Adapt or die unfortunately, companies with remote friendly cultures are weathering the storm much better than more traditional companies. I'm very proud of the leadership where I work; we pivoted so quickly and so effectively, it was a sight to behold.
I do miss going to the offices once a week though, but that's because I like my coworkers.
I suspect they may have been spoiled by their hotspot location's selection bias (higher end talent isn't always in the expensive area with high pay but they would be more tempted to it), tried to pay comparable peanuts on remote talent and got relative monkeys or both.
I would conjecture this is the result of the FAANG culture and its historical lack of support for widespread remote work. It seems like it's the sort of comment that telegraphs, "this is the way we've always done it, why change it?"
FAANG pedigree is not really applicable to remote work though. These companies scaled impressive engineering orgs for building the modern internet, but they are also now megacorps with all the same process and communication overhead, just a different flavor from the previous generation. I have no doubt that companies that are dedicated to the remote work can build a successful culture, and covid and the upcoming recession/depression will gave them a huge leg up.
Unless they were there when they grew rapidly, a FAANG pedigree isn’t worth anything. It’s easy to ride the wave when the money printing machine is already set up.
I'm just leaving a company which has been experiencing stagnated growth for a couple of years and everyone I talk to says that the 100% remote strategy has played a role. My company just couldn't figure out how to get momentum or rally the troops and "light the fire" again.
It wasn't just the remote, but the typical baggage people adopt with remote. For example, it made the mistake of adopting "work when you want" kind of attitude because that was always the norm with 100% companies, which is terrible for a VC funded startup. It set the tone of "what did you cook for lunch?", "oh wow, look at your view of the ocean in portugal" instead of kicking ass.
Obviously not the only problem, but remote was definitely an extra layer of hurdles. A lot of problems would have been easier to address in a physical office.
EDIT: the sibling post that says its a "path to mediocrity" is pretty spot on. But maybe you're fine with your company being a lifestyle company, a "good enough" company. That's fine for some people.
> It set the tone of "what did you cook for lunch?", "oh wow, look at your view of the ocean in portugal" instead of kicking ass.
Sounds wonderful. If a move towards remote work makes it harder for those with capital to extract maximum value from their employees, all the better for society imo. I've seen a lot of propaganda on social media about how people should be excited to work _more_ (to 'kick ass') now that they don't have a commute lmao.
The employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial to some degree, and remote work clearly shifts power towards the employee and gives the employer less ability to monopolize people's lives.
If your company needs people to drown in kool-aid to be successful, sorry! People seem to be slowly but surely leaving that capitalist hypnosis BS in the last decade.
it sounds great, but I didn't mention why I'm leaving. Got laid off because the company is stagnating, been doing lay-offs since before the quarantine. Turns out a kick-ass culture is safer for job security since the market isn't going to give your company a break just because you want to chill.
But i think you can have a high-energy culture but still be healthy, its just incredibly hard to figure out.
There are plenty of jobs out there that are secure & don't require you to be grinding all the time. Any job requesting me to make its mission the main focus of my life gets a laugh and a pass. Why put so much effort into something where I have a minority stake?
Sounds like if the poster worked at a Rise and Grind company they may have not been laid off. I prefer to be in a powerhouse Rise and Grind company with growth potential. It's not for everyone though, some people like stagnation
I feel like this is key even for remote work. Teams that didn't get along or who didn't like each other are going to continue to struggle in new (and worse) ways if working remote. If people didn't communicate well before, I doubt they are going to do any better now.
That depends. Distance from somebody you really really dislike can make it easier to work with that person. What you dont see can not annoy you and you can limit communication to written.
I'm in a similar boat. Funny thing is, the work day actually works out better. I'm not commuting. I sleep longer. Our meetings are shorter and more efficient in general, though we still chit-chat. And we've even taken to multiple times a week game sessions for an hour out of the end of the day when we have time.
Where I work has always been fully remote, so when this started it was business as usual. We expected a rough few months as people stopped buying things, but we've actually been able to increase sales a pretty considerable amount.
I hope some enterprising startups find ways to make work social because for me sitting at home with slack/chat/zoom is death.
It may be less efficient but I like going to work precisely for the face to face time and camaraderie. Though I have been lucky to work more often than not work on projects I was passionate about with people I liked.
I think you're right, that you've had good luck;
the opposite scenario is that I go to work and there are numerous friendly folks for whom work IS their social outlet, so it's a super incoherent environment.
