I think traditional big offices are stifling in their effect on soul and spirit.
Together with automatic coffee machines, they’re surely one of mankind’s worst inventions.
Heaven knows I put up with them for more than long enough in the past. Both the coffee machines and the offices.
Online entrepreneur Dan Andrews, producer of the excellent Tropical MBA Lifestyle Business Podcast, says offices breed averageness and mediocrity – and I have to agree here.
The Traditional Office is a Breeding Ground for Mediocrity
They also breed dronery, tedium, lack of initiative, time-wasting, clock-watching, excessive coffee drinking, nose-picking, surreptitious web surfing – and miserable people. And that’s just for starters!
But in the last few years, the idea of virtual working has been catching on in some quarters. New start ups, particularly in the Internet and online business sectors often dispense completely with the idea of renting office space and instead prefer to work remote.
But what about other companies, what about the mainstream of business activity and the economy?
Historically, ”telecommuting” has been regarded as something far off in the future. Long distance phone calls were expensive, never mind international ones. Work, employment, companies and business were all based in office blocks and occupied and serviced by big commuting armies of salaried employees.
The idea of working at home was seen as something done by lowly paid envelope stuffers. Or only for a fortunate few of top management who came into the office just one or two days a week.
BREAKINGOUT.NET’s SPONSOR:
BYOC – Bring Your Own Computer
In recent years we’ve slowly been seeing some changes. There’s been the idea of “hot-desking” – where staff share office space and no longer have their own fixed designated “desk”, PC, phone and chair.
Now things are starting to be taken a step further. There’s now a concept called BYOC – Bring Your Own Computer. Whereby employees are allowed and encouraged to bring their own computer – laptop or PC to work, rather than rely on the company’s own IT infrastructure.
Companies are outsourcing and buying in contract staff more often to avoid employing large numbers of costly permanent staff on inflexible contracts and who incur expensive social insurance taxes for the employer. This is especially a problem in Western Europe.
The next step has to be to downsize on office space and have more staff working at home. With cheap high quality, easy to use Internet communications such as Skype with video, computer desktop sharing and webinar-conferencing, its now possible to arrange this. There are even software programs which monitor what staff are working on on their PCs (Big Brother in action).
For the occasions when you need physical meeting space, there are conferencing and serviced office suite centres where you can rent space on an hourly or daily basis as and when required.
Working from home means people can be freed from nine-to-five hour filling. Staff can still have windows of availability, but the work can be organized more on a task-based than time-based system. This can release people from the tyranny of the clock, as well as from stifling dronery, the control freak environment and corporate slavery of the average office.
Are Big Offices Dying Out?
So could this be the way the old big corporations with their old ”heavy iron” approach to office premises will go in future?
Right now the big corporates are still mostly organized in the old 1950s, 60s and 70s ways. Big open-plan or cubicled floors of office space in big buildings, managed by tiers of supervision, with staff working “nine to five”, putting in the necessary hours. The big office is the factory of the developed world.
There hasn’t yet been any broad shift to virtual working away from the big office amongst blue chip companies. The changes that have taken place are mostly in the small scale entrepreneurial sector. Particularly amongst online start-ups, who in any case base their business, or a large part of it, on the Internet.
Otherwise, if you want to work from home or out of the office and have more flexibility, chances are you’ll be required to “justify” it first. Not working in the office is still the exception.
The office serves as a means of control over the workforce
The big office is necessary for large corporations for as long as they remain structured as they are and continue to operate as they do.
The fact is that the big office gives employers an easy means of control over the work force. I think this is actually the primary reason many companies still continue to maintain these large office buildings. They want their workforce gathered together in one place, to keep control over them, make sure they do their “hours”, so they can own them.
Home = Free Time, Office = Work
It’s also a generational issue. For the older generation, work and free time are kept separate in different locations. And never the twain shall meet. Unless you’re in higher management, then you may be granted the privilege of working from home a few days a week. But for the rest of the commuting office army, it’s a firm no.
Most people then are still subjected to the tyranny of the big office and the office way of life. Coming into work at a specific time, jealous colleagues who take note of who takes time off and when, who comes in “late” or who manages to work from home and how often and who doesn’t.
The average offfice is still based on the idea of putting in a specified number of hours nine to five – regardless of whether those hours are actually productive or not. It’s the old factory environment continued in a different guise.
Big Office = Big Expense
I think the old style concept of the big expensive corporate office blocks, will eventually go the way of the old heavy iron industries. We haven’t got there yet. But the pressures are already working their way through.
Big downtown real estate office space is now extremely expensive. Companies have been moving to out-of-town “greenfield” office sites to keep office costs down. But this has also reached the point where everyone’s been doing it and it’s no longer such an advantage. Maintaining big office buildings in high-cost economy countries has become too expensive.
Globalization, the revolution in online technologies, which makes global communications practically free, plus increasing outsourcing trends, especially to so-called “Third World” locations… these are starting to have an impact. The big office is the next obvious item on the balance sheet where savings can be made.
I think a lot of ”office work” will outsource to the home and other mobile locations and will no longer be fixed in one place. But for the time being the office is not obsolete. It will take some time for the change to work it’s way through the biggest of the big corporations.
And I think the change will come about, not through any desire amongst employers to reform the corporate culture, but simply through the need to cut costs. Once the accountants turn their attentions to Next Big Item: Office Costs - that’s when we’ll see the changes come. And when it does…
The Quaint Old Office Ruins of Manhattan…
Who knows, the centre of Manhattan might one day end up as a collection of old ruins like the remains of Classical Athens.
Tourists will pick their way through the crumbling abandoned skyscrapers with wonder and amazement at the thought that companies used to pay massive rents for people to sit inside them at PCs all day long.
A strange way of organizing their work and doing business those corporations used to have back in the days of the early 21st century…
By the way, the article I mentioned by Dan Andrews, producer of the Tropical MBA Lifestyle Business Podcast is called “Offices Are So Old School” .
It’s at http://www.lifestylebusinesspodcast.com/advantages-to-ditching-your-office/
You can also listen to the Podcast on his site about this topic. Entertaining and well recommended.
Image courtesy of Digital Agent – Ken Yuel
Print This Post
Related posts:
Written by kevin
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Kev's Diary