Back to the office or back to the future...

First, we took away their rooms. Then their desks. And now, after COVID and with days of constant back-to-back Teams meetings, we want our staff to return to the office so everything can be like normal again.

Change is inevitable, yet often unwelcome. While we may profess to embrace change, the reality is that most of us resist it. We prefer the comfort of the familiar. However, when circumstances force us to change; when we clearly see the need or the benefits, we adapt quickly. The COVID-19 pandemic was exactly such a force, propelling us into a new way of working, one where virtual meetings replaced face-to-face interactions and the boundaries between work and home blurred.

MY ROOM

In the beginning of my career, almost everyone had their own room at the office. Sometimes even with a plaque with your name outside the door. “The room away from home”.

I remember a producer of music shows at the public service radio, Sveriges Radio (SR), that I used to visit to promote my artists. It was a mystery how he could even get in and out from his desk. It was literally piles of vinyl records from the floor all the way to the roof. He had a comfortable chair, a record player, loads of memorabilia and there were small corridors between the stacks of records that you had to navigate around in the room.

Not everyone "moved" into their rooms like this gentleman, but clearly our rooms at the office were OUR rooms, similar to our rooms at home.

MY DESK

Then came the open landscape offices. We accepted that not everyone needed a room for meetings or phone calls in privacy and since we realized we could save some money, we started to sell the concept and the benefits of "teams and interactions". So, we moved out of our rooms and occupied a desk next to our closest colleagues. We brought our pictures of our dogs, kids, and families with us. Perhaps some trophies, a football, our beloved coffee cup. We created our own small space in the huge - or sometimes not so huge - open landscape.

But we soon realized we needed more meeting rooms. Even small phone booths, because we still had to have some private calls and people sometimes in general talked very loud when they were on the phone. Sure, it was a bit difficult to concentrate with all the people around, but since we are all of a very social species we enjoyed the chit-chat as well. Coming to the office was like getting together with our best friends. The Thursday or Friday after work drinks didn’t even have to happen outside of the office. We could just bottle up at our desks and finish up our last emails while the atmosphere got more and more relaxed. Nice!

In one company that I worked for, we were a small team and we had to merge our respective tables together in the shape of one enormous dining table. At the end of the "table" sat the boss, and the rest of us were distributed around the rest of the “table”. Every Friday at lunch someone would go out and buy a few bottles of either wine, rosé, or Cava and around four o'clock in the afternoon we bottled up whilst finishing our last emails. It was very nice, almost like a drink before dinner.

We did not manage to drink everything we had bought and after a while we kind of built up this storage of quite a collection of nice wine and other drinks. We kept it in a storage just behind my plot of land, where I sat. One day when I was alone at the office, our chairman of the group walked in. He greeted me, glanced over my shoulder, then paused a stair at the storage behind me.

I realized that he had discovered the liquor store of goodies behind my back and I started to get really nervous. He came closer, looked up from the bottles, and looked me in my eyes and said: “That’s not wine and spirits, Joakim, is it?” Since I felt the question was so awkward - I mean clearly it was bottles with wine and spirits there and I knew he did not have any issues with his eyesight - so I answered: “No, of course, it’s not.”

The chairman said “Good, very good”, turned around, and walked out of the office. My perception of what had happened was that we now had an understanding and I made sure we all kept the bottles well hidden from that day on.

WE TAKE YOUR DESK, BUT HEY… YOU GET A LOCKER!

Anyway, even if the era of open landscape offices was nice, it also exposed the actual presence of people being in the office. When we had our own rooms we didn’t know for sure, but the open landscape made it pretty obvious that there was a conflict between the number of desks occupied, and the people we couldn’t find a desk for.

So we robbed people of their desks, gave them a locker, and called it an Activity Based Office. Once again there was a correlation between cost savings for the company and clear benefits for the staff, with more acceptance for remote working, that were so attractive and that did drive the quick change. Not to mention a chance for the office design companies to sell a renovation and redo of the office space. Consultants came in, and they even had scientific models to help optimize the amount of people we could have in the office.

We sold the concept as “flexible” with new and innovative collaboration areas, more open spaces that sometimes looked like lounge areas at fancy hotels. And since both the managers and their employees knew that not everyone could be in the office at the same time. The negotiations started to formalize the practice of the work from home model that had already been in play for a while, since the Internet infrastructure got better and better.

