Perhaps I should have said upfront in Part 1, but it’s never too late: In this series I’m discussing the office after humanity has re-emerged from the global isolation ward this dratted pox has lowered on us all.
I am not discussing, and have no interest in, imagining how the office might function during this extended interregnum, or what it will look like with social distancing, fractional capacity, and all the rest of it. Plexiglass barriers, instant-read touchless thermometers, infantilizing and hectoring decals at 6’ intervals on the floor? Be my guest, but I’ll see you on the other side. (Yes, I laud the experts who have devoted their lives to knowing how to make all these things possible—we really need them to be in charge right now. But I’m not one of them.)
Let’s resume our survey of the explicit and tacit design choices made in offices, their cultural overtones, recipes for the mix between sheer, maximized worker-bee productivity and social/connective/team dynamics, and why people might want to “go to work” in an office if their job functions don’t actually demand it.
As I read some of the new literature on why we even have offices, one of the metaphors I found helpful as a spur to thought was to think of the office as a “bundle of space applications, the way cable TV is a bundle of channels.” And now some of those channels are changing and we have the lockdown/WFH effect kicking in to speed up those changes. (The quote is from Jennifer Magnolfi Astill, a leading researcher on workspaces.)
Some excerpts from the interview:
Magnolfi Astill: This [physicalàremote] 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.
She tracks three primary changes.
Starting in the 1990s, first Silicon Valley startups and then the rest of the world, discovered the business applications of the internet—starting with email and highly networked corporate environments. [Done that—Bruce.]
The second shift became obvious after the 2008 financial crisis: The shift to mobile technology, cloud computing, and smartphones. [Done that—Bruce.]
The third and current shift started a couple of years ago, and it’s focused on exploring the potential to apply machine intelligence to business problems. [This future, in the famous phrase, is already here but “unevenly distributed.” I suspect it’s the kind of evolution that will find lawyers, rather than lawyers finding AI. So you don’t have to learn to code just yet.—Bruce]
The good news is you have time to plan all this:
- Everyone isn’t rushing back to your current offices this week or next.
- Office leases tend to last a fairly long time and rare indeed would be the multi-office firm where they all expire even in the same year, much less at the same time.
- And we are all making this up as we go along—something to be celebrated, not fretted obsessively over.
One more thing: One size need not fit all.
By that I mean simply that physically present and virtual/remote lie on opposite ends of a spectrum; there is plenty of space in between for imaginative hybrid and mixed options.
Full disclosure, but this is old news to regular readers: I am a card-carrying devotee of major metropolitan areas: The more global the better. And at the same time I completely understand the celebratory, liberating adrenaline rush of realizing we don’t have to descend every day into the subway or exhaust everything NPR has to offer playing stop and go on the freeway.
On the other hand: Humans crave connectedness. Being away from colleagues for long times generates free-floating “FOMO” (fear of missing out). Strolling through a densely packed midtown or downtown, with attractive stores, architecture, and yes, people, is a lot of fun. Zoom is the sworn enemy of totally serendipitous encounters. So let’s ask if there isn’t a middle way?
Generalizations can be perilous, but they’re undeniably useful, so let me advance the reasonable hypotheses that:
- The more employees working virtually in number and days/week, the greater the challenges to instilling/maintaining/growing social cohesion. (For each of these, the obverse should be true, so “the more employees working on-premises in number and days/week,….)
- The more employees working virtually in number and days/week, the greater the access to widely dispersed geographic talent.
- The more employees working virtually in number and days/week, the greater the challenge (near impossibility?) of integrating new hires and recruits into the firm’s culture and “the way we do things around here.”
- The more employees working on-premises in number and days/week, the lower the savings on real estate, the more time spent commuting.
- The more employees working on-premises in number and days/week, the greater the odds of spontaneous, serendipitous chance encounters resulting in genuine creativity.
To bring all this in now for what I hope resembles an intentional landing, let’s switch gears to how to think about the office of the future. (This was informed by PwC’s “Creating the office of the future,” (July 2020).
First, redefine, for your firm, what role the office should serve. An “acid test” question here might be to ask, “What activity is so important/attractive that it will keep people coming in and showing up?” I suspect you may quickly find yourself discarding the (unspoken, previously unchallenged) assumption that the office is the default location for getting work done. Maybe the default is remote and WFH.
I imagine many of you will find that the functions the office serves—the activities that can really only be performed there and not remotely—center on team building, intense collaboration, and commitment (to decisions, strategies, tactics).
Second, and conversely, redefine what the WFH/remote guidelines should be. People (probably not too many in a law firm, perhaps IT specialists) who need to be physically present with critical in-office equipment or technology, are obviously not going to be WFH much or at all.
Given those two exercises, you should have a rough idea (a) what activities the office needs to be optimized for; and (b) how many people it will typically need to accommodate. This brings us to the third task.
In thinking about your emphasis on being intentional in how we plan to recover, I looked back to the ASE archives and found your Feb 27, 2014 post, “Where do you want your firm to be in 2020?”
I don’t suppose any of us would have wished 2020 to have the insults it has so far served up, but there were two things that struck me. Firstly, 6 years +/- seems a reasonable time frame to consider intentionally. Secondly, the planning process – at some point – needs to think through how resilience can be supported by the choices one makes.
