Abstract
In a Commentary published in 2017, I urged researchers to consider place both as a setting and an agent fostering collaborative practices in open-plan corporate offices (Andrews, 2017). This Commentary updates that article. The 2020 pandemic shuttered offices and sent individuals home, where they are gaining new habits and personal control in working remotely. To lure reluctant workers back to the office, companies are reimagining and redesigning their workplaces—a biophilic perspective helps—as homey studios or collaboration centers which an individual might choose to come to for the in-person gatherings unavailable at home. Hybrid strategies, negotiated with empathy between employees and employers, are emerging to manage work life and individual well-being across these principal workplaces.
In a 2017 commentary, I urged readers of IJBC to look at place as a major agent in workplace communication, a role for place which had been largely overlooked in our field although it was increasingly the focus of commercial and academic research otherwise. The article focused on the belief held by many corporate leaders, and the architects and designers who consulted with them, that the physical environment of the workplace itself could foster the interdisciplinary collaboration they linked to organizational well-being and innovation. An attractive physical presence would also enhance the company’s brand in the market as it recruited and retained highly talented employees. I then went on to review some of that research, especially the pros and cons of open plan offices as sites for collaborative communication activities.
The Agency of Place
The research included, for example, an extensive and productive empirical study that asked directly: “Is there a case for space as a tool to produce a culture of innovation in our workplace” (Miller et al., 2014, p. xvi)? The researchers’ conclusion was yes. But they argued that a new culture will form only if the “invisible bonds of the old habits are disrupted and an environment that supports desired new behaviors and values erected” (italics added, p. xvi). Miller et al. (2014) identified “space” as the “catalyst to disrupt and transform culture.” Reconfiguring the physical workplace would help usher in the desired change in culture. The space they studied, and I studied, was the corporate or institutional office common at the time.
Today, however, the space for studying the relationship between work activity and the physical environment has expanded. For openers, it has been fundamentally disrupted by the continuing evolution of mobile information and communication technology (ICT), which has enabled “a reinvention of where, how and when work happens (Laing & Bacevice, 2013, p. 39). The manager of an international bank argues, “Working together, talking to each other, working in a more agile way. People are probably not so fixed any more in their working environment. They work much more in projects” (Bray, 2019, p. B6). Those projects attract diverse and changing networks of collaborators who contribute from multiple sites, including homes, coffee shops, airports, and trains, to solve problems across organizations and disciplines around the globe. ICT and changes in work practices led, for example, to an early 21st Century disruption in office real estate called a coworking enterprise (Andrews, 2021). It paralleled such other ventures emerging from the sharing economy as Airbnb (shared rooms and whole homes, disrupting the hospitality industry) and Uber (shared rides disrupting the taxi and rental car industry). Generally credited as originating in San Francisco in 2005, these shared commercial spaces offer advanced technology with office-like furnishings available to individuals for short- or longer-term rental. They are also social settings that help establish a community sense and opportunities for networking among the independent creative professionals who were the first target market.
The pandemic that began in 2020 significantly accelerated earlier disruptions in the office and introduced new concerns about the individual well-being of workers and the contribution of companies to national social health. It’s premature—and probably wrong- to declare the end of the company office. But wherever work happens, it’s increasingly clear that communication activities will need to lead and help companies adapt to this new environment. The following is a rough sketch of a highly fragmented, changing workplace scene derived mainly, but not exclusively, from consultancy reports and articles in the business-oriented press. The discussion begins by briefly reviewing where the 2017 commentary left off, with questions about communication in the open plan settings of company offices. The discussion then turns to the evolution of the two major spaces of work today: the office at home and the company office, reimagined and redesigned to support a hybrid concept of work life. It’s a setting for communication rich with possibilities for investigation by researchers, practitioners, and teachers of business and professional communication.