Offices seem to fundamentally be an arms race in subversion of its own purpose for both good and ill. The quiet compared to say a factory floor was a feature which gets compromised for increased quantifiable benefits. Digitalization means the stacks of literal file cabinets and references aren't needed while. Focus and extended work are what they are meant to promote but the two concepts are at odd - either work only when most focused or work for an extended period with breaks ans interuptions. It is a very versatile compromise essentially which is ironically very unfocused.
I suspect the cheapness of rent reduction may win over many companies to remote long term just as open offices and cubiciles seduced them in the past. It may give increased delays for certain tasks but lets face it - they had no problem with increased delays from travel before.
I suspect we might see some increased very short term rentals for interviews and meetings in the future if the bottom line beats out the culture for a change.
>And so, for all the threat faced by the office, there is also cause for optimism about its future. These days the “hyper-physical…is so cherished,” notes Heatherwick. [...], all those desks and all those people, all that bustle and time-wasting, have their benefits.
Humans need offices. Online encounters may be keeping us alive as social beings right now, but work-related video meetings are too often transactional, awkward and unappealing. After the initial joy of peering into each other’s houses on Zoom, we are confronted with people’s heads looming even closer than we see them across the desk at work, and we gaze in horror – half of it self-awareness that we, too, must look awful – at thinning hair and double chins. We become freakish specimens rather than people. No Skype chat can replicate what Heatherwick calls the “chemistry of the unexpected” that you get in person. [...] Because what moves us is not sitting at our computer, it’s the relationship that we have with people.”
Although I've been 100% remote for more than a decade and love the freedom and flexibility, I still don't think this COVID-19 crisis will kill offices and commuting as much as some workers hope for.
Today's telecommuting technologies like videoconferencing, screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, etc are still not seamless and fluid enough.
Therefore, some companies (especially young startups) that have high degree of collaboration will continue to work in offices to outcompete the companies that are 100% remote.
Yes, onsite collaboration in offices is overstated but maybe productivity of working at home is overstated as well. As a random observation, I find it interesting that TV show writers' rooms (including weekly dramas and comedy skits) will all get into the same office to hash out a show. Why do they do that if remote tech like videoconferencing can replace in-person interaction?
Why do they do that if remote tech like videoconferencing can replace in-person interaction?
Because the screenwriter's boss is no different than yours: "butts in chairs, people. It's how collaboration happens!" Or inertia. Or enough other things that I'm not going to immediately leap to, "because it's the best way".
> As a random observation, I find it interesting that TV show writers' rooms (including weekly dramas and comedy skits) will all get into the same office to hash out a show.
I believe some TV shows (SNL IIRC) are still being made with people working remotely.
>I believe some TV shows (SNL IIRC) are still being made with people working remotely.
I think you're saying the current COVID is making producers and writers adapt to the lockdown situation because they have to, and therefore they have to work remotely. Yes, I understand that.
I think once the coronavirus scare is behind us, those writers will willingly go back to being in the same physical room to hash out the dialogue for a show.
If you look at the "writers room" from the SNL documentary[0], you wonder why all those writers and stars are in the same room when they could just use videoconferencing for the "table read". They're all younger generation with money so using technology such as laptops with webcams probably isn't the barrier. I think it's because most writers want to be in the writers room and videoconferencing is still not a good enough substitute for a physical presence. That's why they suffer the miserable Los Angeles traffic to show up in that room.
Since this article offers few sources for its claims, except cherry-picked anecdotes, here are some claims of my own: forced remote work will polarize opinions. Those of us who enjoy the perks will become further entrenched while those who can't stand the downsides will say it's proof WFH is the devil.
My last full time office job began with a great, downtown location. But it became crowded as the company outgrew the space. Little annoyances like mandatory office music and shared desks made focused work more difficult. Of course management always gets their own offices, so they get control of their space with a choice to retreat when privacy or silence is needed.
Hopefully the shared experience will break the cycle of talking past each other. Though I'm not holding my breath.
back in the 199x i felt great coming into our small office with 30+ of 20-something guys like me crammed in coding and playing network Quake and the Rammstein blasting in the office over the Quake rocket explosions. Best productive years. These days even mere presence of 20-somethings on the team gives me headache :)
I wouldn't hope. According to the 2nd law things are moving only in one direction - from-bad-to-worse. When it comes to post-lockdown offices what so far i've seen discussed is adding some transparent mini-walls between desks - kind of smallish transparent mini-cubicles. Like everybody being inside a small personal aquarium so to say. Thus you'd have the worst hybrid of open office and cubicles.
