Tag: centralized commuter offices

Beyond the Office-versus-WFH Binary

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Knowledge work is not a binary choice between “office” and “work from home.”

Some knowledge workers prefer to be co-located at least part of the time. Others do their best work remotely. Those preferences exist at the individual, team and organizational levels.

A strategy that works for client collaboration may not work for focused individual work. A team that benefits from regular in-person interaction may still need substantial flexibility. A policy that looks consistent on paper can produce very different outcomes across roles.

That is why the question is far more complex than the usual office-versus-WFH framing.

The underlying tension is that both remote work and commuting to an office involve tradeoffs. We are social creatures, and being with others can matter. But so do time, distance, concentration, autonomy, and the quality of the work environment.

Having someone commute an hour to sit in a cubicle with a laptop, only to become more demoralized, is a clear sign that an organization needs to think more carefully about what the purpose of office space.

It can feel like having one foot in 1980 and the other in the present.

Organizations need help sorting through competing assumptions and designing an approach that fits their mission, workforce, technology, management practices, and actual work.

That is the focus of Last Rush Hour’s advisory services: helping leaders examine workplace assumptions, reduce return-to-office conflict, clarify the role of the office, strengthen distributed management, improve ICT utilization, and prepare for AI-enabled knowledge work.

The goal is not to defend remote work or mandate office attendance.

The goal is to make better decisions based on evidence, context, and the work that actually needs to get done.

The awkward adjustment to virtual and decentralized knowledge work

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Since the 1980s, information and communications technology has transformed knowledge work. Much of the work involved in gathering, synthesizing, analyzing, and presenting information can now be performed without a dedicated office or a daily commute.

The decision-making function of many organizations has gone virtual. That does not make offices completely irrelevant. Co-located environments can still support relationship-building, training, brainstorming, and strategy sessions that benefit from real-time interaction. But routine individual work and many forms of collaboration no longer depend on a particular building.

The difficulty is that the physical environment has not adjusted at the same pace. Office towers, business parks, campuses, and the transportation systems connecting them were built around the assumption that knowledge workers would regularly travel to a common workplace. Much of that infrastructure remains in place even as the work it was designed to support becomes more distributed.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this mismatch. Social-distancing measures forced organizations to test whether thought work could be done without the office and without the associated transportation demand. In many cases, the answer was yes. The experience produced a rapid shift in expectations, followed by what might be called a period of future shock.

The adjustment has been psychologically and organizationally difficult. The buildings and freeways are still there, but their necessity for many knowledge-work tasks is no longer self-evident. People are being asked to reconcile the visible permanence of the old system with the practical emergence of a new one.

Organizations are responding by experimenting with different ways of working. Some arrangements are proving more coherent than others. One particularly awkward example is requiring employees to commute to an office in order to participate in virtual meetings that could have taken place from home. Employees can see the contradiction: they spend time and money traveling to a designated workplace so that they can work remotely with colleagues who may be somewhere else.

Policies requiring attendance on prescribed days can intensify this frustration when they are not tied to a clear purpose. The problem is not simply that hybrid work is difficult to manage. It is that many organizations are applying old spatial assumptions to a changed model of work.

This is an awkward adjustment phase between two systems. The old system is organized around centralized workplaces and routine commuting. The emerging system is more virtual, distributed, and flexible. Organizations now need to determine which activities genuinely benefit from physical presence, which can be performed remotely, and how offices should be redesigned around those distinctions.

The transition will be uneven and sometimes contradictory. But the central task is clear: organizations must align their policies, workplaces, and transportation expectations with the work people actually do, rather than with the assumptions built into the previous era.

The economics of office presence

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The virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work has greatly reduced the need for office attendance. But it nevertheless holds value for many knowledge organizations as shown by return to office policies mandating attendance for all or some of the work week.

That value is being assigned and weighed by both knowledge organizations and workers in terms of compensation and talent attraction and turnover.  

The math of the office attendance value equation works roughly inversely. Some organizations offer premium pay for office attendance. It’s also being valued insofar as spiffing up offices to make them “worth the commute.”

Conversely, some knowledge workers are willing to accept lower compensation for roles that don’t require much if any office attendance. A paper issued earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found on average, tech workers are willing to accept a 25 percent pay reduction for roles that don’t require full time office attendance.