Bruce, my microfirm and I (a grand way of saying my partner, my office manager, and me) faced the office question this year, two months after the pandemic closure, when our landlord gave us notice that it wanted our space for itself. (We had sublet from a law firm that doesn’t compete with us.) Not so eloquently as you, we identified the essential functions of our office as being:
1. A place to receive deliveries including mail, especially checks from client who don’t pay electronically, as well as invoices from vendors who don’t bill electronically.
2. A place at which we can be the registered agent for our business clients. (We serve this function for 60 or more, and the law requires us to have a physical location.)
3. A place to store stuff that’s important to the firm or to current projects where any of us can get to it, and to keep corporate minute books.
The other functions of our office are desirable — some are highly desirable — but not essential. These desirable but not essential functions are:
4. Meeting clients, particularly clients who want to go over maps, plans, and large documents with us.
5. Seeing one another; doing teambuilding; sharing ideas; bonding.
6. A comfortable place to sit, think, and work.
7. A central place at which to receive phone calls.
All of 4, 5, 6, and 7 have substitutes available: (4): meet at the client’s location or in a shared conference room; (5): Zoom, Goto Meeting, and when it reopens the local equivalent of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar; (6): the spare room at home plus $2000 of furniture and tech; and (7): offsite phone answering services or phones with autoforward. I continue to play with your comment a while back that the pandemic has made firms discover how little of their office space is actually used by people to do work.
Midrange Guy:
Fascinating reflections, partly because you’re living it–this is not a “test” or thought experiment for you.
What strikes me is how extremely limited the “core” office functions you identify (1,2,3) are. I have to wonder if a “WeWork” space (or its successor/equivalent, since I’m not at all confident that company will remain a going concern) wouldn’t serve your purposes, if they could accommodate you on (3).
So thanks! Keep me updated on how it goes.
Bruce, our answer to 5 is about the same as your answer to 7. In addition to the time that we schedule together in the office, we occasionally go to one or the other of the two social clubs downtown – the more distant one is only a 5-minute walk from our office – which are the local equivalent of the Princeton Club. (The younger of the clubhouses was built in 1913.) They are grand, quiet, and private. It is not a perfect substitute for idle time together in the office, but one club mixes a mean Manhattan and the other has salted almonds to die for.
Sorry – our answer to 5 is the same as your answer to 4, not 7.
Bruce, here’s what we ended up doing for office space. We stayed in the central core, in fact, in the same building. We increased our footprint by 30%, which allowed us to have 5 private offices instead of 3. (Lawyer Three joins our firm tomorrow.) We have a larger break room and our office manager now has a private office instead of a cubicle. We cut back in two areas: the file room and conference space. Maybe 1 of the last 100 files we’ve opened requires storing paper for more than a day or two. Instead of having a file room we put file cabinets along one wall of the open work area, cutting our file storage area from 100 SF (our portion of shared space) to 20 SF (the footprint of the cabinets). We’ve gone from sharing four conference rooms (two very large) to having one conference room that seats 8. Two of the offices are large enough to hold conferences of 4 to 6 comfortably and can serve as backup meeting spaces in the unlikely event we need them.
Put another way, we’ve gone from having 3 private offices in 1600 real SF to having 5 private offices in 2000 SF. Our rent is at or near market but we’ve cut our cost per office by 30%.
Interesting outcome; aside from the file shrinkage (we have 2 TB on G-drive ourselves and are all but paperless) not what I would have expected!
What were the key drivers?
We chose to stay downtown despite its cost and tax disadvantages (which are high) because it’s convenient for our people and has easy access by car, train, and bus. I thought about two high-end suburban office parks, both with ample free parking (downtown it’s $300/month here) and lower business taxes. I discarded them because everyone in the firm but me would have had to travel farther to get to work, and one of the parks has the bare minimum of public transit (8 or 9 buses/day, rush hour only). We had a strong preference for remaining in the same building because we have a long-term relationship with the landlord, both as a landlord and as a client. This is my fourth office in one of the landlord’s buildings. We did look at three other buildings in the central core. Two were not quite central enough; the third was a strong contender but the space was a little less convenient to partition for our desires.
I wanted to have enough room to add a fourth lawyer when we’re ready, and to have two more staff stations, one of which could also suit a drop-in or WFH part-time lawyer if we hire one.
As for price: not even the best of the real estate brokers here knows what “market rate” for downtown office space means right now. We had a five-year-old lease on our old space and all-in measured by $/RSF it was about 25% below the pre-pandemic market rate. I’m paying $1 or $2/RSF/year more for the new space, which is still well below the pre-pandemic market rate, and I’ve cut my rent cost per office and cost per desk substantially.
In summary: we cut out much of the public space and almost all of the file storage space. We’re devoting more of the space to the offices and workstations (think social distancing here) and making the office a more comfortable place to work. I had in mind your comment on a webinar a few months ago that if we took a hard look at how little of our office suites are actually used for people working, we’d be shocked. In our new office, more than 80% of the space — everything but the conference room and the kitchen — is for people to work in.
This is making more sense now thanks to your walking through the reasoning. Understand that I’m not for or against space per se, just wasted space. Hence my observation on the webinar, and it’s gratifying to know that at least one human being has taken it to heart.
This also had me laughing: “As for price: not even the best of the real estate brokers here knows what “market rate” for downtown office space means right now.”
When I have to be in midtown Manhattan it’s little exaggeration to say that you could roll bowling balls down the streets and sidewalks with next to zero risk of hitting anyone. Eerie and disorienting. Yet downtowns may yet stage a comeback; my (psychological) money is on it. Density is a good thing.
Fascinating, and thanks!