From workplace to gathering place
By Frederick Pilot
September 17, 2025
The return to office debate reflects a transition period away from when the tools to process, document and communicate information were located in centralized commuter offices (CCO), making it the primary knowledge workplace. Over the past few decades thanks to advances in information and communications technologies that is no longer the case.
The CCO role as “workplace” is changing from a location where knowledge work is exclusively performed to an ad hoc meeting place where knowledge workers gather for collaboration, brainstorming, social bonding, and training. Offices or some suitable location are still needed. But not every business day. Floors filled with cubicles surrounded by closed door offices have become superfluous.
The conceptual shift underlying the transition is from conceiving of much knowledge or thought work as needing a defined workplace — like a physical factory floor assembly line in manufacturing — to a virtual, much less location dependent activity.
Related is a shift in the view of knowledge workers to the time and travel expense needed to gather. Coming together isn’t a mindless commute trip anymore. It’s now more like business travel and has to be meaningful and clearly of value.
The purpose of co-located work is now emerging as dominant determinant. When and where do knowledge workers gather and for what purpose?
This transition is a big one and coming with much gnashing of teeth and confusion and disorientation that is to be expected in a shift of this scope given how deeply entrenched the office has been as the exclusive knowledge workplace. That organizational discomfort can result in resistance that makes adaption more difficult.
Frederick:
Although I pretty much walked away from the thinking-about-telecommuting-topic over a decade ago when I realized that the location of work activity was a complex topic that didn’t interest me very much, I remain aware of the evolution of activity patterns and the importance of how they locate across the geography.
I note with interest you point: “The conceptual shift underlying the transition is from conceiving of much knowledge or thought work as needing a defined workplace — like a physical factory floor assembly line in manufacturing — to a virtual, much less location dependent activity.” In thinking about your claim with respect to what I’ve studied as a researcher and what I’ve perceived through my experience as a contract worker who has been very project based in my activity, I have to counter your claim with this observation of my own:
“Most highly productive, high-performance, project-oriented team work involving knowledge or thought work requires careful attention to the physical location of the involved staff, and as a general rule project managers do need to manage the team players as necessarily location dependent.” A presentation I made in January 2007 at a Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting is relevant to my claim. Look at the references to academic work in the presentation slide deck at
https://bettertransport.info/mediachoice/NILESpresentationTRBmediaChoice.pdf.
Let me add this — I completely understand and would support Amazon’s push to have workers be present in Amazon facilities more of the time than they were in the Covid-19 pandemic, and I also understand why many Amazon workers did not want to return to the office to the degree that their managements sought. I’ll stop there.
JSN
A corollary for my observation in the last comment: I take strong exception to any claim that telework is a mode or form of transportation. I also object strenuously to government transportation planners who venture into providing telecommuting advice with obviously little understanding of organizational design for work activities beyond what they think they know from their own jobs and organizations.