THEN CAME COVID

COVID was a game-changer. People who perhaps had heard of video calls but who never really had to use them, were forced to join meetings online. And not just a meeting here and there; the office moved online. Board meetings, workshops as well as lunch meetings and after-work get-togethers all of a sudden happened over Teams and Zoom. Everyone was just one click away, and even big conferences with hundreds of participants tried to find acceptable online formats.

We struggled with countless challenges such as onboarding new staff and saying goodby to others. What was the new online metaphor of the coffee machine? I mean, how could one just bump into each other online and get that lovely spontaneous chat that we all missed from the office days? How do we not lose our company culture when everyone works from home?

In the pre-COVID times, a company just had to offer four walls and a roof, and company culture magically happened. Not necessarily the kind of company culture we wanted, but one that could be worked on. All of a sudden, we not only had to figure out substitutes for “the coffee machine” but also to define our company culture and illuminate it in Teams meetings, emails, and phone calls. Not an easy task, but there was a thought process that accepted the reality; we were working from home because we had to.

AND HERE WE ARE

It has been around two years since we started opening up after COVID, and we’re still in post-COVID times in the sense that many offices continue to be relatively empty. Well, the people who loved having their own room - the “room away from home” - are back. So are the people who love having their own desk and hanging around with their coworking friends.

There are also enough phone booths and meeting rooms for everyone present at the office today. That’s neat. All the constant back-to-back meetings on Teams don’t have to take place in the open landscape. Everyone can at any time leave their desk and grab a room because not everyone is at the office at the same time.

Do you see the challenge here?

The people who wanted to have their own rooms (Roomies) have it. The people who really liked their desk with their team around them (Deskies) have it. However, if they should be able to continue, the people who currently have not come into the office (Homies), cannot all of them return to the office due to the lack of rooms and desks.

Not to mention all the recruitments done based on a remote work model. It’s great to be able to recruit someone that is working remotely from another country. But what do you say to his or her colleagues in the team when they want to work from home as well, or have a workation for a longer period of time?

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The concept of everyone commuting five days a week to work is dead. The idea of “one size fits all” with demands on 2 or 3 days at the office is clearly over too. The only thing we can agree on around how to work post-COVID is that we cannot agree at all. The reason for that is that both companies and staff love what flexibility brings. But not necessarily how to apply it. And as said before… That’s the secret formula for big changes happening quickly - finding the sweet spot of mutual interest.

So, how can we address what's within our control and find peace with the fact that we cannot turn back time?

Well, I think there are a few rather easy things we can try…

• Accept that we are not one homogeneous workforce in the office anymore but perhaps rather three segments: “Roomies”, “Deskies” and “Homies.”
• Leave the “Roomies” and the “Deskies” as they wish. Let them have their rooms and their desks. But if they are not there, anyone should be allowed to borrow their rooms and desks. That's the deal.
• Don’t force the “Homies” to the office, with one exception: If someone really wants to meet them face to face, they should have to go in. That’s the deal.
• Make it rational for “Homies” to be at the office frequently by scheduling a number of events:
• Schedule summer and winter events/parties
• Schedule quarterly on-site town halls (perhaps prompted by quarterly result reports) with introductions and farewells of colleagues and after work mingle and drinks
• Schedule monthly on-site workshops or breakfast events
• Schedule on-site bi-weekly check-ins with direct reports
• Schedule weekly on-site team meetings
• The “Roomies” got their rooms and the “Deskies” their desk. Now let the “Homies” get their nomad hub.
• Create a special lunch and lounge area (big enough for town halls) where “Homies” can sit and work, have coffee with peers, and so on. Homies love working at home and at Starbucks. Let's try to copy that kind of setting.
• Invest in loads of phone booths for video calls. You just cannot have too many.
• Embrace flexibility

If you take away people's rooms, their desks, and eventually the promise to have somewhere to sit and work in the office when they come in. What's left that makes them feel anchored to the office anymore? If the answer is not the locker… I guess it's their colleagues and that we can provide how they prefer to work. And that my friend, will never stop changing.

So, let's stop talking about going back to the office and instead start engaging people to join the journey back to the future.