So apparently the office is dead...

I call bull****.

Many firms, both large and smaller have energetically and vocally declared they are giving up the office.

Personally I think it is (mostly) a knee-jerk, short-sighted move - at least at at the moment.

Everyone is lacking critical, long-term data to make such a decision.

Why am I right? Well, before everyone pitches in - I'm not saying I am, its just a view/observation/perspective - where possible based on experience.

Firstly - while it feels like its been a long time, the enforced lockdown - to some degree or other - we're now roughly at the 6 month mark. It's quite easy to argue that we are still in a honeymoon period when it comes to working from home. The flex is good, the commute is gone and when its nice outside we can retire to the garden swiftly.

Most of the UK workforce, to the best of my knowledge, are not used to working from home, so lets say you've been in one office or another for a decade, 6 months of being at home, seeing the kids/family/dog/etc is great, and relatively speaking it is a novel experience compared to 10+ years in the same boring, grey/beige, office with a lousey view at best - fair play.

On the other hand, we have occupied our current office in December 2019 after spending 9 months working mostly at home - it was a breath of fresh air.

For me, working at home had made me a bit lazy, complacent and unstructured. While I always completed at least a days worth of work, at home it was too easy to mix it up with distractions, snacking, roaming the house and so on.

I missed the routine and separation that an office provides. I do also like driving, so...

Like most new WFHers right now, I enjoyed the flex largely over the summer months.

And mostly its all good, but enter the first problem of working from home - climate control.

In the UK we don't really have this concept, we have heating, because lets face it, the weather (usually) sucks - but on the odd and rare hot day, we're screwed. Yes - we can enjoy it in the garden, but if we do that we can't really work - at least in IT. It's hot - so you don't want a laptop on your lap, its bright, so video calls are tricky, plus its painfully clear you're in the garden - so it then depends if you can get away with that - depending on culture, participants, etc - so at the end of the day, perhaps you'd prefer to be in the office, with the air con on.

Despite the UK climate being a bit lousey, most offices need aircon as collective body heat, computers, etc emit a lot of heat energy - and thats before a new build and good insulation.

Next problem, in no particular order - our broadband infrastructure is absolutely shit. While its not in my nature, I try to avoid swearing in Linked In articles, at least after a few drafts, but honestly, if you don't have Virgin or FTTP you're shafted, royally.

In an office, with say 30 people you need a good connection with good contention for all those users - makes sense. At home though its just you, right? Well no - not really - if your partner is also working at home then they could be stealing a good chunk of the bandwidth - then there's kids, other devices doing what they want, etc. On a good (well more like unprecedented/excellent) FTTC connection you have 75 Mbps down and 20 up - which most don't. The 75 down is fine but when you need to be heard on a call the 20 up, then shared, is potentially why people are pulling faces every time you open your mouth and don't come over clearly (or at least hopefully it is).

Our infrastructure for domestic connectivity is frankly terrible, and while it doesn't strictly prohibit working from home, it doesn't help it - and as its a domestic setup it doesn't allow fo guaranteed quality of service and explicitly does allow for traffic shaping and so on, when you're suffering, everyone else is and no one is happy.

Next up - winter. Closely coupled with mental health. Winter is pretty dismal - at home you get up, start your day, likely in the dark, then end your day in the dark too - yes its brighter during much of the day but that's it. In the office, you still go in when its dark and leave in the dark too, but its bright, open, there's other people, hopefully happy to see you and you them, and hopefully good heating - it's real boost on those coldest days - plus you're not paying any of those heating bills!

Perhaps then a fast follow is the bills, if you work for a big multinational they'll have all this covered historically - expenses, WFH policy, etc. But if you're the business owner and it turns out you have to cover some of these costs (I honestly don't know the score) but I'd rather pay or one 1Gbps business line at ~300/mo + VAT these days, that will serve easily 30 people if not more even in the most techy business, vs 30 x 20/mo for everyone to have lame FTTC (or other Broadband over copper) or a 4G Hotspot... and that's just the start. When people are remote, who pays for travel to team events, etc - it varies, but still requires consideration, and whether there are other costs/tax implications/etc.

