The way we work has changed beyond comprehension in the past 200 years. But the way we use offices is pretty much still the same.
There have been changes in design: Closed individual offices were the norm, cubicles came and have now largely gone, and today the open office and agile working reign supreme. But the idea of a place where you travel to work, nine hours a day, five days a week, hasn’t changed since the idea was invented during the Industrial Revolution. Until now.
“Processes get locked in place: The only reason schools have such a long summer holiday is because children used to have to go and help bring in the harvest,” Stanford University Professor of Economics Nick Bloom said. “Ideas can be very hard to shift. But I think we could be about to see an explosion in growth.”
The way we use offices is at the center of that.
The way companies use offices was already changing, and that change has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic and the switch to home-working it has forced upon the world. So office space is going to have to change to mirror the way companies are now working.
Experts believe in the future, companies will want less space, but better space. They will want space that allows different teams within their company to achieve different objectives, with the physical environment helping company goals. Office space will need to seamlessly bring together those working in the building and those working from home.
Companies will want to experiment with different physical environments, trying and testing in the same way they would a new website. Office owners, developers, and operators will need to provide the physical infrastructure and technology that allows all this to occur. Those that do will help companies tap into this potential growth in productivity, and are likely to be richly rewarded.
For Bloom, who specializes in productivity and the factors that influence it, the change in the way we work and how we use offices is akin to the change that occurred in factories when they switched from steam power to electricity. It took decades for the increases in productivity to be seen, not because factory owners didn’t want to switch from steam to electricity, but because it took a long time to work out how factories and production processes should be organized to take advantage of the new technology. Companies had to change shape, and so did the buildings they occupied.
“[Nobel Prize-winning economist] Robert Solow famously said in the 1980s you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity figures,” Bloom said. “We haven’t seen the miracle that IT was supposed to produce, but new ways of working, accelerated by COVID-19, could spur that. We now have the processes and technology up and running to be able to work flexibly and increase productivity.”
Bloom sees the coronavirus accelerating the trend for employees to work remotely, either from home or from smaller satellite offices away from city-centre HQs, as companies that may have doubted the wisdom of this practice had their hand forced. Companies have had to reorganize at least temporarily in a way that embraces flexibility, and Bloom believes those that stick with it will see increased productivity long term. The combination of office and homework is expected to reduce the inefficient elements of office life: stressful commutes, rigid working patterns, and unnecessary meetings.