As one of the former 2% of Americans who was working remotely before the pandemic, I am a guinea pig of sorts. While those of you new to remote work may still be relishing your new-found freedom, I can say with certainty that I look forward to returning to an office someday. Say what?
The Problem
In some respects, you are trading one prison for another when you work from home. While the ability to take ownership of one’s schedule is an unprecedented opportunity for remote workers, it does come at a cost. Remember impromptu chats in the office kitchen? Dead. Running into new people from other functional areas? Gone. Laughing and trading stories with friends? Sayonara. Extraverts will be especially harmed by the lack of social interaction that is inherent in remote work; introverts may flourish in the solitude of their home offices. I am somewhere in the middle, needing both extended periods of solitude bookended by periods of social intensity.
How are young people, who used to rely on face-to-face mentoring and interpersonal relationships in a convivial work atmosphere, supposed to lead from behind a screen? Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan doesn’t think it’s possible. For all of the benefits of remote work, it is indisputable there are social harms that accompany it, as it further atomizes and dehumanizes us, probably exacerbating the already high levels of loneliness and depression prevalent in our culture.
Let’s Build a Solution
Suppose we were to don our UX hats and build a working model for the future of work. What would that world look like? First, a few assumptions:
- Remote work is never going away. The genie is out of the bottle. Insert your cliché.
- Employees want freedom; bosses want control.
- What formerly was resolved in a five minute in-person chat now takes an hour meeting.
- People are yearning for more social interaction and meaning in their work.
- Workers will find it hard to build relationships and advance in virtual-only settings.
- Work is increasingly cross-functional, collaborative, and agile (knowledge economy).
- Fostering productive innovation sessions remotely is difficult, if not impossible.
- Employers are sitting on billions of dollars in vacant commercial real estate.
The key difference between the old way of working and post-2020 is that your employer is now forced to treat you like the adult you really are.
Imagine on Sunday night, you get a text from your boss: “Design meeting moved to Wednesday. Can you make it?” You usually work from home on Wednesdays, but you don’t mind going in an extra day. “Sure,” you reply. “See you then.” You’re an ambitious product manager with team members across the country. There’s a local office hub about 30 minutes away that your office rents for workers in your area. You usually go “to the office” every Tuesday and Thursday. There’s no rule that establishes how many days you want to go, but you like to get out of your house twice per week. A few coworkers go in three times a week, but rarely more often than that.
You meet your boss and the full team on Wednesday. A few people join the meeting remotely but most are there in person. Your office is something akin to a Wework; it’s a dynamic space where workers can come and go as they please. There’s no assigned seating, dress codes, or direct supervision. You can work in the main hall space around your other coworkers, or grab a private conference room for deep work. Your team assembles in the main space and grabs a whiteboard. “So,” your team lead says, “let’s get to work…”
Your team puts in three hours of whiteboarding your next mobile application feature. You take a quick break and grab lunch at a café inside the office. You come back and finish working through your project with the team. All of the objectives you set out to achieve are finished by 3pm. “Who wants to shoot some pool downstairs?” your boss asks. You head downstairs and parlay the working session into a happy hour. You guys hang out for a few more hours and you get home by 6pm, just in time to greet your fiancée for dinner.
This arrangement acknowledges that remote work is never going away, and utilizes flexible, dynamic interpersonal interaction as the foundation of the employee’s relationship with the employer. The physical office is a bonus space that is designed to accommodate collaborative team work, giving employees the freedom to come and go as they please. It repurposes commercial real estate into something more modern and useful, saving employers the cost of paying for a vacant office. Allowing cross-functional meetings at diverse locations promotes creativity and agility, and cuts down on rote meeting time in areas where quick in-person, informal conversations can easily solve the problem. Working in this way also allows people to calibrate the degree of social interaction they want (or don’t), empowering them to determine how much facetime they need. This helps them build new relationships and advance in the organization.
Conclusion
Remote work is not a panacea, as it has its disadvantages, such as social alienation and a lack of humanity. Luckily these pitfalls can be mitigated by stripping out all of the baggage associated with in-person offices, and allowing these spaces to meet the demands of our new remote-first age. Only then will we achieve the very best of both worlds, as the autonomous nature of remote work blends with the physical stability and security of a bygone age.