Home Offices
The pandemic underscored a perhaps ironic reversal in the meaning of the term home office. For decades, it has referred mainly to the building or campus of buildings which serves as the headquarters for a corporation. Co-located with other offices in a hub city or, as in the 1960s, in a suburban setting with interconnected buildings, parking, and landscaping, the office consolidates a large number of employees in one place. The proximity of employees to one another was thought to foster relationships, establish a corporate culture, and facilitate orientation of new employees as well as supervision and management of the work overall. In the US during the1960s and 70s, leading international architects and their corporate clients produced such highly polished and publicized home offices as those for Connecticut General life insurance, John Deere, and IBM. For employees, a designated workspace within the building provides a sense of identity and belonging, physical reinforcement of a work routine, and a place to keep one’s stuff. In the 20th Century, the home offices of corporations mainly offered, in Laing and Bacevice’s (2013) terms, “rationally designed spaces that reinforce bureaucracy, specialization of skills and hierarchical knowledge flow” (p. 39). They also helped establish the company’s brand in the minds of employees as well as customers.
As the dimensions of work shifted, however, the corporate home office, like the office scene described in my 2017 article, morphed into a place that could instead “stimulate improvised routines, creative reinterpretation of tasks and multidirectional knowledge flow (Laing & Bacevice, 2013, p. 39). The open plan, in its many variants, aimed to do just that. But at the same time some companies began to exploit the plan’s design to reduce their physical footprint and thus reduce real estate costs while also increasing the number of desks in a given space. The plan devolved into a workplace that many employees found stressful in a negative way, distracting, and unhealthy (e.g., Hobsbawn, 2021; Kaufmann-Buhler, 2021; Saval, 2014).
The Office at Home
Then came the pandemic. Corporations closed their offices entirely and sent their employees home to manage their work virtually as best they could. Such workplace software as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Slack eased what was otherwise an abrupt transition. To return to the scene I depicted in 2017, I took the demographic of workers mostly for granted as a function of their working together in a company office. I didn’t follow them home. Research on workplace communication today requires attention to the multiple places of office work and the new management strategies needed to foster collaboration across these settings. For convenience, I call them the office at home (as opposed to the home office), which might include a multiplicity of other home bases employees may choose, and the company office. It also requires acknowledgement of the disparity and inequality that often exists in the demographic profiles of those who benefit from remote work and those who do not, dependent in large part on an employee’s professional role or status within the company and on their individual circumstances.
Working Remotely
Many employees—and, increasing, managers and executives—are happy to work remotely (e.g., Bindley, 2021). The most frequently cited benefit is freedom from an often lengthy and stressful commute. Individuals with flexibility in their work can also live where they want, choosing places that offer a desired way of living, warmer weather if wanted, lower taxes, less traffic, cheaper housing, and more access to nature and recreational pursuits than they might have otherwise. The head of a consulting group that recruits businesses to Arizona calls this a “flight to lifestyle” (J. Mitchell, 2022, p. A3). At a national level, such mobility has helped to spread talent away from expensive coastal cities in the US to smaller cities in the country’s midsection, where industries may have shut down and population declined. The influx of professionals, many young and tech savvy, has often led to greater prosperity in those regions. For companies and entrepreneurial endeavors, remote work—sometimes exclusively, with remote-first enterprises—provides access to talent world-wide. A software company’s marketing head said his company’s flexible work rules are a major recruiting tool, his “access to top talent has gone through the roof” when he tells them they can work from anywhere (Bindley, 2022b, p. B6). A 2022 poll showed that two-thirds of those who worked remotely during the pandemic don’t want to return to the office; in another survey of 18 to 24-year-olds, 71% said they would consider looking for another job if forced to return to the office full-time (Cooper, 2022, p. SR10).
I recently spoke again with Kevin Pouche, a partner in a Boston business data security firm, about his firm’s experiences with remote work. In 2014, Pouche was the subject of my workplace communication research as his firm planned the design of a new office (Andrews, 2016). The log he kept then of his daily communication activities for several weeks showed that he spent most of his time in the office talking face-to-face with colleagues from his firm as well as visitors from partner technology firms. Except for sales representatives who worked remotely with clients, his colleagues were in the office every day. Their growing number was the motivation for a new office, especially since the conference room, site of both frequently occurring routine meetings and those addressing special matters, couldn’t hold everyone. For that reason, the redesign included a “collaboration room” near the entrance and unassigned workstations. The outside sales reps came into the office once or twice per week, with a requirement to be there every Tuesday.
