Traditionally, offices have been workplaces for all knowledge work. Staff commuted to them Monday through Friday. Now that it can easily be done in a home office or library, coffee shop, or shared local office space, knowledge work can be done most anywhere at any time.
Instead, what’s needed are venues for gatherings for training sessions for newer staff members, socialization, symposia on select topics, presentations, and brainstorming strategy and generating ideas.
Recognizing this, larger organizations are redesigning their offices to make them more like hotel conference centers. They are operated like traditional office workplaces, requiring regular commute trips.
That’s a viable model for staff who live nearby. But many may not and face long commutes, driven by more affordable housing costs in outlying areas farther from the office. Or they may reside in other more distant locations.
This is headed toward a redefinition of the office as a meeting and conference venue instead of regular workplace with the expectation of quotidian attendance. Rather than maintain fixed office space, organizations may evolve to operate more like industry groups and trade associations, meeting in hotels offering conference facilities and work spaces.
Daily commuting will transform to business travel to these gatherings. Each organization will determine their purpose, length and frequency consistent with their needs and budgets. They could be one day events or involve a full week held every month or quarter.
As offices become like hotel conference centers, hotel conference centers could become more like offices.
This shift helps address a critical need to provide an opportunity for staff to develop social as well as mentoring relationships between senior and junior staff that require a degree of co-location. Critically, hotels offer a place to for staff to stay for multi-day events.
Some larger organizations may use their existing offices as meeting places with staff staying at nearby hotels for multi-day gatherings. Social events could be held at adjacent restaurants.
Fundamentally, this requires a shift away from thinking of knowledge work like manufacturing where workers have to be concentrated in a workplace to be productive. Thought work doesn’t work that way. And organizations are made up of people. People who as the songwriter Hal David wrote need people to stimulate and refine their thinking.