The future of the office is church
With a vaccine on the horizon, and the prospect of a post-COVID world in sight, the future of going to work has never been more uncertain. It is clear enough that office work in the next decade will be different from what came before. I suggest that office work in the ‘20s will look a lot like church.
Many companies have realized, due to COVID, that their employees can be as productive at home as at work — in some cases more productive. So, the traditional function of the office as a place to get work done is under threat. Already some companies are making big promises about going remote indefinitely. And almost all companies with leases in expensive cities are having a good long think right now about how much they want to spend on office space once the pandemic is over.
As the traditional function of the office becomes less important, however, other functions are becoming more visible. Previously these functions had simply been bundled in with the traditional function, and so were less relevant in decision-making about office design and leasing. There are many such functions, but three seem particularly important:
First, companies need to maintain a common office culture.
As anyone who has worked at a variety of companies can tell you, culture has an enormous effect on the day-to-day operation of any large organization. Is this the kind of company where you’re supposed to just nod politely during big meetings and then go and do your thing? Or is it the kind of company where you argue vigorously for your point of view, setting aside politeness and hierarchical deference? Do people at this company keep working after normal business hours? If so, are they really working, or just pretending to work? The answers to these kinds of questions matter not only for the well-being of a company’s employees but also its stock price and account books.
Second, companies need to maintain a shared set of corporate values.
Values are fully intertwined with the company culture, but they are more explicit and externally oriented. They are sometimes merely imposed from above, but in successful companies they are more often maintained as a kind of dialog between leadership and the rank-and-file. Corporate values are often self-reinforcing. A particular set of values might attract a certain kind of job candidate to the company, and once that candidate becomes an employee that person makes the connection between the company and those values stronger. Values are the way companies show their customers, employees, partners, regulators, etc. the kind of world they want to create, and deflect criticism of that vision. If you’re BP, your values might be “people need energy now, and we’re giving it to them, while at the same time working to make future energy more sustainable.” If you’re Facebook, your values might be “we are succeeding at doing something both difficult and fundamentally good: connecting people.”
Third, companies depend on friendships.
Not necessarily world-shaping, close-as-kin friendships, but no large organization could survive if its employees only ever treated each other with cold and cordial respect. Part of what keeps people interested in their work is working with interesting people, and lots of real work, as every successful company knows, is done in bars after hours, at birthday parties and baby showers, in meetings that happen at work but aren’t official meetings. Without people at work you trust as more than just colleagues, it’s hard to establish real mentoring relationships. Without people at work who care for you as a person, it’s harder to admit failure and move on effectively.
All three of these — culture, values, friendship — are very, very hard to do entirely remotely.
It’s hard to notice that everyone around you is really focused and on the ball if you only ever interact with them in Zoom meetings. After all, maybe they’re so well prepared for those meetings because they’re talented, or have just been here longer than you, or understand Zoom expectations better. Company Slack channels have a way of rage spiraling just like every other kind of social media if they’re disconnected from in-person interaction where intentions and affect can be read more easily. And so many friendships arise from random in-person encounters — maybe that person wore a t-shirt of a band you like, or a tailored suit, and it happens you’re into tailoring.
So, companies will need physical locations to do the work of building and maintaining their culture, values, and friendships. Unlike the ordinary work, this culture-values-friendship work need not happen on a daily basis, and in fact companies might find it goes better when it doesn’t happen every day. Perhaps it happens weekly, or twice a week. Unlike, say, a company holiday party, it has to intersect with the ordinary work somehow, or else it will feel awkward. A CEO announcing “we’re here to build culture, share values, and make friends” more or less guarantees that none of those things will happen.
How does it work, then?
I suggest that churches and other religious organizations have already solved a related problem, and as companies figure this out the solution will come to look more and more like a church.
If you haven’t spent much time in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues, you might have a stereotypical image of what they’re like, derived from movies and so on. The congregants sit in pews and are fundamentally passive.
But the reality is that in busy congregations, the sitting-in-pews part is a small fraction of what goes on, and represents a minority of the time commitment most congregants make. Much more time is spent in small group meetings, various scriptural studies, in volunteering for ministries directed both internally and externally, in parish council meetings, choir practices and social hours, than is spent in formal liturgy. In fact, those churches where most people only come for an hour once a week are probably declining and failing, at least in worldly terms.
How does this inform what companies will need to do as they switch to more remote work?
Formal, once-weekly liturgies are a bit like all-hands meetings (or all-division or whatever equivalent for large companies). They are especially good for shaping and maintaining values. Culture and friendship also play a role, of course, but a lesser one. (Listening respectfully to the company leadership is part of company culture. Sitting near people, or making eye contact with them at important moments, can reaffirm friendships.) A leader speaks, and the audience interprets the message in its own way.
Small group meetings are like, well, meetings. While Zoom and related technologies will certainly continue to play a role in a post-pandemic world, having meetings in real life when possible will come back. Lots of culture building happens during meetings.
And naturally, people will socialize, both formally and informally. There will be parties, as well as informal catch-ups in passing (these are often described as being in the hall or at the water cooler, even though many contemporary offices have neither hallways nor water coolers). Rather than a once-a-year holiday party plus many unofficial get-togethers throughout the year, companies will offer a range of officially sanctioned social opportunities, from regular catered mixers to on-premises, alcohol-is-served celebrations of big milestones.