When we spoke in 2022, the firm had 34 employees (up from 17 in 2014) and was hiring, including a newly hired manager of operations based in Orlando and working remotely. After the pandemic, most of the other employees, along with the representatives from technology firms, were working remotely as well. Productivity hadn’t slipped, in fact, the firm was doing especially well financially. Pouche and a business partner spent 4 days a week in the redesigned-but-now-too large office, but they were often there alone and were debating whether they needed to keep paying for a physical office, and, if so, its size and location.
Given this environment favoring remote work, software developers continue to create applications for managing, communicating, and sharing documents that mimic or compensate for in-person collaboration (Bindley, 2021, 2022a; Spataro, 2022). Slack has advertised itself as “where work happens,” calling cloud computing the new workplace. Consultants speak fondly of the nowhere office or the everywhere office with individuals connected only virtually (Hobsbawn, 2021) . Zoom and other video conferencing platforms boast that they improve diversity on teams by expanding access for and creating a network of people world-wide, thus reducing friction between communities. Video conferencing, they say, also encourages the participation of individuals, including minorities and women, who have been shown to speak up more than during in-person meetings. One survey found that 62% of participants felt more valued and inclusive because everyone was in the same virtual room (Spataro, 2022). Such video enhancements as Microsoft’s “together mode” in Teams incorporate artificial intelligence to “digitally place participants in a shared background,” reducing background distractions and allowing participants to see non-verbal cues in ways that make conversations “feel more natural” (Spataro, 2022). A feature in Teams also helps managers check in with their teams, gauging their emotional well-being through “suggested, customizable check-in questions.” Notification settings and other features enable team members to negotiate their own collaborative activities. Perhaps ironically, norms and tools for remote work seem to emphasize “over-communicating,” including written communication to cut down on the misunderstandings, frequency, and length of video meetings through summaries and pre-reads (Bindley, 2021).
But challenges to remote work remain. Long periods at a screen are well known to cause unwanted stress and fatigue, especially in video meetings. In addition, not everyone has an alternative place to work. In one study, only 35% of respondents had a dedicated home office (Spataro, 2022). Those in small houses or apartments may also have to share space with roommates or family members similarly working from home. During the early stages, such other optional workplaces as coffee shops, libraries, and coworking sites were also closed. When day-care centers and schools closed, child care became an added activity to be accommodated at home, especially by women. A home environment can be filled with distractions and lack the connectivity and suitable furnishing for long-term work at a computer that are available in a company office. A physical office, even a cubicle, can provide these, along with a sense of identity and some border between work and home. Remote work can be isolating, with individuals lacking the informal connections with their colleagues that punctuate a day at the office. More broadly, there’s the FOMO factor: fear of missing out in general, especially as offices reopen and some workers are on-site.
Enhancing Personal Agency
Despite these real challenges, during the years of the pandemic working from home has provided a welcome feeling of personal choice and control. This enhanced agency, along with higher expectations about their working conditions, has become a significant factor in the current resistance of knowledge workers to return to a company office now that the health threats are being addressed. Women, for example, whose request for flexibility in their work schedule before the pandemic may have been denied by managers who required their daily presence in the office, often found increased child care less a burden than an opportunity. Individuals have developed new habits in determining “breathable, workable chunks of time,” and type of time, to be spent working and in choosing the place for spending that time (Hobsbawn, 2021, p. 24).
Control over their work time enabled what Microsoft, for example, has called a “triple peak” day (Microsoft Worklab, 2022). Traditionally, knowledge workers have two productivity peaks in their workday: before lunch and after lunch. But when the pandemic sent so many people into work-from-home mode, a third peak emerged for some in the hours before bedtime. The evening hours can compensate for mornings spent in recreational activities or afternoon and dinner time spent with children. In general, Teams chats increased between 8 to 9 am and 6 to 8 pm more than at any other times, with a big spike as well on Saturday and Sunday (Spataro, 2022).
