What Is an Office For?

Offices are changing in response to Covid-19. But many of these shifts aren’t necessarily new, says Jennifer Magnolfi Astill, one of the leading researchers on the evolution of workspaces, and not all will stick. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the pandemic has accelerated the natural evolution of the office away from a productivity space to something else — both a learning space and a space to solve complex problems. So think about what’s happening like a cable subscription: “If we think of the office as a bundle of space applications the way cable TV is a bundle of channels, then the contents of the bundle are changing — and the pandemic is pushing that change farther and faster than it would have otherwise happened.” Magnolfi Astill, who largely focuses her work on tech offices that involve human-machine collaboration, has consulted on workspace with dozens of companies, from Google to PepsiCo to the BBC. HBR spoke with her recently to understand how the Covid-19 pandemic would affect the future of offices. The following conversation is edited for clarity. Jennifer Magnolfi Astill HBR: Your research into the evolution of workspaces suggests that the changes to work we are experiencing aren’t being caused by the pandemic. Magnolfi Astill: This shift has been under way for some time. What the current situation has done is shine a very bright light on the change and accelerate the process of adoption for companies outside the traditional tech world. In some industries, we’ve seen companies and individuals adopt almost 10 years of workspace progress — such as the use of digital collaboration tools and video as a default — in a few months, simply because they had no choice. Ten years? The shifts I observe in tech workspaces have about a decade time scale. That just seems to be the way it works. What exactly is the shift that you’ve been studying and we’re just now seeing? In the field of technology, we’ve observed three structural shifts since about 1998. A shift occurs when an ecosystem of companies actively competes for a sustained period of time to unlock the potential of an innovation in technology. This creates a market of supply and demand of products and services, but also of talent and workforce skill sets. The workspace inevitably responds to this, often through an innovation of its own. At a very high level: The first shift happened in the late ’90s. The startups of the time — today’s Silicon Valley incumbents — were competing to unlock the potential of a new innovation called the internet. Workspace shifted within a few years — in terms of both the physical design and the introduction of new digital work tools — to support workers engaged in building the internet as we know it today. Think of very simple things, like email allowing communication from your desk rather than in person. But also the growth of highly networked corporate campuses. The Big Idea Stay informed with emails about everything new we launch in this and other Big Idea projects. Sign Up for Updates The next big shift occurred as companies competed to unlock the potential of mobile technology — smartphones, cloud computing, and the resulting human mobility. This shift became obvious after the 2008 financial crisis, when not only technology startups but also a broader portion of the workforce were able to leverage mobile tools. The workspace response that emerged was coworking: Workspace leases were shorter and more affordable; spaces were more open and shared by communities of newly independent workers and startups. The network could be carried around in one’s pocket and laptop, so the use of workspace could be purchased as a temporary service. The shift we are in now started a decade later, around 2017 or 2018, and it’s centered on harnessing the potential of machine intelligence for business. Few knowledge workspaces, and even fewer manufacturing workspaces, will exist in the future not intent on solving complex problems through leveraging machine assistance, be it through predictive modeling for understanding consumer behavior, robotics, or many other forms of human-machine collaboration. Practically, what does that look like? Two functions are emerging as a result of the third shift. The pandemic has made this very clear in some ways, but this evolution is actually independent from it. First, organizations will need space for teams and leaders to make sense of complexity, distill a course of action, and make decisions together. And just as in our current context, they will rely on machines to help do this. Think of the daily briefings of governors during the pandemic. The public press conferences are points of synthesis; what they don’t show is the work done by teams of humans and machines that analyze large data sets to cast a view of the coronavirus and model possible scenarios and outcomes. Spaces for this type of work need to deliver simultaneous access to the big picture and specialized, machine learning–driven data. Think of war rooms in defense work. Or mission control rooms at NASA, or an operations center for weather monitoring. The other type of space will be for specialized learning. The ability to absorb and operationalize new knowledge to meet a changing context has been critical in surviving the pandemic. This type of change readiness in teams is native to young startups, but it is cultivated over time in a