I was quite happy with my open-plan office pre-Covid. I enjoyed the conviviality of co-workers, I had my own designated neighbourhood, and I was lucky enough to have a pleasantly short commute. But as I adjusted to hybrid working, I realised I had been living a lie, conditioned to believe the open-plan office is better for everyone as opposed to being largely just better for companies as they allow for more people to fit into expensive real estate.
This week, former VP at Twitter, and now bestselling writer on workplace culture, Bruce Daisley joins us to discuss how our new reality has impacted upon our productivity. Listen now:
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[ Ep. 68 - Productivity Post-PandemicOpens in new window ]
Looking back on our pre-Covid workplace I realise that in a bid to accommodate collaboration and quiet, to solve for the average as it were, we had catered for neither. The open-plan office is neither a space for fruitful collaboration nor is it an environment that allows for quality quiet time.
This week on the Inside Marketing podcast I spoke to Bruce Daisley, best-selling author on workplace culture and former vice-president at Twitter as well as host of a podcast on workplace productivity and culture – Eat sleep work repeat. Working from home benefits the individual but is it actually good for businesses, for productivity? I was interested to hear Daisley’s views.
“No one has all the answers right now, we are going through a period of deconstructing what the office is all about. When we think about the office, we need to understand what Clayton Christensen refers to as ‘jobs to be done’.
You don’t buy a drill because you want to own a drill, you buy a drill because you need to make a hole in the wall, that’s the job to be done. Similarly, we don’t have offices because companies wanted to invest in commercial property, the job to be done is to create a productive workforce.
“One of the functions of the office was to facilitate a greater sense of team cohesion, it wasn’t something that was done in a very structured way before, there may have been instances where you didn’t see your team that much over the course of a few days due to meeting clashes but you may have gone for a coffee or a beer after work, or to a company event and that’s when you caught up with your team and built those connections.”
Daisley says that “we may be romanticising the highlights reel of the office as we knew it, but how much fun was the office two years ago really? There were plenty of days people were stuck at their desks all day trying to get emails done.”
The open-plan office is absurdly dysfunctional when trying to have a sensitive or private conversation or phone call or when you need to concentrate, and it’s extremely annoying when your neighbours aren’t synchronised to the same work cycle as you (they need quiet when you want a chat and vice versa). Daisley points to some research about the open-plan office.
“What I discovered about open-plan offices was mind blowing, we imagine them as these large, bright spaces where people connect, but what happens when people moved from confined spaces to open-plan spaces is that their dislike of their colleagues goes up, people end up hating their colleagues,” he said.
Covid has been proof that we can reimagine what workplaces and what working in teams means
The open-plan office doesn’t cater for the introverted worker either, the one who prefers to let thoughts percolate, to deliberate and reflect on challenges rather than think out loud or try to think amid surrounding loudness. And the unstructured nature of the open-plan office means that, without sufficient designated ringfenced team spaces, they are equally dysfunctional as spaces for collaboration, where teams can work together on specific projects.
I know from my own experience that sometimes you need a quiet space and, in a bid to maximise headcount per square foot, we sacrificed meeting room spaces. “The universal experience of going into meeting rooms was that there was always some stressed individual loitering outside gesturing and asking ‘have you got this booked’ because we couldn’t get certain things done at our desk and there wasn’t enough space in the building.”
Remote work
Covid has made us realise that a lot of work can be done remotely. “Before Covid, we considered that a lot of work was filled with non-negotiables. In a lot of instances pre-Covid, when employees requested remote working from their bosses, they may have been told it wasn’t possible, but we know it is not only possible, but better at certain times because a lot of organisations have seen that they have had two good years of business; they not only survived but succeeded,” he added.
You could argue that we had no choice, but businesses adapted, companies stopped thinking about being present in favour of being productive. “It removed us from the collective hypnosis that we were going through, that there were certain non-negotiables that we had to go along with that were just part of the job.”
He also points out the fact that “the people who love offices the most are the bosses”.
I have found it difficult to navigate as we return to a new way of working, co-ordinating team co-locations takes a bit more planning, but it’s vital. There is no point in having one-third of your team in the office on three separate days. Consider meeting-free days among your teams, or at least meeting light days. If your day is filled with back-to-back team calls, then that’s probably a good day to avoid the commute but try to co-ordinate your teams so most are not all on video calls when you come together. I’m also leaning towards the idea that we need a hybrid model of participation, there may be days that we need the office full to facilitate cross-team collaboration, not just facilitating intra-team building.
I asked Daisley where you draw the line between leaving the decision of working from the office to the discretion of the individual or whether it should be mandated if it is not happening naturally in the wild. “Try to have an open discussion, the one thing that good workplace cultures have is a sense that we are all in this together. If someone is making an individualistic choice of not coming in at all, then you need to explain why the network effect of bringing people together is important, maybe you need to have a clearer policy.
“One of the companies I worked with has a “Wednesday plus one” policy, everyone is in on Wednesday plus any other day at their discretion, but Wednesday is non-negotiable”.
Opportunity
Covid has been proof that we can reimagine what workplaces and what working in teams means and we must not waste this opportunity. We need to take this opportunity to build back better, to reimagine workplaces, to stop pushing the narrative that open-plan offices are better for everyone when in fact they are designed to fit more people into expensive real estate.
In the same way we are embracing hybrid working models, let’s build better hybrid spaces, spaces where we have sufficient rooms for teams to collaborate but at the same time adequate areas for quieter time.
There is a real danger that as we acclimatise to new office dynamics, the extroverts will all return and the introverts will all work remotely.
The “extrovert’s trap” is something all businesses need to be conscious of, particularly when consulting employees about workplace preferences. We have a genuine opportunity to build a better workplace of the future, to leave behind some of the bad habits from pre-Covid and embrace some of the new behaviours.
It’s also worth remembering that this is uncharted waters, despite a recent spike in companies and services that offer costly consulting on hybrid workplaces. The reality is everyone is figuring this out.
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Dave Winterlich is chief strategy officer at Dentsu Ireland
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