In being at home, whatever their definition of “home,” workers could also shape, at least to some degree, the physical environment for their work to match their creative and aesthetic needs as well as enhance their well-being and efficiency. The home-of-choice can provide a comfortable, multisensory work environment which promotes both productivity and relaxation, as needed, with access to nature and the incentive to move around away from computer screens.
The Company Office Reimagined
The open plan office I described in 2017 represented a stage in a long series of efforts to improve the design of offices (e.g., Saval, 2014). In her research on the open plan, Kaufmann-Buhler (2021) productively traces the “intertwining” of the history of office design with the history of management. A shift from hierarchical industrial systems to knowledge work in the 1960s led to more dynamic, flatter organizations, which were more dependent on worker interaction and communication and less on surveillance by managers. The open plan was designed to enable this interaction. As opposed to a rigid hierarchy expressed through spatial markers of status (like corner offices for executives), the plan aimed to provide more autonomy for workers in their work. It recognized their use of time and space as “thinkers” rather than task-oriented paper pushers. Light-weight furnishings were designed for flexibility as users adapted them to different settings accommodating different kinds of work. The open plan was designed to support the Theory Y management style current at the time, that is, coaxing or nudging employees rather than requiring them (Theory X), the carrot rather than the stick. But it devolved into a setting that knowledge workers often found unproductive and stressful.
Adjusting the Open Plan
Recent research has helped uncover strategies for overcoming some common problems in the plan. At a simple level, for example, one study traced satisfaction with open plan offices to where someone was sitting (H. Mitchell, 2022, p. R1). People rated their productivity, teamwork, and team bonding more favorably when they had “visual control over what was going on in the room,” that is, when a relatively low number of desks appeared in their line of vision. They lacked such control when they faced many desks or had many desks out of their sight behind them. Row on row of desks facing the same way also make it hard to talk without disturbing others. Breaking up the space with movable dividers, thus lowering the number of desks in view, enhances satisfaction and communication.
Underlying the design of open plan offices was the assumption, as I assumed in my 2017 article, that employees would come to work there every day and accomplish most of their work on site. A “pivot” away from the plan early in the pandemic was the concept of a “dynamic workplace,” accommodating remote workers who rotate in and out of the office mostly for collaboration and socialization on a flexible schedule. In one model, called “community” or “neighborhood” flex working, whole teams sit together when in the office “in one area, though its location, size, and boundaries could change from day to day” (Mims, 2020).
Starting With a Clean Slate
Taking the idea of a dynamic office even further, the chief people officer at Dropbox, for example, argued: “We asked ourselves if we had the opportunity to start with a clean slate, how would we redesign our work life.” (italics added, Cutter, 2021, p. R6). A principal concern is how to “retain and excite the workforce and win the battle for talent” (Plant, 2022, p. R6). Post-pandemic company offices are being reimagined and redesigned as part of an evolving hybrid strategy where more focused work is done mostly at home. Some are configured as a decentralized network of several “micro-offices” located to serve “pods” of employees who are based relatively near one another. The approach offers an office setting while reducing employee commutes (Bindley, 2021; Mims, 2020; Plant, 2022). The goal is to lure them back.
Reimaging the company office in terms of work life requires a fundamentally holistic perspective. One current trend is biophilic design, which has been shown to reduce stress and improve cognitive performance (e.g., Gloede, 2015; Margolies, 2022; H. Mitchell, 2022). Biophilic design connects building occupants more closely with nature “through views, plants, natural materials, daylight, fresh air and even the sounds of nature” (H. Mitchell, 2022, p. R1). To lure workers back to the office, designers are incorporating biophilic thinking into what one firm calls a resimercial strategy that references the multisensory home environment (indoors and outdoors) to enhance the physical environment of the office (MHD, 2022, p. 89). A simple example: for years, noise, particularly other people talking, has been a major complaint among individuals working in open plan offices. To counter the noise, workers tended to plug in their ear buds and communicate through emails and instant messages, negating a central purpose of the plan, which is to foster spontaneous, chance encounters. Creating an atmosphere more like home, “the domestication of the office,” designers introduce settings with floor lamps, area rugs and other fabrics to tamp down sounds and enhance calm. In these areas, employees are invited into informal conversations that engage others in various divisions of the company and help build the weak ties among diverse individuals thought essential to creative thinking.