Beside butts-in-the seat visibility, the other main achievement of open office - the high density - coupled with opaque walls would make for claustrophobic work stations (think voting booths) while transparent walls would allow to increase the density even more. Historically such density increases have been taking a decade or two. Thanks to corona we're going to jump straight into it.
I think workers have to push for killing off the open office by bringing it up as a health and safety concern while COVID-19 is still at the forefront everyone's consciousness. There will never be a better opportunity; bring it up as a question at corporate/divisional meetings and provide feedback wherever reasonably possible.
It doesn't sound like ours is going away, but I did recently find out they're removing half the docks so people can spread out more and planning on funding WFH setups for off-days (which will increase to handle the reduced seats).
I don't like that most of these articles present a binary choice: always work from home or always work from the office.
I've learned two things in the past couple of months:
* I really enjoy being at home when doing task work. I can play music without headphones. I can tweak my surroundings to be just the way I like them. I can meander down and see the wife and kids for lunch. Talk a walk around my neighborhood. (I would be able to run an errand or to, normally, but...)
* I hate being at home when doing design or collaborative work. Videoconferencing is better than nothing, but the latency makes me want to claw my eyes out. And I just deeply miss the conviviality and warmth of sharing a physical space with my team.
But I don't need either the former or the latter every day. What I'd really like is a team that worked together a couple of days a week, and from home a couple of days.
The obvious problem is this is the most expensive of all solutions. You still need an office space for everyone (you can't really get a smaller office and stagger days that people go in, because the whole point is camaraderie and collaboration. Maybe you could do this across organizations? Sales mon/wed, product and engineering tues/thurs).
Plus everyone needs to still live within commuting distance to the office, and also have a productive work space at home, which is a huge luxury in a place like SF to have an extra room for an office.
I'm actually considering doing exactly this. Before too long, I'll be at a point where I really need to collaborate with one member of my team and I can't imagine doing it over VC. We usually spend an hour or two at a whiteboard sketching things out.
It might be easiest to simply take turns driving to each other's house.
Actually! I worked a job where the desks were shared by two teams. We'd push our keyboard and mice behind the monitor at the end of the day. Each team was in two days a week, interleaved, and both teams were remote Friday. This way we were all remote 3 days a week, but if for any reason cross team pairing needed to happen (it never happened) there was always Friday.
This cut office costs in half and increased productivity. It was quite good.
Speaking of remote, I've worked two jobs which were semi full remote, where we'd come in if we wanted to collaborate, on average 2 days a month. Both scenarios would save the company money on office costs.
One company, we had a full dedicated office, where we'd find a space we wanted to work in. It was normally abandoned there, except the CEO, SFO, and CTO was often there every day. We'd find an empty office room and close the door having privacy. It was quite nice. The advantage of this was our office space was tiny, compared to how many people we employed. Likewise, when we wanted to come to the office the environment was always fantastic.
Another company I worked at used those shared office spaces with a pay as you go plan. Eg, if you reserve a meeting room, they charge the company for it. We'd go there and find some desks we'd like and go at it, or reserve a meeting room if we wanted. The company would pay for it, so I'm not sure the price, but the environment was good with a café and great outdoor collab spaces. I'm sure it saved the company a lot of money.
So yah, partial remote and full remote do save companies money. They increase productivity and reduce office space costs. However, both of these are quite different than shelter in place, where those who would benefit from coming into the office can't. Shelter in place is less productive and far more frustrating than proper remote.
> The obvious problem is this is the most expensive of all solutions.
Is that actually true? The company isn't paying people to maintain their home offices. Any day where everyone works from home is a day where they don't need to have cleaning staff, food services, etc. come in. It may seem inefficient to have the building sitting there empty, but relative to having people there (and not relative to having no building at all), it's probably a net win.
Think about how many restaurants in prime real estate locations are closed for breakfast or on Mondays.
I think that could help some, since the latency problem is likely made worse by the difficulty reading people's body language to identify the flow of the conversation (e.g. latency + not being able to read the body language of when someone is finished speaking means people interrupt each other).
However, I don't think it would help with the latency itself.
It would be interesting to see whether a team meeting held in minecraft negated the issues with video latency. If there is no expectation that you can read people's facial expressions then the latency becomes a non-issue.
