The echo of the empty office corridors: Back to the office?

👻👻 Booohooo, the echo of the empty office corridors 👻👻

On a dull Friday, the tall, glass office building was particularly eerily quiet, as everyone was working from home. But not Martin, who found comfort in solitude and peace. He then heard a scratchy whisper that his neck hairs were standing up: “... Why are you here?” 👻

Once upon a time, there was a busy campus...

When we're out and about with our customers on campus, at least on Mondays and Fridays, we see lovingly designed office spaces that are creepily empty. Casual eco-certified wooden swings, on which you could work in this way in a new way, but which only hang silently and silently in front of you. Eco-organic Fairtrade coffee beans that remain unmilled. Movable, modular furniture that has never been rebuilt, let alone moved.

One of the trendy new work terms in combination: “Office peacocking”, first belongs in a A study by OwlLabs worth reading. The phenomenon describes the eye-catching furnishing of offices with cozy couches, zoom zooms and Monstera Deliciosa for the absolute feel-good factor to attract employees to come back to the office from their home office.

Many of these features are individual wishes or ideas that have flowed into specific investments and are now haunting plagued real estate and employer branding managers as a shadow of themselves in secluded corridors. 🕸 👻 🕯 It's no wonder that even some of Zoom's employees are now being ordered back to the office.

It fits in with the fact that 63% of employees in Germany still believe that their managers perceive colleagues in the office as more hard-working and trustworthy than those who work remotely. #proximitybias

How much office does it have to be?

Hybrid work is a balancing act of diverse needs and requirements. While for some in the company, the corner office is still regarded as the ultimate status symbol, other employers choose remote work arrangements depending on their sense of freedom. What do we often observe as external parties?

Especially in teams with a low level of reflection and a strong culture of needs, discussions about home office are often stuck and are conducted strongly from an individual perspective, in search of mostly selfish advantages. Dangerous about this: Anyone who tries to please everyone will never be able to do so.

“But my cat doesn't like being alone...” 🐱🚪

From our point of view, the requirements must be formulated neither from the characteristics of the roommates nor from the maintenance costs of the tomato plants, but from the task and objectives. These can change as a result of influencing factors and require flexibility, and yet you can derive “requirements” from this, which must then be addressed to different levels:

• to the individual
• to the team
• to the organization and
• to the office space

Yes, how about we start with ourselves?

We enjoy accompanying and supporting our customers in transforming their working methods. In doing so, we also observe that there is often a mismatch: Requirements from an individual perspective are addressed to campus or office design.

The result is chic, ultra-modern haunted houses furnished with digital whiteboards, standing desks and corduroy sofas — because who should scribble on the walls that can be written on, look deeply into each other's eyes and come up with new, creative and innovative ideas, if not the ones that make up this organization?

When attendance rules are then tightened so that it's all worthwhile, employees find workarounds. Coffee Badging is one such example: Just go to the office for a few hours to show your face, “check in” once, maybe have another coffee with colleagues and then go straight back home — and then actually get something done.

Office design and equipment can support or hinder working methods, but the shift to a new way of working doesn't happen by simply tearing out the doors of individual offices and yelling “open space.” Translating a harmonized view of office space requirements is a demanding task: It is about creating a place that promotes collaboration, innovation and creativity — for different generations and ways of working. And that requires a deep understanding of design, functionality, and organizational culture.

📦 🧠 MOVING IS MORE ABOUT PEOPLE THAN OFFICES.

It is the people who bring a community to life from a space. Therefore, whenever moving or renovating, it is at least as important to consider managers and employees in this change.

Our Birchie Timm Hauschild has a reading tip for you: He loves Vitra's colorful e-paper on “The Future of Shared Spaces,” such as Issue 05 on “Distributed Work” or Issue 08 on “Dynamic Spaces.”

What did he learn from this? The D5 model.

The D5 model describes five stages of distributed work — “distributed” because without a central office, you can never really be “away”, i.e. “remote”, but at most spread across different locations.

🏢 D1 — Physical presence: Everyone here works in the same office, at the same time. For example, when production or even physical presence is part of the service. Or simply because it is so desired.

🧑 ‍ 💻 D2 — Responsiveness: D2 companies have the technology and culture to enable employees to work from home, but they only use it sporadically. Many companies are just getting back on this path and a kind of “home office on permission” culture is developing.

🤳 D3 — Replication: Here, companies are trying to replicate the office experience online. For example, by ensuring that all employees are online during office hours or by using video calls for meetings. However, only a few companies are getting a grip on the excessive synchronous video conferences and are surprised about stressed employees. Better guidance is needed here.

🙋 D4 — Real asynchronous work: The company has fully recognized the benefits of working remotely and uses asynchronous communication, which allows employees to do their work at their own time. Slack, Teams, Notion, Drive, Asana, and Co. are some of the tools used in such companies.

🧘 D5 — Nirvana: This is the ultimate level, which the Automattic team, for example, attributes to themselves. It's not just about working remotely, but the entire company and its processes are built around the concept of distributed work. Unlike developing a type of work retrospectively, this stage often develops from the open-source culture and from the fact that employees are distributed worldwide and work in the time zone that suits them best.

The world of work is changing and we are looking forward to talking to you about it. In the mood for a coffee chat — virtual, hybrid or on-site? Reach out to us anytime! 😉

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