able work­ing from home full-time as I am work­ing from an open office plan (and not only because I’m home too).

I think more tra­di­tion­al com­pa­nies would feel that rotat­ing peo­ple into the office makes more sense… but there’s so much trou­ble with that. Do they keep teams togeth­er? What about peo­ple like me that don’t work with their team-from-the-same-man­ag­er, but peo­ple who work across-teams-to-get-results. That sec­ond type of team isn’t reflect­ed in the org chart… yet, if the com­pa­ny is to be “fair” (which is real­ly not what fair means… but I’ll ignore that for the moment)… if the com­pa­ny wants to be fair, the way to slice-and-dice it is to rotate around by teams. Or by license plate (ran­dom; like they did when we were rationing gas in the US in the ’70s).

But if rotat­ing, who gets to work from home on Fri­days? A more advan­ta­geous day over the sum­mer, when it means you can com­mute to your sum­mer week­end on Thurs­day. And if your peers can work at home on Fri­days and have a bet­ter sum­mer com­mute, that’s a perk to be nego­ti­at­ed… or to be used even if Fri­day is your day in the office. How do man­agers han­dle that? Com­pa­nies might be flex­i­ble like Twit­ter, but most are rigid cor­po­rate machines that don’t want to hear about our human­i­ty. And the rule is (or will be) the rule.

What about work­ing cou­ples… can they coör­di­nate their work from home across com­pa­nies so they can share the one home office they have?

What about Mon­days? That’s the day for most hol­i­days… some­one work­ing from the office on Mon­days, if it’s fixed, will have decid­ed­ly less office-time than some­one work­ing from home a dif­fer­ent day. (Judge for your­self if that’s pro or a con.)

Two key observations

There’s a mil­lion ques­tions that I find fas­ci­nat­ing about this… but it comes down to two obser­va­tions:

1. The busi­ness mod­els will not sus­tain more invest­ment in real estate.
2. It’s obvi­ous that for many, our jobs are time/location inde­pen­dent but we work “9 – 5” at an office out of habit. A habit that clear­ly does­n’t serve our human­i­ty as we bal­ance com­mutes, child­care, home-school­ing (*yes, we will all be home­school­ing for some time), doc­tors vis­its, gro­cery shop­ping, exer­cise, etc.

I like to think about “what does that mean we should do?” And, I don’t know. I’m very curi­ous how this plays out. The only thing I can think of is peo­ple-man­age­ment skill.

It’s very easy to man­age a team when you’re sit­ting next to them or in the same build­ing. When you know that they’re pris­on­ers to being onsite all day, and if they choose to not work in that time they’ll get a bad review. But most­ly you have to be real­ly look­ing for it to get a bad review.

When a team is dis­trib­uted, you need a bet­ter way to man­age to the work, and hold peo­ple account­able. A bet­ter way to man­age account­abil­i­ty and com­mu­ni­cate asyn­chro­nous­ly. A bet­ter way to dis­trib­ute both account­abil­i­ty and respon­si­bil­i­ty.

It’s the freakonomics not the “thing” that matters most

It’s not about the office space, real­ly. It’s about the side-effects that result. I like to think of this as the freako­nom­ics of the sit­u­a­tion. What unex­pect­ed things two- or three-steps removed from the fact that peo­ple work at home more occur.

And how can you get ahead of that to find the oppor­tu­ni­ty?

The parents aren’t alright until the kids are

Final­ly. It’s not the work from home part that is hard. It’s the work from home part while the spouse is also work­ing from home and while the kids are home school­ing.

It’s like an open plan office in the mid­dle of a kinder­gar­den full of kids that I’m teach­ing part-time.

If work from home hap­pens for every­one, even in a lim­it­ed way, that means fam­i­lies are going to spend a lot more time togeth­er around work/school, instead of fam­i­lies going out to do their “thing” and then come home for home­work and din­ner.

That could be the most inter­est­ing knock-on effect of all.