I think what I'd personally prefer is office as coworking space - go there when onboarding, have space for meetings/events/sessions, and have a few offices available for the people who prefer that.
Best of both worlds - cost savings from everyone who prefer to be home (which will be a lot of people) with the option to commute when its the better option.
Aside from workday access to family, I think you’re just describing regular dedicated private offices per each individual knowledge worker, which superior on all fronts except commute time (yes, superior even on a real estate cost basis).
Private offices for all allow social distancing at the office if needed, ability to tweak your surroundings to suit your needs when doing task work, and easy access to share physical space with a team when needed.
I worry we are losing sight of how disastrous co-working spaces and all open-plan designs are.
Fully remote is better than open plan or coworking for sure, but none of these options come close to just coming to our senses and bringing back private offices with doors for individuals.
I had an office with a door for 14 years. I've been in a cubicle again for the last year until 2 months ago when I've been working at home.
I was so much more productive in an office with a door. I could close it for silence, I could close it when on conference calls. I wouldn't be disturbed and I wouldn't disturb anybody else.
If my company let me reduce my salary by $2,000 a year and gave me an office with a door I would do it immediately.
Last summer I started working at a place that does this, and it's been great, for the reasons you mentioned! We have tuesdays and thursdays set up as remote days, with meetings highly discouraged. Half my team has a decent commute, and only come in on monday and friday.
What I like about it: I get a lot of control over where and when collaboration vs. heads down work happens. I know I'll have the space to go heads down for as long as I want tuesday/thursday, and that I'll see my full team at least twice a week, so we tend to plan around that. I can also plan personal activities, appointments, etc. on the days I'm working from home, knowing I don't have meetings or a commute.
I didn't realize how important that face-time was until we lost it at the start of the pandemic. While all of our processes and day-to-day translated to full remote with little to no changes, without the re-centering and catching up and personal side of things we got monday/friday people were more on edge and collaboration/unity suffered. It's been a tricky thing to recoup, but we're finding doing more casual video calls here and there is helping.
Yeah, totally agree. Ironically COVID has made me realise how much I want to work in an office now, as I'm going slightly insane from the lack of social contact.
Moving forward, the best middle ground for most jobs would probably be half the traditional working week in an office, the other half from home. Or something like that.
It is a shame that the author didn't say more (anything?) about the positive sides of the office related to social bonds. I miss seeing my coworkers face to face. I am tired of the weird conversational dynamics that arise from minor delays in transmission. I miss a number of things that are directly related to being physically present.
The office isn’t dead, but it is also clear that the office won’t come back to levels we saw before.
Commercial real estate is very expensive. In many companies the biggest expense after salaries is the cost of their office space. That cost is going to be challenged very heavily moving forward. Many companies that were against work from home because “it won’t work for our company” have been in near 100% WFM mode for a while now. After some initial stumbles most haven’t imploded and many quite like the new model.
I suspect that hybrid will become the new norm and that many fewer people will spend every workday at the office. That in turn drastically reduces the square footage required by many companies.
The implications of all this for the commercial real estate market are quite severe. Expect to see developers quickly try to pivot some of their commercial space into residential ASAP before they find themselves sitting on empty floors with plunging value.
One interesting aspect of making everyone WFH is that it is effectively moving the cost of office space from the employer to the employee. Most homes are not designed or setup to be virtual offices for two employees, because most people never really considered it when they acquired their current living space, which is the reality many people are working within now.
If this becomes the new normal, it will change the way people think about what their home is used for. In many cases, it implies an increase in needed living space, which comes at a cost.
I was working from home for the last 5 years, and really miss office environment. I definitely would not come back to 9-to-5, but I desperately need one day for collaboration in person, I miss socialization and coffee breaks with colleagues, and my home turned into office long time ago, whereas it should be my "fortress" of relaxation and quality time with the family. I seriously considered moving all operations to coworking, but COVID-19 stopped me for a while
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadI do miss going to the offices once a week though, but that's because I like my coworkers.
Those who appear to be struggling are doing so mostly due to disrupted customer demand, supply chain or business relationships.
It wasn't just the remote, but the typical baggage people adopt with remote. For example, it made the mistake of adopting "work when you want" kind of attitude because that was always the norm with 100% companies, which is terrible for a VC funded startup. It set the tone of "what did you cook for lunch?", "oh wow, look at your view of the ocean in portugal" instead of kicking ass.
Obviously not the only problem, but remote was definitely an extra layer of hurdles. A lot of problems would have been easier to address in a physical office.