This explicitly recognizes the personal cost in terms of time and money incurred by the commute whereas traditionally it was externalized onto staff and seen as part of the job. Now it’s being factored into the employment relationship. Higher compensation for roles requiring regular office presence can offset employees’ cost of commuting.

On the other hand, companies that do not demand office attendance and thus remove the cost of commuting from the employment bargain are being flooded with job applications per this recent Business Insider article, reflecting their high desirability among knowledge workers.

“It’s not about where we work, but how,” Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox, told Business Insider. “Flexibility and agency are the new currencies of work.”

The length of the commute and housing costs also factor in. The math there is well established and similarly inverse. Housing tends to cost more nearer to downtown business districts or office parks and campuses or with reliable and fast public transit. Conversely, housing costs tend to be lower in outlying edges of metro areas but come with longer and more time-consuming commutes that take away from employees’ personal time.

As for talent attraction and retention, the most skilled and knowledgeable staff know they are marketable and factor that into their calculations. Knowledge organizations that require office attendance run the risk of losing talent not inclined to work in a mandated organizational office setting.

Buildings and bureaus: RTO isn’t only about trust and control

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Return to office (RTO) isn’t only about control or trust or workplaces. It’s more fundamental. It’s essentially about organizational identity.

For decades, public and large private sector organizations have defined themselves largely by how they functioned, structured in the industrial age management model as vertical bureaucracies exercising command and control management. The hierarchy is represented in the building with the building as totem. Leadership sits in the upper floors of the building and corner offices. Staff in cubicles in the center and on lower floors.

The building is at the core of organizational self concept and sense of purpose. The org may have started humbly in a garage like Apple but now a large multi building campus represents it nearly as much as its branding. In Apple’s case, for example, the modernistic circular spaceship headquarters building.

Apple founder Steve Jobs described the personal computer as the “bicycle for our minds.” That untethers the mind from time, place and distance. But the spaceship houses the bodies containing the minds of Apple employees. It’s the mothership, the corporate edifice.

Decentralized, virtual knowledge work first made possible by Apple computers and later information and communications technology (ICT) advances is at odds with that. Hence, we see resistance expressed as RTO. It really means return to the organization — get back in the building.

Or as some orgs have framed it to staff, you don’t have a future with this org if you don’t regularly appear at the building that represents it and should find another role outside of the org.

ICT has disrupted that. knowledge work no longer requires the industrial age buildings and bureaus of the 20th century or daily commuting to and from them. It’s done wherever knowledge workers are and thinking. Rapidly processed, communicated and recorded on ICT tools like personal computing and communication devices and the cloud.

The essential questions knowledge organizations face in the 21 century:

How are they defined in the post-industrial age (or “smokestack era” as Alvin Toffler termed it in his 1990 outlook on the 21st century, Powershift)? If buildings and bureaus no longer essentially define them, what does?

Since knowledge work has been traditionally defined by Dave Rolston’s four dead kings of work:

  1. One job title
  2. Performed under one manager
  3. At one time
  4. At one place

How will it be optimally defined and organized going forward?

No assembly required

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As information and communications technology tools decentralize and virtualize knowledge work, it challenges knowledge organizations to reconceptualize working. In the pre information economy industrial age, work and education involved assembling: in schools, factories and offices.

Now the office is optional.

Making this conceptual shift has proven difficult for many knowledge organizations. That’s because their leaders often believe assembly is essential for collaboration and teamwork. Hence, they demand staff attendance at least some of the workweek in a centralized, commute in office.

Assembly is no longer needed is when information of all forms is easily shared virtually.

Forced assembly hasn’t gone over well for staff who find themselves going though the motions of assembling, swiping their badges to create a record of attendance. Or sitting in a cube farm and having Zoom or Teams meetings with colleagues in other nearby cubicles – something they could just as easily done without making the commute trip there.

Future shock and past snapback

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Before advances in information and communications technologies over the past four decades, knowledge work required industrial scale centralized commuter offices (CCOs), often staffed by hundreds or thousands of knowledge workers.

Much of the staff worked processing repetitive tasks that shifted from paper to digital form that did not require centralized creation, processing and storage. Information then became portable and decentralized, moving along with knowledge workers on personal computer and communication devices and later internet-based telecommunications and the cloud.

That made CCOs obsolete as exclusive work and meeting places by making knowledge work far less dependent on time and place, allowing information to travel as text, data and video most anywhere and asynchronistically.

