Crystal Balling the Office of the Future

By Jim Tholen, Managing Partner

This week we want to blog about where we see offices going as we slowly and awkwardly (hopefully) start returning to our new post pandemic normal.

I was speaking with a very good buddy of mine who is a senior partner at one of the very large professional services firms about this topic - offices as both work environments and as platforms to help evolve company cultures.

Pre COVID, we (True North) have long been advocates of more inventive, more collaborative work spaces. At BroadSoft our last several build outs aspired to have attributes such as:

• Lots of collaboration options (pods, bigger spaces, flex space, informal spaces) for people to meet and work together - with as many of these as possible seamlessly able in include full other participates virtually;

• Very few actually individual offices, preferably all unassigned long term  - with a sign up for day use;

• Use of cubes or benches again on a sign up basis so individuals  can get work done;

• Lots of office flow dynamics to encourage interactions and less scheduled conversations.

• Flexibility on WFH vs WFO dynamics depending on the group and project;

• Thinking through use of space and collaboration dynamics for those times a leader wants most/all of her team or office in the office.

Historically the worries of this more fluid work environment have been around:

• Productivity and communication 

• Losing informal synergistic “water cooler” encounters and

• A loss of developing an office and/or corporate culture.

COVID has forced us to live real time experiments on WFH and hybrid office dynamics. In our conversations with tech leaders, including CEO’s of smaller high growth companies, larger platform tech companies as well as professional services firms like my buddy’s above, we see lots of learning and intent with our bulleted attributes and lots of concerns that map to the worries we discussed:

• Very few leaders envision a return of a pre COVID normal

• Most leaders (including historical big naysayers of flex space and WFH) are believers now that their  teams can be highly productive working from home;

• Different firms are moving back to their new normals and different rates. 

• My buddy’s firm is telling people ‘everyone is coming back’ but have been moving that date back. Even here, though, the new model is far from the monolithic everyone has a cube or an office;

• Another major professional services firm is telling their professionals they may never require an employees central work location be an office

• There is a bit of slow motion video going on with all of this - the slow motion is driven by the fact that most companies (including both these firms) have longer term leases, and office build outs much more reflective of the old models not our more dynamic new ones.

• But both firms told me 5 years down the line, their office footprint will be significantly less than what they have now - and will be utilizing lots of tools we discussed earlier.

If there is one area of concern we heard from leaders thinking through their respective office strategies, it is around corporate and office culture.

• How do you help create a dynamic, positive company culture if people are mostly working from home and/or at client locations?

• How do I make sure that newer employees are trained (information and formally), and get rooted in the culture of an office and a company if employees are only occasionally in an office?

• One interesting adjacent concern (maybe a new blog from us down the road?) are concerns around the “Great Resignation” dynamic and whether some of these high levels of voluntary departures are fueled by a sense of loss of culture and office community. I know both professional services firms are struggling with their levels of voluntary redundancies.

We strongly believe that the experimentation and focus around these concepts of the collaborative office will ultimately yield a much richer (and flexible) work environment for lots of employees.  Done well, these offices of the future should help rather than impede the kinds of company and office cultures we all aspire to. 

In fact we challenge all of us to think and act proactively not reactively in this regard. As leaders in your companies, can you:

• Use this massive disruption to your competitive advantage?

• Instead of just trying to replicate/update old models - radically think through how new approaches can accelerate your business (and company culture and collaboration) forward?

We look forward to seeing where this journey of office experimentation and radical rethinking takes us!