EDIT: the sibling post that says its a "path to mediocrity" is pretty spot on. But maybe you're fine with your company being a lifestyle company, a "good enough" company. That's fine for some people.
Sounds wonderful. If a move towards remote work makes it harder for those with capital to extract maximum value from their employees, all the better for society imo. I've seen a lot of propaganda on social media about how people should be excited to work _more_ (to 'kick ass') now that they don't have a commute lmao.
The employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial to some degree, and remote work clearly shifts power towards the employee and gives the employer less ability to monopolize people's lives.
If your company needs people to drown in kool-aid to be successful, sorry! People seem to be slowly but surely leaving that capitalist hypnosis BS in the last decade.
But i think you can have a high-energy culture but still be healthy, its just incredibly hard to figure out.
I feel like this is key even for remote work. Teams that didn't get along or who didn't like each other are going to continue to struggle in new (and worse) ways if working remote. If people didn't communicate well before, I doubt they are going to do any better now.
It may be less efficient but I like going to work precisely for the face to face time and camaraderie. Though I have been lucky to work more often than not work on projects I was passionate about with people I liked.
I suspect the cheapness of rent reduction may win over many companies to remote long term just as open offices and cubiciles seduced them in the past. It may give increased delays for certain tasks but lets face it - they had no problem with increased delays from travel before.
I suspect we might see some increased very short term rentals for interviews and meetings in the future if the bottom line beats out the culture for a change.
Humans need offices. Online encounters may be keeping us alive as social beings right now, but work-related video meetings are too often transactional, awkward and unappealing. After the initial joy of peering into each other’s houses on Zoom, we are confronted with people’s heads looming even closer than we see them across the desk at work, and we gaze in horror – half of it self-awareness that we, too, must look awful – at thinning hair and double chins. We become freakish specimens rather than people. No Skype chat can replicate what Heatherwick calls the “chemistry of the unexpected” that you get in person. [...] Because what moves us is not sitting at our computer, it’s the relationship that we have with people.”
Although I've been 100% remote for more than a decade and love the freedom and flexibility, I still don't think this COVID-19 crisis will kill offices and commuting as much as some workers hope for.
Today's telecommuting technologies like videoconferencing, screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, etc are still not seamless and fluid enough.
Therefore, some companies (especially young startups) that have high degree of collaboration will continue to work in offices to outcompete the companies that are 100% remote.
Yes, onsite collaboration in offices is overstated but maybe productivity of working at home is overstated as well. As a random observation, I find it interesting that TV show writers' rooms (including weekly dramas and comedy skits) will all get into the same office to hash out a show. Why do they do that if remote tech like videoconferencing can replace in-person interaction?
Because the screenwriter's boss is no different than yours: "butts in chairs, people. It's how collaboration happens!" Or inertia. Or enough other things that I'm not going to immediately leap to, "because it's the best way".
I believe some TV shows (SNL IIRC) are still being made with people working remotely.
I think you're saying the current COVID is making producers and writers adapt to the lockdown situation because they have to, and therefore they have to work remotely. Yes, I understand that.
I think once the coronavirus scare is behind us, those writers will willingly go back to being in the same physical room to hash out the dialogue for a show.
If you look at the "writers room" from the SNL documentary[0], you wonder why all those writers and stars are in the same room when they could just use videoconferencing for the "table read". They're all younger generation with money so using technology such as laptops with webcams probably isn't the barrier. I think it's because most writers want to be in the writers room and videoconferencing is still not a good enough substitute for a physical presence. That's why they suffer the miserable Los Angeles traffic to show up in that room.
[0] deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu3LyygiSJM&feature=youtu.be...
My last full time office job began with a great, downtown location. But it became crowded as the company outgrew the space. Little annoyances like mandatory office music and shared desks made focused work more difficult. Of course management always gets their own offices, so they get control of their space with a choice to retreat when privacy or silence is needed.
Hopefully the shared experience will break the cycle of talking past each other. Though I'm not holding my breath.
What?
Forced office work already polarizes opinions. Many of us already say Work From Office is the devil.
Why does my typing on a keyboard in the office bring more "value" than when I type on a keyboard at home?
I completely agree with you.
the same reason why you sometimes have to call someone or talk with them in person instead of typing them a text.
Correct. Sometimes.
And sometimes its better to text. See how not having the option to choose is limiting?
Just put up normal dividers, which exist in many many forms already.