more experienced workforce and at scale through ongoing learning and reskilling. Both of these functions require physical space, and they will likely be essential for competing in this shift. I’ve seen this in edge cases already. What kind of edge cases? I study robotics teams. They often solve problems that they haven’t faced before, and by the very nature of their work, they do so by integrating machine assistance. While these teams can be very mobile and distributed, specific mission-critical and specialized-learning functions always happen with other team members — both humans and machines — and in a physical space. So the pandemic is accelerating this third shift to new types of workspaces? Yes, but there is an important point to make: It won’t happen all at once. As real estate executives and CIOs know, buildings operate on a different time scale than technology. This is just the nature of building physical structures. Office projects at a certain scale take a few years from design concept to occupancy by users. The speed of change in technology is obviously much faster. This is partly why I study startups and small edge cases. A startup doesn’t think about designing its space. It’s not a core need early on. It just builds a way to work and organically creates space to support its work. Later, when the startup starts to scale, it needs larger spaces that support its unique work patterns, and as those types of businesses and work styles mature, the workspace industry follows. However, it’s important to acknowledge that the people developing spaces in 2008 weren’t necessarily thinking about creating innovation in the office. It was an emergent response to an unmet need, and it took about four years for it to begin to formalize. That’s how coworking emerged, and eventually incubators and shared workspaces. Workspace evolution is not top down, it’s bottom up. When it comes from the users, it’s usually the kind that proves to have lasting value. When it comes to how the pandemic will affect offices, it seems that people have gone through a whole cycle of feelings about it. First, there was adoption of remote work and a sense that it was exciting and pointed to a new future. Then Zoom fatigue set in. Then people started going in different directions about whether or not they ever wanted to return to the office. A lot has changed, but what change will stick? From the workers’ perspective, this hasn’t been a linear transformation. It’s not just a change happening faster. It’s an emergency. This has to be called out. Thousands are literally working under duress. So, that being said, we ask what will stick and what’s important to take from this forced experiment. For work itself, the net out is that the sudden shift to remote work has gone better than expected by most accounts. These are early numbers in the life cycle of this pandemic, but data based on a recent survey of 50,000 workers suggests that 75% are able to focus effectively on team and individual activities in the current context. On the flip side, people are working more hours a day, blurring the boundary between work time and personal time, a predictable outcome in an emergency but unsustainable in normal times. Some effects of our work experience during the pandemic will remain. This event will mark a permanent change in our perception of workspace in terms of the four primary work modes of an office: focus, socialization, collaboration, and learning. Most of what’s been discussed, especially early on in the lockdown, is focus work. The collaboration aspect of work has been redefined, and companies outside of tech are learning very quickly how to do that. But lately we are hearing more about the socialization aspect of work. As time wears on, people are realizing that they miss things about their workspace that have little to do with production. You’ve talked in the past on the importance of that socialization aspect on things like innovation and expanding networks. “Collisions” between people and groups make for better, more creative output. And that’s what many have started to miss? Yes. It is harder to quantify than productivity output, but the pandemic has made the absence of socialization extremely clear to most workers. Whether it’s those casual conversations, serendipitous encounters, or drinks after work — these have real value to a company and impact its ability to innovate and solve problems. They also have real value to employee engagement and happiness. From my research and others’, we know that remote teams benefit from physical interaction by coming together at least once a year to solidify social bonds that then improve teamwork. We know that if people are more than 90 feet away, they are effectively not in the same space, so we can design a workspace to get those people to collide and interact more. We humans naturally absorb a great amount of information about our environment and each other, including nonverbal cues, when we are interacting in the physical world. This improves communication, trust, and performance with team members and allows us to establish and cultivate richer working relationships, increasing the value of human work altogether. I continue to believe that the pandemic is distilling for us the value of workspace. It’s given us a meaningful perspective on what we do and what we value in an office. Ultimately, that’s the big question: What is an office