What is an office?

In recent years there's been a heated debate about whether employees need to be in the office, or whether they can be effective working from home. The arguement for and against seems to the range between it's good for mental health to get out of the house, or it creates a clear boundary between work and life while the anti-office brigade rail about how it's last century thinking and the call to return to the office shows a lack of trust in employees to actually work from home.

Let me be clear… I’m an advocate for some time in the office. But here, I’d like to challenge our belief of what an office actually is, what it represents and why it's important.

If we take the view that the office is solely a big space with desks in it, that our organisation pays a lot of money for to keep warm and lit, then we're actually missing a trick. I think you'll agree, that there’s nothing more demoralising than making the effort to catch an early train into ‘the office’ only to find that you’re sitting on Teams calls all day surrounded by empty desks because everyone else is WFH. At which point, you may find yourself saying 'what is the point of the office' - other than the access to a networked printer.

I’ve recently come to think of the office in different terms. This is where I've landed:

☕️ A physical communal workspace where ideas are shared between colleagues, where collaboration happens and community is built.

☕️ A place where colleagues learn from each other, and support each other. It’s where friendships (maybe romances?) grow, and we come to understand each other in a deeper way.

So, can we have an office at a local coffee shop/shared workspace - yes.

Can we have an office at a colleague’s house - yes.

Can the office be an expensive central city building - yes.

So clearly, an office can be anywhere where colleagues meet, learn, collaborate and grow together.

If that’s an office, then I’m all for it.

How about you?