Many of these events—all-hands meetings, ordinary team meetings and parties—will, for the sake of minimizing logistical demands and commuting time, be grouped together during long single days or two-day-long sessions. “Meeting days,” I suggest they be called, not because all meetings will happen on these days, but because they are days set aside for meetings and for meeting up.
What does this mean for offices as physical places?
First, all companies except the very richest ones will share space with other companies. Companies might first try just leasing smaller spaces and rotating their employees through these spaces in shifts, but more successful companies will recognize the value of having large numbers of their employees in one place from time to time. Such companies will either lease smaller spaces and then share larger venues with other companies on an ad-hoc basis, or lease larger spaces that include large venues, but swap the whole space with other companies day to day.
On the whole there will be a tension between the economies made possible by sharing space, which will tend to make spaces generic, and the desire for spaces to reflect the specific values and self-image of a company, which will have the opposite tendency.
This tension already exists to a certain extent in office buildings, of course. At present this is resolved, at least for companies that lease Class A office space, by normal commercial office buildings having fairly generic, flexible layouts, while interior fit-outs are designed for individual lease terms, with design choices made at the behest of individual lease holders.
But this solution is made easier because both commercial floor plans and interior office fit outs share a fundamental unit of spatial organization, namely the work station. The work station is the governing dimensional artifact of the entire modern office, and it is likely to lose this status completely in a world in which more and more desk work is done at home.
So, the architects of future offices will have to resolve the tension between specific and generic in a different way.
One possible solution is already adopted by many churches, which is for multiple congregations to share the same building, with one congregation as the primary. The church’s layout and symbolism all reflect the character of the primary congregation, which also owns the building, with the secondary congregation making small-scale temporary changes to the visible symbols only when they’re using the space.
This arrangement is more common than one might think, since neither party tends to publicize them, and they can be denominationally profligate. I have attended synagogue services in the grand basilican space of a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with the central cross discretely covered, and I know of a different synagogue that rented its main hall to a Russian-language Evangelical church on Sundays plus one weeknight.
So, sharing will be a major element of future office space. The richest companies will distinguish themselves by not sharing space at all, somewhat less rich companies will discretely share space with other companies while remaining the clear primary occupant of their spaces, others will accept part-time occupancy of very generic spaces, and still others will find it economical and undamaging to their own values to share space as a secondary occupant.
Services will naturally spring up around these arrangements. Some of the (potentially enormous amount of) money saved by not needing to provide workstations for every employee every work day will go to firms that make the process of using office space easier.
Brokers that can find good temporal-cultural arbitrages will do well — for instance, a high-end graphic design firm that wants to have mostly evening get-togethers might not mind being the secondary occupant of a beautiful space designed for a big ad firm that does most of its meeting during the day.
Similarly, companies that can quickly restage office space for new occupants will do a brisk business. Restaging will be complex and time-sensitive. It will involve both aesthetic/symbolic changes, like swapping out lobby signs, as well as janitorial services that ensure that wastebaskets have been emptied of any paper that might contain sensitive information. If any physical records are left in the space between swaps, they will be secured with more care than a typical locking file cabinet.
Since offices will be used chiefly for the maintenance of culture, values and friendship, I suspect that office design will become significantly more symbolic and less functional.
At present, it is usually only ridiculously wealthy companies or companies with significant messiah complexes that diverge much from the functionalist modernist office aesthetic pioneered at midcentury.
This aesthetic is cost-effective, and it minimally communicates seriousness and professionalism. As companies spend less money on space as such, I suspect that the need to differentiate themselves symbolically will generate a much wider range of office aesthetics.
Companies with wealth and significant messiah-factor will have offices like Apple’s, as far as they are able. Companies with wealth and without much messiah-factor will offer low-key but amazing design, with what would seem an extraordinary attention to surfaces and finishes by today’s standards. The catered food will be really, really good.
Spaces that are currently symbolically loaded, like signature conference rooms and lobbies, will evolve into even richer representations of company values. In fact, if we could project ourselves into these future offices, we would find that they consist of nothing except rooms that we would call lobbies and conference rooms, arranged in formations that are sometimes stately, at other times lively, all lavished with a level of thought and material finish found only at the highest end in today’s corporate world.
In recent decades, the share of Americans going to church has declined significantly, a phenomenon sometimes described as the “rise of the nones,” who belong to no religious congregation (it seems that in general these unchurched people have religious beliefs, but do not participate in any organized religious events). If the future of the office is church, this suggests a natural connection between the gig economy and the rise of the nones.
While offices will grow more symbolic, and in some ways more important as places of community, the number of people with no connection to any office will almost certainly rise. Many companies will simply forgo office space altogether for the sake of economy. Company culture, after all, only matters if the kind of work your company does is generally synthetic, knowledge-heavy, and hard to quantify — professional work. If you’re an Amazon warehouse worker or an Uber driver, your performance is perfectly quantifiable and you are, to Amazon or Uber, completely replaceable.
Such people will not have offices. Office-going is likely to become a status symbol in itself, something associated with fancy houses and college degrees. People consigned to labor as contractors, or to work for companies too poor to afford any physical space, will have nowhere to go other than their homes, or, perhaps, if they are seeking culture, values, and friendship — to church.