What will business be like when (almost) no one’s in the office?
July 1, 2020
“The office has lost top billing as the place where white-collar work gets done,” proclaimed a pair of tech executives, writing in
The Wall Street Journal and quoted in the Summer 2020 issue of
Dining Insights’ lead article, “Planning Dining Service in the Post-Virus Era”.
From March through June – and in varying degrees beyond – companies and institutions have been kept alive by executives, managers and many others working from home offices and kitchen tables.
“Newly remote employees will soon begin to see that productivity, innovation and creativity remain strong, if not stronger, under the new conditions,” according to Matt Burr, CEO, and Becca Endicot, editor, of Nomadic Learning, a digital training company. “Organizations will learn that they benefit tremendously from losing the limitations that come from traditional office settings.” (nomadiclearning.com)
Maybe. That’s pretty much what advocates of the open office were saying some ten or twelve years ago, before it became apparent that an open office left no place for someone to concentrate on a specific task. (That’s one of the pluses to working at home. No one except the spouse, kids and dog can bother you.)
The other side, not yet acknowledged by remote-working promoters, is the loss of what open offices were designed to encourage – casual encounters and informal face-to-face discussions where ideas are aired and new initiative emerge. Gmail was conceived during a conversation over lunch in a Google cafeteria, according to company legend.
The shift to off-site working has been gradual but continuing as technology improved and expanded capabilities. The January 2013 issue of Dining Insights noted, “Companies now have new ways to outsource even highly skilled work to freelance workers all over the world.” The new way is “a pool of virtual workers that can be tapped on demand to provide a wide range of services,” Evgeny Kaganer of the University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain wrote then in the
MIT Sloan Management Review.
This market is alive and well today. Technical writers, among others, can be had for as little as $200 an assignment – no taxes, no benefits, no legal complications or commitments, not even a desk and chair for a day.
Over the years since around 2010, employees in search of work/life balance have increasingly worked a day or two a week from home. Participation data for corporate dining facilities have reflected declining on-premises populations. The Society for Hospitality and Foodservice Management’s semi-annual Industry Standard and Benchmark Comparisons survey’s reports of lunch participation in company dining centers nationwide tells the story:*
1992: An average 56% of available employees had lunch in the company dining center.
2002: 43% of available employees
2012: Office environment, 35.9% (early in the trend to remote working)
2016 Office environment, 35.0%
2018 Office environment, 31.0% (latest data available)
* Each year’s survey reports the prior year’s statistics. The 1993 survey reported 1992 results, etc.
With the advent of Zoom and other conferencing software systems – and a hard shove from Covid-19 – remote office work has become nearly universal. Whether, when and how a significant return to offices will occur are open questions at this point. Obviously, if lunch participation falls much below the 2018 average of 31%, employee dining service will become not just unsupportable, but virtually obsolete in many office environments, seriously denting a large segment of the on-site food service industry. Will it happen?
It would take a remarkably clear crystal ball to see what will happen in 2021 and beyond, including when and how the economy will recover, but based on experience during prior (but much slower) transitions in office arrangements and fluctuations in the economy, some reasonable expectations can be considered.
1. It’s probable that physical presence in offices will average below 50% of actual employment for a year or more, even after the coronavirus is tamed. The comfort of executives and employees generally (no need to get dressed up; no commute) and company advantages (no or limited employee dining, coffee pantries, conference services and other expensive services to support; less office space needed) will be important considerations in deciding office populations.
Depending on the company, average daily office populations could be 25% or less. Operations like call centers and tech support services operate as well remotely as they did when everyone was in an office. Much other routine work probably can be performed remotely as well. The use of freelancers for specific assignments may expand.
2. It will take a while for disadvantages to show up in various ways at different companies, each perhaps seeking its own solution. For example, a company with 1,000 employees that reduced its office space as 75% of its employees worked remotely may find the office is now too small if it must bring more people back to the premises.