All of these points feed into the next - we've not yet endured (cf. suffered) a full year, four seasons, all the ups and often more downs, etc - so right now, no one knows how its going to pan out. All the potential problems above and perhaps more could surface - of couse, benefits will too - but I suspect it will be mixed on many dimensions.

And this doesn't consider that not everyone actually wants to work from home - I've seen various personality and other types in my career so far.

There's the strict employee - that is, work is a job (fair play) and they don't want cross over, so the thought of being at home for work and non-work is unthinkable.

Not everyone has the space to work from home, nor should they - but you do need a good space if you do work from home I believe. A good desk, a quiet space, the right light, feeling comfortable (decent chair, etc). If you don't have the space, what do you do? Can you work every day sitting on your bed / on a bean bag / etc? Probably yes, but it's not healthy.

What if there are a lot of distractions at home, family/kids/pets/etc?

So - what's the point?

We have an office, both before COVID and now, after. Why? Well - all of the above. We like going back in a few days a week - for a meeting, for a change of scene, etc.

Equally, we do legitimately enjoy working from home a bit more. We've always been flexible, but we are more so now. There's no choice really.

Many companies have trust issues when it comes to more regular WFH and they've been force to deal with these, but this whole new age does not mean a permanent change is coming - it may be, but its just too early to tell.

Landlords are likely to get defensive too - there is a lot of commerical property out there and while supply and demand is of course a natural thing, and right now rent may well be cheap, if we enter year two of the work from home cycle where everyone has experienced the incredible highs and painful lows they may well find themselves with an upper hand on rent and demand, especially if/after some re-purposing to convert to residential and suddenly, perhaps, the demand outstrips the supply. Costs go up.

I have no dog in this fight, despite having a friend who is a commerical landlord, but I am supporting him with our company's rent.

My reflection is not to rush to make a decision - your rent, proportional to your head-count, if you have a good a occupancy ratio is likely around 5%, could well be less or more - but compared to a hire its fairly trivial. There's a lot of hype, which I very much support, around supporing local, small, all businesses - many commercial landlords and property companies are no different in many ways to your local shops, pubs and takeaways - so that's worth considering too. And finally, consider - if you are doing well/ok/not-failing, and lets say you manage that over the next year or two - what will you and your team want?

Were they only in the office because it was forced upon them, or are they social creatures, always, or at times, who want to chat, leave the house, enjoy their peers etc.

Some very large companies will certainly reap the benefits, perhaps too long stuck in old, bureaucratic red tape where you need 10,000 people in an office - yes there are gains to be made there, and big ones but these large companies do not make up the majority of the workforce.

Ditching the office is not a good news story in my view, don't brag about it (at least not yet, until its clearly good news), just because you learned the hard way to trust your team to keep working doesn't make you smart, visionary or otherwise - you were just lucky in the timing of your lease.

In one broad-brush stroke you also screwed your commercial landlord, often a local business owner, who will struggle to fill that office, in part due to the current climate, but also due to the perpetuated anti-office message.

Trusting your team to work from anywhere is probably an overdue lesson, but its too early to say its the now clichéd "new norm". Like the rest of us, you just needed something to force the leap of faith, now you have a flexible, diverse team and have confidence in remote hires, opening up the job market and more - but it does not negate an office - somewhere to have meetings, to have a sense of identity, home and/or a safe, consistent, predicatble space for staff.

Of course there are some people and companies who have been remote for a while, perhaps forever, or making a transition but sensibly and with consideration. For some it works well, others not and as such any long term change should ideally be carefully considered as it could be hard to reverse quickly enough to mitigate unexpected issues.

It's all very complex, and I don't profess to be right - but I do think too many have not thought it through. And so shouting about it and/or claiming a (righteous) victory is ill conceived and shortsighted, even if in the long term it does work out.