These ICT advances have sped up considerably in the current decade with widespread adoption of working from home accelerated by the pandemic and the emergence of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.

These changes have come so rapidly that they challenge knowledge organizations to constructively adapt to them. They are experiencing what futurist Alvin Toffler termed “future shock” in his 1970 book of that title. It happens when the pace of technological change is so rapid institutions and organizations feel overwhelmed by it and experience cognitive dissonance as past, present and future seem to merge.

Understandably so considering the as built environment of office buildings concentrated in central metro areas and connected by what were originally designed as “high speed” highways to bring knowledge workers to and from them from outlying bedroom communities.

That world of the 20th century when companies grew and staffed up and occupied offices at industrial age scale no longer easily jibes with the 21st. That scale no longer make sense when knowledge, innovation and strategic judgment are the most valuable resources, resources that no longer require large numbers of staff regularly concentrated in office buildings.

Future shock produces what could be described as past snapback. It’s resistance to the future and nostalgia for when knowledge workers regularly commuted to the office because that’s where the job was. It’s clearly seen with “return to office” expectations.

Which haven’t gone over well since knowledge workers and not their organizations have traditionally borne the costs of getting there. And once there, sitting in a cube farm doing the same activities they could do in their home offices. That produces cognitive dissonance for knowledge workers.

Knowledge organizations have been trying to reconcile the conflict between the 20th and 21st centuries with “hybrid” office attendance, having staff come in on a designated number and days of the work week. In other words, working in the CCO like in the 20th but with the current century recognition that knowledge work doesn’t necessarily require office attendance.

It eases future shock and cognitive dissonance. But going forward into the third decade of the 21 century, the shifts will require knowledge organizations make a big adjustment to a world that for many seems to have changed in less than a decade.

From workplace to gathering place

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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.

An emerging — and dubious — tradeoff: Making CCOs destinations worth the drive.

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In his 1976 book, The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff, Jack Nilles posited that telecommunications had evolved to the point it could substitute or “trade off” against transportation demand associated with getting workers to centralized commuter offices.

For Nilles, the idea occurred to him while crawling along congested Los Angeles freeways to commute to his job as an aerospace engineer along with thousands of his fellow Angelenos. This was at a time when advanced telecommunications technology was T-1 lines that could simultaneously transmit data and voice telephone calls, allowing downtown offices to link to satellite offices in the sprawling L.A. basin located where their employees reside rather than having them travel to the downtown office buildings.

Two decades later, the Internet did the same thing but brought the connection straight into peoples’ homes. That greatly enhanced the mathematics of Nilles’ tradeoff. Much if not most knowledge work could as the Internet and personal communications devices evolved could be done in home offices — no transportation or even satellite offices required.

A new tradeoff is now in the offing. This one proposes to make commuting worth the personal time and expense cost incurred by knowledge workers by making commute in offices more luxe, comfy spaces instead of stuffy, florescent lit cube farms.

“People and companies know that offices are changing and that offices need to start feeling maybe a little bit more like hotels, with great service, seamless technology, inspiring design, and workplaces that create a true sense of place,” says Annie Dean, chief strategy officer for the building operations and experience division at CBRE, a large commercial real-estate services firm.

Dean’s new role overseeing CBRExIndustrious Building Experience Lab juxtaposes with her former role with software company Atlassian, where she led Atlassian’s Team Anywhere that emphasized virtual, decentralized knowledge work. “We have 13,000 employees spread across the globe, and individuals can choose their working location every day,” Dean said then. “It’s about how we work, not where we work.” 

In her new role, it’s the where is paramount: making the centralized commuter (CCO) office a destination worth the drive.

The question is whether knowledge workers in highly congested metro areas like the L.A. Basin will find value in the tradeoff. Certainly office space can be overhauled to make collaboration, training and brainstorming sessions more comfortable and enjoyable instead of the usual layout of seas of cubicles surrounded by closed door offices that has been the standard setup since at least the 1970s.  

In these big metros, many knowledge workers aren’t likely to see the value when crushing commutes – like in the San Francisco Bay Area — are factored in. In such high cost metro areas, the predominant tradeoff is housing affordability versus commute time that tends to push knowledge workers to metro fringes were housing costs are lower. That typically means longer commutes. Spiffing up the CCO won’t alter the math for many of these knowledge workers. The time sucking trip it isn’t likely to be seen as worthwhile aside perhaps from an occasional trip each month more akin to business travel to professional gatherings involving overnight stays involving a true hotel.