Biophilic design isn’t new. In fact, an early version of the open plan—now buried— was the European concept of Burolandschaft, that is, office landscape, which featured clusters (not rows) of desks in settings separated by movable dividers and enhanced with abundant greenery. This sometimes random-appearing arrangement echoed patterns in nature. It contrasted with the rectilinear placement of cubicles and desks to which the plan descended.
Natural patterns tend to enhance the perception of space (Gloede, 2015). In one pilot test with office workers, researchers created three settings at different levels of biophilic intervention. They then divided worker participants into four groups—one baseline group, and three groups, each in one of the three settings. Workers in all groups wore wrist stress sensors for 8 weeks and completed surveys to test the effect of these interventions: One group was exposed visually to indoor plants and digital projections of nature; a second group enjoyed the gentle sounds of nature, such as wind, water and birdsong; a third group had both visual and auditory elements; and the fourth baseline group had no visual or auditory interventions (H. Mitchell, 2022, p. R1).
Each group of workers in the biophilic settings improved in their cognitive performance over those in the baseline group. Stress levels were lowest in the multisensory (third) group.
These model settings suggest a range of design options. Some interventions are relatively inexpensive and simple, such as container plants (if not merely arranged in a grid), photographs of mountains or forests, and posters that mimic windows with views. Some are more expensive. These include natural wood flooring and furnishing made at least partially of wood and natural fabrics; “living walls” of plant materials that also absorb sound; wide access to daylight, either direct or filtered; and terraces, decks, and other outdoor areas with furnishing that support both spontaneous and planned face-to-face collaborative activities. Some interventions mimic nature in ways that are technologically complex, such as digital projections of nature, soundscapes, programmable LED lighting to simulate daylight, and biophilic mechanical systems that can “deliver fresh air and thermal comfort more naturally than. . .forced air systems” (H. Mitchell, 2022, p.R1). The toxic effects on worker health caused by sealed office buildings were a concern even before the pandemic, which focused attention on those concerns. At home, workers are likely to have windows they can control to provide access to fresh air and ever-changing daylight. They can adjust the temperature during the day to match their personal level of comfort. In addition, as needed, they can move about, inside and out, to refresh themselves and take a break. These are features to be emulated in the redesign of offices.
Starting with a clean slate requires thinking less about furnishings and more about “the space they occupy” (Brownell, 2015). Architect and materials researcher Blaine Brownell notes, “the flexible, column-free work environments ushered in during the 20th century were intentionally generic” (Brownell, 2015). Solving the problem of placing workers within these environments was often a matter of designing the right office furnishings. But Brownell advocates for office environments that provide “memorable architecture” rather than a “meaningless container” of furniture. One example is the biophilic architectural approach shown by the office of a Boston financial firm whose 10,000-square-foot space is “enveloped in undulating waves of digitally milled plywood that shape both the interior architecture and the furniture.” Natural patterns of arrangement, abundant and ever-changing natural light, and sustainably forested spruce laminated plywood create a “corporeality of place” in the office. Brownell concludes: “Office design should not focus on making a better cubicle but rather on ensuring that the workplace is an environment that employees would choose freely above others—a place in which they are inspired to do their best work” (Brownell, 2015).
Collaboration Centers
Bringing employees together in person in a company office has been an unquestioned and common practice for decades. Bringing employees back to a physical workplace after an extended time of remote work is, as we’ve seen, a new game. A Facebook spokesperson argues, “The company still believes in the kind of collaboration, communication and spontaneous connection that can only happen in offices” (Mims, 2020, p. B4) When reimagined as a component within a hybrid concept of work life, the office aims to become a place that employees “would choose freely above others.”
Herman Miller (2022), the furniture design manufacturer and office consultancy, has been a major force in what they see as the evolution of the office from a “single space for work to a network of spaces.” They call the post-pandemic office an “on-demand amenity” that facilitates the “immersive on-site collaboration” that “cultivates learning, preserves culture, and expresses the organization’s brand” (p. 2). Channeling the workspaces of creative professionals, for example, Dropbox calls its now-redesigned office “studios” (Bindley, 2022a). Another company’s offices are their “collaboration centers” (Cutter, 2021). Many redesigns resemble the makerspaces becoming more common for collaborative, interdisciplinary problem solving in academe (Andrews & Roberts, 2017).