for? There are two parts to this question. One has to do with somewhat objective aspects of the evolution of work. The other is based on organizational culture and core values. Once you answer these, how you design the workspace will likely change. And productivity may not be the best application for an office? In fact, businesses might increase productivity by making less of it happen in an office? It’s possible. It depends on what drives productivity. Those who gathered qualitative and quantitative information during this time will be able to mine insights and model scenarios for how much and what type of work should happen in their workspaces and what would be better performed remotely. Specifically, large companies that occupy millions of square feet of space will want to optimize. Beyond cost considerations, many workers have now experienced newfound flexibility and autonomy in how they manage their work, something that’s usually only associated with startups. This aspect has been beneficial on the whole, so I believe it will represent a new baseline. Companies and employees have made the transition and will want to retain some of that flexibility. So the job an office does for workers is changing? Exactly. It has been for some time. Think of a workspace as a bundle. An offering. Like a conference, or a travel experience, or your cable TV package. The offering includes many things. At a conference you get keynotes, breakout sessions, networking parties, and so on. A travel bundle includes tours, hotels, and so forth. Cable includes channels. With bundles, we tend to purchase the entire thing but use only parts. And the parts we use tend to address specific needs, which change and evolve. So the office bundle includes, let’s call them “space applications”: individual focus work, meetings, working lunches, team collaboration, creative play space, operations support, etc. When a structural shift in work happens or, as in our context, a systemic disruption of work, our requirements of a workspace change. Basically, you need different channels. In other words, the pandemic has been a forcing function, making people look critically at their office bundle, like someone saying, “Why am I paying for those TV channels I never watch?” It has been like a magnifying glass. We are aware that this is a bundle, and that has made us question the need for some of what comes with it — like commuting, to cite an obvious one. We now know we can perform many work functions without an office, provided there’s a social contract that allows it. This is a point of no return. Even companies historically very skeptical of mobility, like banks, are surprised that they have performed at their own productivity standards given such a sudden and radical shift to a remote workforce. To use our analogy, this moment has given many organizations the ability to sit back and think, “Which components of the workspace bundle will we want to come back and which ones can we do without?” For example, individual focus work might not be a useful part of the office moving forward, because now that people are technically set up, they can perform better at home. At the same time, companies will still need physical workspaces for certain functions that require interaction in the real world. We’re still too deep in the anomalous moment to know which applications will remain and which will evolve away from the office. However, the key is that our sense of what’s possible has changed. This experience has given us significant new insights about things we value when it comes to our work and our time. This suggests to me that new ways of working together will emerge, at first in the form of innovation in digital work tools, and later in innovation in physical space. In tech workspaces, my research indicates that spaces designed for complex problem-solving and for specialized-learning functions are applications that will be amplified in the future office while others will be diminished. The exact mix will depend on company culture and specific needs. Companies may want to start altering their workspace, but there’s a problem: They’re in leases. The time frame of real estate is different. True, but as we said earlier, the pandemic has marked a point of no return. As our experience of work in recent months has shown us, the real work of envisioning our future workspaces starts from acknowledging that “workspace” is no longer just the physical office building but also the digital/virtual space where work happens. This means that future workspace offerings will come with some physical space applications and some digital space ones. If until recently real estate executives managed most aspects of workspace facilities, working during the pandemic has taught us that more expertise will be involved in envisioning future workspaces, from CTOs, CHROs, to internal communications, etc. And this will change how leases are done. In corporate real estate, we’ll start to see the implications of the acceleration caused by the pandemic in 12 to 18 months. Much will be revealed about our workspaces in this time. In the end, numbers don’t lie. In the long term, it simply won’t be feasible to have the sunk costs of large office portfolios operating at 10% to 30% capacity. There’s money to be saved, and space to be transformed. The Big Idea

What Is an Office For?

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