On the disappearance of the office - Simon Usborne in The Guardian:

‘As weeks become months and offices remain closed, many are predicting their permanent decline. Buildings that for decades have defined urban geography, diurnal rhythms and the meaning of work may never hum in the same way to the sounds of keyboards and fluorescent lighting.’

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‘According to a survey by the global financial services company Jefferies, 61% of more than 1,500 UK respondents said they would return to work immediately if they could. Facebook says half of its employees will work from home by 2030, but Mark Zuckerberg said only one in five were enthusiastic about doing so. More than half “really want to get back to the office as soon as possible”, he told the Wall Street Journal.
When Bradburn polled his network of more than 5,000 HR bosses, he asked for the biggest reasons their teams had shared for wanting to go back to the office. Seventy per cent cited social and mental health issues, including feelings of loneliness. “I think young people in particular really need that connection,” Bradburn says.
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‘“It’s always been a pretty backwater topic,” says Nick Bloom, a British economics professor at Stanford University in California and an expert in home working. The last time Bloom’s phone rang so much was 2013, he says, when Marissa Mayer, then the chief executive of Yahoo, banned remote working. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read a leaked memo to staff.
The assumption has been that remote workers slack without direct supervision. But do they? In 2010, a Chinese travel agency with 16,000 employees came to Bloom in search of evidence. Ctrip, which assumed workers would prefer being at home, was spending big money on offices in Shanghai. It wanted to know what remote work might do for the bottom line. “Their proposition was that they’d save on rent, but lose on productivity,” Bloom says.
Bloom devised a trial – the first of its kind – involving 250 members of a Ctrip call centre. Half of the group were selected at random to work from home for nine months. The other half would continue to work in the office and the productivity of both teams would be measured.

None of Ctrip’s assumptions were right. Productivity in the home group went up by 13%. Without the distractions of the office, agents were making more calls and taking fewer breaks and sick days. “They were truly stunned by the results,” Bloom says of Ctrip. Its executives calculated not only that they could save millions in rent, but also that they could make $2,000 (then about £1,300) more in profit annually per employee.’ (…)

‘The sounds of the office have a new resonance. More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.
Progressive employers are racing to find ways to recreate the joys and perks of office life. Google is laying on cookery classes and mindfulness sessions, as well as offering $1,000 (£780) to each employee for equipment. Lauren Whitt, Google’s wellness manager and resilience lead, says demand has grown for her team’s services, which include video counselling and therapy by text for people who lack privacy. “We’re also seeing more families having more access [to these services],” she adds.
If reports of the death of the office have been exaggerated, everyone agrees it won’t look the same. Bloom envisages a new landscape of smaller offices, with employees alternately working at home for half the week to bring down costs and make physical distancing more viable. Budgets for nice interiors will fall. “I think the office will be more suburban, more spacious and nastier-looking,” he says.’

Read the article here.

We might not need colleagues, we just need their sounds. Illusion is everything, much depends on the quality of the illusion.
The best illusions are better than reality.