In encouraging collaboration, workspaces called studios and collaboration centers resist the design of the typical office conference room, a rectilinear box with a central table surrounded by chairs and a seating arrangement that reinforces an organizational hierarchy. Redesigned, a conference area, not necessarily a room, shifts its shape as people move themselves and its furnishings around, often to areas with natural light, sometimes outdoors, and where they can exert control over their surroundings. New spaces are more home-like to “help employees transition back to the office. . .after....working from their sofas and dining tables” (Margolies, 2022, p. B7). The more laid-back look aims to make people feel comfortable and encourage participation by those who might be intimidated by a traditional setting. While companies encourage employees to come to the office in person, they also recognize that remote participants will sometimes need to join a conference at the office. Advances in technology, including special cameras and microphones, enable in-person and remote participants to share the conversation and work on documents on relatively equal footing.
A Space for Two Places
It’s fair to say that the concept of a corporate workplace has been fundamentally disrupted by the pandemic. Prior to spring 2020, balancing one’s work and home life largely meant finding ways to separate the two. Today, it often means integrating the two in a hybrid style of work. A simple shift in prepositions suggests the change. Before spring 2020, we tended to speak about working at home, a relatively rare event; the more common term now is working from home (WFH), suggesting its virtual integration with work in the office. A hybrid style has implications for both when one works and where one works—when, and presents significant challenges as employees and employers negotiate and manage their way to pursue the company’s goals.
Hybrid Work: Time
For many knowledge workers, the traditional 9:00 to 5:00, 5-days-a-week office clock has been reset permanently. Cracks appeared in that tradition earlier than 2020, of course. The traditional structure derived from the more rigid, hierarchical, task-oriented mindset encapsulated in the corporate home offices of the 20th Century and, before that, from industrial production models. Even after mobile ICT and other factors changed the concept of work and work practices, what remained was a general sense that, most of the time, most knowledge workers would be in the company office 5 days of week. Exceptions might be visiting clients or customers or other sites of the company’s interest or, with flextime options, working at home. The pandemic closed offices long enough for a core of employees to develop new habits and new agency in determining when they would do company work. This meant not just during the week, but at other times when it benefitted them, overriding the traditional separation between the work week and the weekend as well. Under these conditions, returning to life as it was at the office looked even less tolerable.
Resetting the office clock has engaged individuals and managers in taking new perspectives towards each other, listening to each other with empathy, building mutual trust, and collaborating on scheduling time, if any, in the office. Project teams need to negotiate when to work independently (preserving long stretches of time for focused work, avoiding meetings and conversations); when to work together, and where, if not virtually; how to stay in touch; and how to respond to emergencies (Samuel, 2022). Negotiating work time also implies, significantly, negotiating time at home with family members and anyone else who shares a home base. These negotiations, too, require empathy and an understanding of competing claims on a person’s responsibility for child care; occupancy of a shared, dedicated space and technology at home for work; cooking, cleaning, or other duties. On a positive note: a recent survey found that “the unique circumstance of working and learning from home as a family has created more empathy between teammates and shifted perceptions held by both managers and employees that work can be done remotely” (Spataro, 2022).
Hybrid Work: Place
Time is one dimension of expectations in a hybrid approach to managing work: coordinating an individual’s preferences on when to work with the needs and preferences of their work team, their company, and those also at home. The other is place, and when to work where. While workers may come to the office for relief from distractions at home and for appropriate furnishings, most come for what home (except for family or roommates) doesn’t have: “other humans” (Badger, 2022, p. BU 7). As we’ve seen, the post-pandemic office is mainly designed to support conversations and the in-person collaborative activities teams need to recharge their energy and reconfirm or adjust their project approach.
