Peter Cappelli - The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face

2021 by Peter Cappelli

Published by Wharton School Press

The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania

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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-136-2

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-153-9

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61363-154-6

B y 2005, Google had become the top choice of college graduates as the place to work. Its new office buildings were renowned for the employee perks: gourmet food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; concierge service; bring your dog to work; spaces for nappingyou name it.

The fact that it had such terrific benefits had a purposeto keep employees at the office. This was not only because they would be working more, but also because their interactions with each other sparked new ideas and innovations that were incredibly valuable to the company. Tech companies and a great many organizations saw this approach of getting people into the office and keeping them there as a best practice.

Yet in May 2021, Google announced a sharp shift in the other direction. Twenty percent of employees could work from home permanently, and another 20% could work remotely, tied to a series of Google locations elsewhere. The remaining 60% could work someplace other than their office two days a week; and for four weeks out of the year, they could work anywhere in the world.

The takeaway: Get the workforce out of the office.

After a year and a half of offices being shut down and employees working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, white-collar work all over the world is facing a fundamental inflection point for its future. Evidence and anecdotes say that many of those employees like working remotely and that businesses survived, and in some cases thrived. Unlike Google, many employers largely want to return to how things were before the pandemic, while most employees want to maintain the flexibility they have grown to value.

We now face a big question: What is the future of the office? Should we all go back to the physical space and the way things were, should we continue to stay home, or should we do something different?

Forget the fascination with other topics that dominate when we talk about the future of work, such as what artificial intelligence might ultimately do to work, our obsession with trivial differences in the attitudes of generations, and other imagined issues. Working from home could change more about office work than anything in a century, it is upon us right now, and we have to choose fast.

It sounds very sensible to go back to the office and pick up where we left off. Weve been doing office work for hundreds of years, and weve figured out ways to manage problems and get things done there. We had a temporary break in the action that was a little longer than we predicted, but that will soon be over. Lets get back to work.

On the other hand, it sounds equally sensible not to go back. Office employees generally liked working from home. Employers, remarkably, report that on balance things worked no worse and maybe even better with remote work. Weve been at this for a year and a half. Why go back?

Then theres the third option: something that incorporates office work and remote work and tries to make everyone happy. The wide variety of options here is what is known as a hybrid approach, but exactly what that means can vary dramatically from one organization to another.

There was no choice during the COVID-19 pandemic. It forced a giant (and unwanted) experiment of having to work from home. It began as a speed bump, akin to a series of snow days for schoolchildren, then quickly turned into a longer-term event, as we might expect in recoveries from natural disasters. It then became a kind of new normal. In most cases, white-collar workers ended up working from home for well over a year with no time to plan for how to do so.

Now, there is time to think through what to do. Keeping things as they are means working from home almost entirely. As of the summer of 2021, most of the US restrictions on staying home have been lifted. We can think more carefully about the path to take, employer by employer. But we have to choose.

This decision has huge implications for individuals, for employers, and for society. There are advocates on all sides. Depending on whom you ask, it is a means of liberating people from office life, of reducing car commuting and pollution, or of destroying the commercial real-estate market and center cities and making it impossible to get away from work.

This could be the moment to redefine what work means for employees and how it fits into society. It could also be an opportunity to make a big and costly mistake. It could be that the work-from-home experience during the pandemic was unique and will not translate to a more normal period.

The problem is that it is not at all clear what we should do. Not everyone liked working from home, and there were a lot of other things going on besides working remotely that might not be replicated going forward. The experience where everyone had to be home is quite unlike the hybrid approaches most employers refer to now. There are potential arrangements where some people are in the office and others are not, where some people get to choose whether to be in the office or at home, and where some people are remote permanently. All have different and important implications.

The office has been a permanent fixture in white-collar work for centuries. It is not just the place where work gets done but also the center of work-related intrigue, office politics, and public failures and successes. It is a source for literature, movies, and eponymous TV shows. Among other things, a remarkable 22% of all married couples have reported in recent years that they met and started dating at their offices.New York magazines May 2021 issue is an elegy to the office, documenting with personal anecdotes how intertwined its changes have been with our social lives and the experience of that city over the past 100 years. Given how much time we spend at work, getting rid of offices raises profound questions about social isolation if we retreat to our homes for work and for everything else.

Then there is the economic impact. Employers spend huge amounts of money on offices, in part showing off with corporate campuses, towering buildings, and individual offices designed to reflect and convey prestige on employees. The practice of counting ceiling tiles to see whose office was bigger has been a standard part of judging status. A lot of money went to basic amenities like bathrooms and ventilation systems but also to designs that were supposed to stimulate performance: breakout rooms to encourage informal meetings, interior designs to facilitate collaboration, and quiet rooms for individual tasks. A move away from offices would be a crisis for the $1.7 trillion office real-estate industry, the $600 billion construction industry, and all the businesses and employees that serve office jobs.