The Office Reconsidered
For much of the twentieth century, the office was a place of fixed routine. Clerks arrived at the same hour, sat at the same desk and left when a bell or a clock told them the working day was over. The design of these buildings reflected a belief that office work could be organised much like production in a factory. Rows of identical desks were arranged so that supervisors could see every employee at a glance, and the movement of paper from one department to another was planned as carefully as an assembly line. Few people questioned whether office work needed to happen in an office at all, because the documents, telephones and filing cabinets on which it depended could not easily be moved.
Later decades brought a reaction against this rigid model. Designers introduced partitions to give workers a degree of privacy, and in some countries a more radical idea emerged: the 'office landscape', in which desks were grouped irregularly among plants and screens to encourage informal conversation. Neither approach fully resolved the tension between privacy and collaboration. Partitioned cubicles were criticised for isolating staff, while open layouts were blamed for constant interruptions. The organisational psychologist Dr Tomas Wexley, who has reviewed several decades of workplace surveys, notes that complaints about noise appear in almost every generation of office design. 'Each new layout promised to fix the problems of the last one,' he observes, 'and each produced problems of its own.'
The technology that eventually loosened the link between work and place arrived gradually. Laptops, mobile phones and fast internet connections meant that, by the early 2000s, a large share of office tasks could technically be carried out anywhere. Yet for many years the proportion of people working mainly from home remained small. Professor Leona Brandt, an economist who studies labour markets, argues that the obstacle was cultural rather than technical. Managers, she suggests, tended to equate being visible with being productive, and employees feared that colleagues who were rarely seen would be overlooked for promotion. It took a sudden and widespread experiment, when public health restrictions forced millions of employees to work from home almost overnight, to demonstrate that many organisations could function without a shared building.
The evidence gathered since then is more mixed than either enthusiasts or sceptics tend to admit. Many studies report that individual output, particularly for tasks requiring concentration, stays the same or even rises at home, helped by the absence of commuting and by fewer interruptions. However, Dr Ama Kessie, who researches innovation in teams, has found that new connections between colleagues in different departments decline sharply when staff work remotely. Her analysis of internal messages suggests that people continue to communicate regularly with their immediate team but rarely with anyone outside it. Over time, she argues, this may reduce the chance encounters from which new ideas often emerge.
Remote work also affects employees unequally. Those with spacious homes and quiet surroundings tend to adapt well, while those sharing small flats may struggle to separate work from family life. Younger employees in particular often report that they learn less when working remotely, because they lose the opportunity to observe how experienced colleagues handle difficult phone calls or negotiations. Professor Ruairi Doyle, who studies career development, describes this informal learning as 'the hidden curriculum of the office' and warns that its loss may only become apparent years later, when a generation of workers reaches senior positions with gaps in their practical knowledge.
Faced with these competing findings, many organisations have settled on a hybrid arrangement, in which staff divide their week between home and the workplace. This has prompted a rethink of what offices are actually for. If focused individual work can be done at home, the argument goes, the office should be designed mainly for activities that benefit from people being together, such as workshops, training and social events. Some companies have reduced the number of desks to fewer than one per employee and turned the space saved into meeting areas of different sizes. Others have discovered that staff come in only to spend the day on video calls, which defeats the purpose of the journey. Dr Wexley believes the key is coordination: 'A day in the office is only worthwhile if the people you need to see are there on the same day.'
It is too early to know which model will dominate. Property markets in many cities are already adjusting, with some older office blocks being converted into flats, while new buildings compete to offer better ventilation, natural light and facilities that a home cannot provide. Professor Brandt is cautious about predictions, pointing out that earlier forecasts of the 'paperless office' proved premature. What seems certain is that the question of where work should take place, which for a century hardly needed asking, is now one that every organisation must answer for itself.