That said, in an open letter opposing new rules for in-person work, Apple employees in April 2022 argued, “Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do” (Bindley, 2022b). The letter continues, “Stop trying to control how often you can see us in the office.....there is no one-size-fits-all solution, let us decide how we work best, and let us do the best work of our lives” (Goldberg, 2022a). As the return to the office rolls out, companies are frequently adjusting their expectations about how many (if any) days a week, and on which days, they will require employees to be present. Day-in-the-office norms may center on making sure a critical mass of workers is in the office at the same time to reaffirm their sense of belonging as participants in the company culture. A hybrid work style can also incorporate months of remote work, not just days of the week. In a bow to the integration of work and vacation, several large US companies, for example, offer workers the opportunity to work from anywhere for a period of weeks, up to 8 weeks in some cases (Bindley, 2022c). Return-to-the-office negotiations are often difficult and ongoing: some companies remain remote-first, some continue negotiations, while others (currently, e.g., Tesla) require everyone to be in the office every workday.
The Office Repurposed
Even before the pandemic, the office as a building type had been challenged by changes in technology, knowledge work practices, and the corporate real estate market. Mobile technology in particular required less floor space and desk space, less “technological clutter”—fewer bulky grey boxes and computer rooms, no lengthy cables (Harriss & Winstanley, 2005, p. 29). It also reduced concern about glare from windows. As health conditions improved, and with fewer workers coming to the office each day, companies began to need less space and to abandon older, larger buildings (Putzier, 2022).
The demise of the office as building type was featured somewhat nostalgically in a Sunday New York Times centerfold of photographs illustrating the “lonely last days in a suburban office park” (Badger, 2022) Focused on the mostly vacant former home office of a large chemical company built in 1962 on a secluded site in New Jersey, the photographs depicted, among other scenes, a few cars islanded in a large parking lot; empty seats in a 600-seat auditorium; over a dozen office chairs on wheels clustered randomly in the corner of a windowless room; and paper that had been jammed in a printer since 2018. A lone fox roamed the building’s landscape in one photo, but none included a human. These suburban offices, the author argues, “gave employers more control over workers. There were few competitors nearby to poach them, no transit delays making them late, no retail that might stretch lunch hours too long” (Badger, 2022, p. 7).
What many employees considered failures in office culture even before the pandemic, along with the aging of the buildings themselves and their technological affordances, are causing abandonment, demolition, or a vast repurposing of 20th Century offices. In 2022, the 55-year-old suburban Chicago headquarters of Allstate, for example, where most workers went to the office every day, had been sold and was being redeveloped into a warehouse complex. At the time, seventy-percent of the company’s employees were working remotely, and 24% in a hybrid arrangement (Badger, 2022; Cutter & Putzier, 2021). Other former office buildings are becoming residences, especially in cities, schools, lab spaces, offices for medical practices, or mixed-use environments that include residences, shops, restaurants, and, perhaps ironically, coworking spaces (Cutter & Putzier, 2021).
Office Life Renewed
The nostalgic tone of the Times centerfold may reflect, in part, the long history during which the primary place for business, and business communication, has been the office. Noonan (2022) a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, for example, argues that the office has been “where America happened each day. . . . the primary location of daily integration.... the coming together of all ages, religions, ethnicities and political tendencies, all colors, classes and conditions.” The office was where “you learn to negotiate relationships with people very different from you, where you discover what people with different experiences of life really think” (p. A13). The end of the office, predicted by advocates for remote-first work, would, she argues, contribute to further polarization and self-segregation in America, leaving remote workers to burrow into their self-selected groups echoing “group-driven information and facts” (p. A13).
A consultant and former executive at Goldman Sachs agrees about the importance of offices. She sees young professionals in particular as disadvantaged by remote work, hoping they won’t “underestimate the value of actually being in a room with co-workers: the shared experience, the serendipity of talking to people not directly related to what you do; the exposure to a diversity of ideas and perspectives; the chance to look up and say ‘I never thought about that.’” (Cooper, 2022, p. 10.)