3. What other kinds of disadvantages? Principally, the loss of face-to-face contact and communication. Zoom or similar conference systems are okay; each participant can see the others’ heads and shoulders, but miss the vital body language which often speaks more eloquently than words. Everyone has to take a turn speaking, making the conference more formal than it would be for a group around a table. Meetings have to be scheduled; they can’t be spontaneous. Serious negotiations, like contracts, are unlikely to be as productive when participants can’t face each other in person and measure the other party’s reactions. There are no refreshment breaks or buffet luncheons when participants can relax and socialize informally away from the business at hand or a tough negotiation.
4. Despite the Nomadic Learning folk’s forecast, the absence of informal meetings and interactions will inhibit creativity and innovation to some degree; maybe a lot. Lone wizards might thrive, but team-oriented people aren’t hermits. They may find working remotely in a group awkward and unrewarding.
5. Humans are social beings. If thousands of people are willing to face a bitingly cold November or December Saturday or Sunday to cheer a football team, why would they not want to gather in a more cordial atmosphere? Employee morale depends on the enthusiasm and engagement of its people, identifying with the company and the stimulation of working with each other. A company softball team or bowling club is unlikely to form among remote workers, eliminating one more tie to the organization.
Of course, times are changing. New technologies may offset these apparent disadvantages; companies may find artificial intelligence is more efficient and reliable than humans, and the rising generation’s concept of work and life most likely will be different than that of their predecessors.
As wise people have been saying for ages, Time will tell.
Dining Insights is published by Clarion Group, a consulting firm providing solutions and uncovering opportunities in dining and hospitality services for companies, colleges and universities, government agencies and other organizations. For information on how we may benefit you and your organization, call Tom Mac Dermott, 603/642-8011 or Ted Mayer, 617/875-7882 or visit our website, https://clariongp.com.
A Short History of Office Evolution
Office arrangements follow trends, the way fashions and diets do; they just don’t change as fast – the cost of restructuring facilities and buying new furniture and equipment is a bigger investment than new clothes.
But trends there are. A photo of an office in the 1930s and ‘40s, even into the ‘50s, would show people busy at row after row of desks in a great open space. Managers and executives had separate, four-walls-and-a-door offices, some alongside the open office’s wall or upstairs for the more important folks. Size of office and access to a window (and the view outside the window) denoted rank.
As the need for massive squadrons of clerks diminished and jobs became more specialized, the “cube farm” became the way to go. Everyone had an individual cubicle to call his/her own, demarcated by a five-or-so-foot high partition with space for a built-in desk and chair. The size of the cube (some as little as six by eight feet) and location – in the middle of the floor or by a window – indicated rank. A little better privacy, but not much. The walls weren’t high and there was no door, letting in extraneous noise and neighbors. A lot of cube farms survive today.
In the 2000s, the new way of structuring the office was the open plan – no walls (except maybe in the executive suite), a scattering of desks, tables, comfortable chairs and a couch around a coffee table, ping-pong and foosball tables along a back wall. Convenient coffee pantries with free beverages and snacks and a large, open employee dining center serving everything from gourmet entrees to comfort food to vegan selections, catering to every taste at subsidized prices, were essential elements.
The idea, advocates said, was to encourage open interaction and spontaneous creativity. The fact that it took less space than a conventional cube farm, coupled with the introduction of desk “hoteling” (desks not assigned, available for anyone to use, often first-come, first-served), wasn’t seen as a disadvantage by corporate management. The concept was – and is – considered most important by tech companies and others where innovation and creativity are their primary competitive tools.
The downside that emerged was there was no place to hide when working alone or with two or three others on a task or a project. Many companies found they had to provide semi-private spaces for such work. The expansion of mobile computer connectivity helped solve the issue for solo work; the employee who had to concentrate could stay home and work, away from distractions. As the technology improved, the idea of working from home (or somewhere other than the office) caught hold and came to be encouraged to varying degrees by employers. Work/life balance was often the motivation.
By the 20-teens, remote working had become so popular that, as noted above, office employee café lunch participation rates fell from more than 50% in the 1990s to less than a third by 2018. Of course, the most popular day for concentrating on important projects without office distractions is Friday.
Now, the coronavirus emergency has converted a nice amenity into a business necessity. As the emergency recedes, remote working will likely remain as a key element of the new way of doing business for many organizations.
