Why Do We Have Offices

This is the question every company should be asking before it establishes a formal plan for returning to the office.  How does office space serve the company and its employees?  Many years ago, when the first offices were built, they reflected the factories of the Industrial Revolution.  Employers needed to bring employees together to facilitate and monitor their work.  Today technology allows people to work productively from anywhere.  But for special purpose spaces (e.g., lab space), companies and employees don’t need office space to do their work.  So the office has long since stopped serving its original purpose.  But there are other reasons for its existence.
 
Among the relevant considerations are net income (productivity), employee health and happiness and cultural values.  The only way to understand how having an office vs. not having an office translates in terms of these variables is by comparison and solving (to the best of your ability) for extraneous factors that otherwise influence outcomes.  It’s difficult but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.  For example, with many companies having operated mostly out of office for at least 18 months now, it’s reasonable to compare how the business has performed during this period vs. the same period pre-pandemic.  This comparison will obviously be flawed, if, for example, you’re in the office leasing business like we are here at Cushman & Wakefield.  For us the pandemic has had an outsized impact on our business such that we can’t reasonably compare the effect of being in or out of the office on net income.  The presence of abnormal factors that make one period a poor reflection of the norm render the comparison meaningless.  But for many companies, no such abnormality exists, making it reasonable for the change in office use to be studied as an influential variable impacting net income.  Did net income increase, decrease or stay about the same?  If it increased or was equal, it’s possible the firm can perform equally well or better without an office (in the context of net income).  Yet there’s other factors that matter a lot, too.  How does having an office vs. not having an office impact employee health and happiness?  Maybe the employees are productive but perhaps they’re at greater risk of burnout working from home because they’re working too much? And we can’t forget about culture.  Culture is really a measure of stickiness, or employee loyalty.  The effect of bad culture is a lack of loyalty and higher employee churn, which can be very expensive.  Next to compensation, culture is the biggest variable impacting whether employees stay or go.  So it’s reasonable to compare the employee’s views on culture pre-pandemic when they were mostly in the office, to now when they’re mostly of out of the office.    
 
All of this can be discovered through carefully crafted surveys that ask the right questions.  It’s likely that most companies will come away with an understanding they need to change how they define and create their offices in order to better meet the relevant goals of increasing productivity, make their employees healthier and happier and building strong culture.  At this point, design professionals can help realize the fulfillment of these objectives through space design.