Such thinking about the role of the office, of course, ushered in the open plan. As Kaufmann-Buhler (2021) and Mims (2020) assert, the plan often reappears in management thinking. Today, the office is being reimagined as a place to be integrated with an individual’s home base in a hybrid strategy of work life aimed at creating a welcoming, inclusive company culture that also contributes more broadly to a nation’s social health. “The office that we once knew, the corporate office, is probably dead,” argues the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum near Detroit, about modern office design. “But taking its place is going to be the domestic version of that office” (Berk, 2022, p. 9). That version is a “more homey, collaborative and modern office [that] will give workers a reason to come in” (Putzier, 2022). Managing in this new environment, as we have seen, benefits from thinking about the “reciprocity” between “home in the office and the office at home” (Berk, 2022, p. 9). The growing strength of hybrid work is demonstrated, for example, by a recently reported 304% rise in jobs listed on LinkedIn that use the term (Goldberg, 2022b).
As with previous shifts in management styles, post-pandemic organizations are creating new leadership positions to support the goals of a hybrid approach. A company that develops collaborative software, for example, which went fully remote in 2020, developed the position of “vice president of team anywhere.” She argues that “our sense of place has been permanently disrupted” (Bindley, 2022a). To accommodate a new model of asynchronous teamwork which is “experience focused” (as opposed to “productivity focused”), her company provides an office, a “sunny event space, soft seating, chef’s kitchen, and while boards on rollers,” available for remote teams to meet in person as desired (Goldberg, 2022b). The position of “chief heart officer” at a media agency recognizes the need to focus on matters of mental health among workers. The “head of dynamic work” at a cybersecurity company explicitly addresses the challenges of working from home, a situation sometimes simply taken for granted in the hybrid work equation. The company has a store, for example, that offers “office grade” furniture. Similarly, the position of “vice president for flexible work” at a realtor acknowledges that work from home doesn’t just happen but needs to be “resourced” by the company. Other companies, too, appoint leaders whose portfolio, like that of the facilities manager of a physical building, includes the maintenance of a remote virtual workplace environment (Goldberg, 2022b).
“The only thing we can say with certainty about office life is that it has changed more for good in the last year than it has in the last hundred” asserts Julia Hobsbawn, head of the Workshift Commission at Demos, an independent educational charity in the UK that champions “people, ideas, and democracy” (Hobsbawn, 2021, p. 7). She points to shifts not only in physical work practices but also in emotional ones, what the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) calls “The empathy economy”: This new hybrid space where ‘the office’ is, will be multi-site, never 9 to 5 and flexible in its working patterns. Our working identities, rather like the shifts happening within wider culture around gender and sex, are going to become infinitely more varied and more personalized (p. 8).
Gains in personal agency, new expectations about the quality of one’s work life, and changes in management style toward more flexible and empathetic employee practices post-pandemic may also expand opportunities for individuals to reimagine their entire career trajectory. More than deciding about days-in as opposed to days-out of the office, individuals may take “life-stage breaks. . .instead of working full-time to an employer’s agenda and then stopping work abruptly and forever at an arbitrary retirement age” (Harriss, & Winstanley, 2005, p. 29).
The company office described in my 2017 article differs in many ways from the office described here. The fundamental difference is its being reimagined and redesigned as one of two places for knowledge work. Responding to changes in mobile technology and accelerated by the shuttering of offices during the 2020 pandemic, the office at home has become an important second workplace—as the large corporate home office fades out. The names of these post-pandemic offices (like “studios”) and the titles of positions in the post-pandemic organization (like “chief heart officer”) aim to reflect what employees and companies have learned about each other during the pandemic. The “chief people, policy, and purpose officer” at large networking company, for example, says that it will “continue to be acceptable for employees to talk about their mental health and the state of their personal lives at work—and to expect support from their bosses when they do” (Bindley, 2022a).
This article describes what many consider a new, more positive, humane, and sustainable normal represented by a hybrid strategy of work life carried out in reimagined company offices and at home. It’s a compelling picture. The possibility exists, however, that the description mostly represents new rhetoric about work life rather than a new workplace reality (e.g., Kaufmann-Buhler, 2021). Investigating this potential gap between rhetoric and reality, while looking more broadly at the implications for communication in this new hybrid environment, offers rich potential for researchers, practitioners, and teachers in business and professional communication.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