I've learned two things in the past couple of months:
* I really enjoy being at home when doing task work. I can play music without headphones. I can tweak my surroundings to be just the way I like them. I can meander down and see the wife and kids for lunch. Talk a walk around my neighborhood. (I would be able to run an errand or to, normally, but...)
* I hate being at home when doing design or collaborative work. Videoconferencing is better than nothing, but the latency makes me want to claw my eyes out. And I just deeply miss the conviviality and warmth of sharing a physical space with my team.
But I don't need either the former or the latter every day. What I'd really like is a team that worked together a couple of days a week, and from home a couple of days.
Plus everyone needs to still live within commuting distance to the office, and also have a productive work space at home, which is a huge luxury in a place like SF to have an extra room for an office.
It might be easiest to simply take turns driving to each other's house.
This cut office costs in half and increased productivity. It was quite good.
Speaking of remote, I've worked two jobs which were semi full remote, where we'd come in if we wanted to collaborate, on average 2 days a month. Both scenarios would save the company money on office costs.
One company, we had a full dedicated office, where we'd find a space we wanted to work in. It was normally abandoned there, except the CEO, SFO, and CTO was often there every day. We'd find an empty office room and close the door having privacy. It was quite nice. The advantage of this was our office space was tiny, compared to how many people we employed. Likewise, when we wanted to come to the office the environment was always fantastic.
Another company I worked at used those shared office spaces with a pay as you go plan. Eg, if you reserve a meeting room, they charge the company for it. We'd go there and find some desks we'd like and go at it, or reserve a meeting room if we wanted. The company would pay for it, so I'm not sure the price, but the environment was good with a café and great outdoor collab spaces. I'm sure it saved the company a lot of money.
So yah, partial remote and full remote do save companies money. They increase productivity and reduce office space costs. However, both of these are quite different than shelter in place, where those who would benefit from coming into the office can't. Shelter in place is less productive and far more frustrating than proper remote.
Is that actually true? The company isn't paying people to maintain their home offices. Any day where everyone works from home is a day where they don't need to have cleaning staff, food services, etc. come in. It may seem inefficient to have the building sitting there empty, but relative to having people there (and not relative to having no building at all), it's probably a net win.
Think about how many restaurants in prime real estate locations are closed for breakfast or on Mondays.
Perhaps this the killer thing for VR.
However, I don't think it would help with the latency itself.
Best of both worlds - cost savings from everyone who prefer to be home (which will be a lot of people) with the option to commute when its the better option.
Private offices for all allow social distancing at the office if needed, ability to tweak your surroundings to suit your needs when doing task work, and easy access to share physical space with a team when needed.
I worry we are losing sight of how disastrous co-working spaces and all open-plan designs are.
Fully remote is better than open plan or coworking for sure, but none of these options come close to just coming to our senses and bringing back private offices with doors for individuals.
I was so much more productive in an office with a door. I could close it for silence, I could close it when on conference calls. I wouldn't be disturbed and I wouldn't disturb anybody else.
If my company let me reduce my salary by $2,000 a year and gave me an office with a door I would do it immediately.
What I like about it: I get a lot of control over where and when collaboration vs. heads down work happens. I know I'll have the space to go heads down for as long as I want tuesday/thursday, and that I'll see my full team at least twice a week, so we tend to plan around that. I can also plan personal activities, appointments, etc. on the days I'm working from home, knowing I don't have meetings or a commute.
I didn't realize how important that face-time was until we lost it at the start of the pandemic. While all of our processes and day-to-day translated to full remote with little to no changes, without the re-centering and catching up and personal side of things we got monday/friday people were more on edge and collaboration/unity suffered. It's been a tricky thing to recoup, but we're finding doing more casual video calls here and there is helping.
Commercial real estate is very expensive. In many companies the biggest expense after salaries is the cost of their office space. That cost is going to be challenged very heavily moving forward. Many companies that were against work from home because “it won’t work for our company” have been in near 100% WFM mode for a while now. After some initial stumbles most haven’t imploded and many quite like the new model.
I suspect that hybrid will become the new norm and that many fewer people will spend every workday at the office. That in turn drastically reduces the square footage required by many companies.
The implications of all this for the commercial real estate market are quite severe. Expect to see developers quickly try to pivot some of their commercial space into residential ASAP before they find themselves sitting on empty floors with plunging value.
If this becomes the new normal, it will change the way people think about what their home is used for. In many cases, it implies an increase in needed living space, which comes at a cost.