It’s now longer about whether to CCO or not. New model of knowledge work needed.

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When knowledge workers worked in centralized offices, they commuted to them because that’s where the tools of their trade were. Typewriters, mimeograph machines, photocopiers, plug and PBX switchboards and desk telephones and later, facsimile machines.

When desktop microcomputers emerged in the 1980s and later laptops and cell phones known as “personal communication devices,” their portability enabled their use in home offices just as easily as centralized commuter offices (CCOs). That was the beginning of the end of the office as it was known for a century.

It was the next development in information and communications technology that obsoleted the commute to CCO routine: the mass market Internet in the 1990s. That allowed these portable devices to transmit and receive and later virtually process (in the cloud and with generative AI) all forms of information: documents, data, numbers and voice and video communications.

The CCO’s primary function then became a gathering place for group work. How much gathering is necessary is currently a topic of much discussion and debate among knowledge organizations and their staffs. Every workday? Just some days of the week? For those who live within 50 miles of the CCO?

The topic has cleaved into two camps: office centralists and virtualtists.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, laments the Internet that disintermediated real time communication out of CCOs via “fucking Zoom” videoconferencing as it put it in a viral online rant. Dimon and other old school leaders like him believe co-located gathering is essential to knowledge work and career development. They’re willing to invest substantial amounts of money to create office space resembling first class hotel suites and associated amenities to facilitate assembling in person. There’s some practical rationale for this position relative to career development and training for younger workers.

For the other school of thought, gatherings requiring a commute to a CCO should be limited and purpose driven and not the everyday mode of working. Commuting to a CCO simply to do work that can be done in a home office isn’t worth the personal time and expense incurred. It’s a very strong utilitarian argument.

Resolving this split going forward will require the development of a new model of knowledge work disposes of quotidian office attendance and focuses on purposefully defining the need for gathering and the expected outcome, i.e. reaching a consensus or reaching a decision. That’s in line with the view of knowledge organizations as “decision factories” as Roger L. Martin described them in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article.

Toffler’s second and third waves colliding in U.S. federal government

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In his 1980 book The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler depicted the long-term evolution of modern socio-economy as a series of three waves. The first was agrarian – the cultivation and sale of plant crops and animals. The second was the industrial era that began in the 18th century. According to Toffler, this wave reached its peak in the 1970s when services took on a more dominant role relative to manufacturing – the third wave.

The transitions between the waves play out over many decades and are fraught with tension between the receding and rising waves. Not surprisingly since in each, the scale of social and economic change is enormous with broad implications for how and where people work and live. The previous socio-economy and its industries and settlement patterns is remade into the next.

Toffler wrote of advances in information and communications technology and fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure that would fundamentally alter the second wave industrial era based on centralization of production in offices and factories in metro centers. The third wave, Toffler prognosticated, would instead bring about decentralization.

Second wave office work would migrate back to homes that Toffler termed “the electronic cottage.” Toffler’s prediction came just six years after fellow futurist Arthur C. Clarke issued a similar forecast, envisioning the end of commuting to urban downtown office buildings. “Men Will No Longer Commute, They Will Communicate.” And plenty of women too who have entered the workforce since Clarke’s 1964 prognostication.

Toffler’s and Clarke’s future has arrived – gradually since the mass market personal computer in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s – and suddenly following the social distancing public health measures of the 2020 viral pandemic. Millions of office workers migrated to the electronic cottage, creating home offices and no longer regularly commuting.

The tension between the second industrial era and third information era waves is now starkly evident in the federal government and in two prominent figures of the current American administration: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Trump is a product of the second wave and the 1980s in particular when he developed his identity as a real estate developer including office buildings. The younger Musk is more complex, a creature of both the second and third waves. He embraces technology but largely in the context of second wave transportation advances: automobiles (Tesla) and rocket ships (SpaceX).

Both men are essentially second wave industrialists. For them, Toffler’s postindustrial third wave electronic cottage doesn’t exist. It’s a dwelling, not a place to work. Working there instead of commuting to a distant office is even “immoral” as Musk put it. Consequently, the administration has ordered federal workers to report for duty at the office.