centralized commuter offices

What Telecommuting Looked Like in 1973 – CityLab

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Nilles’s solution to these contemporary concerns was telecommuting, but not quite telecommuting as we know it today—after all, this was before the advent of the Internet. He envisioned firms broken up into satellite offices, where employees could work remotely when they didn’t need to be physically present at headquarters.Instead of commuting to a central location downtown—and clogging up the area’s already congested streets—clerical workers would report to whichever office was closest to their homes to receive and complete assignments there. “Our primary interest, and the greatest impact on traffic and energy consumption, was reducing the commute to work,” Nilles says.

The authors wrote that “either the jobs of the employees must be redesigned so that they can still be self-contained at each individual location, or a sufficiently sophisticated telecommunications and information storage system must be developed to allow the information transfer to occur as effectively as if the employees were centrally collocated.” We know, with the benefit of hindsight, that both changes took place. (Emphasis added)

Source: What Telecommuting Looked Like in 1973 – CityLab

More than four decades after Jack Nilles penned these words (and years before the advent of today’s Internet), a “sufficiently sophisticated telecommunications and information storage system” now exists — thanks to the maturation and widespread adoption of information and communications technology. History’s stage is now set for a major reduction in daily commute trips to centralized, commute-in offices. That’s the primary message of my 2015 eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century.

Conversation with Laurent Dhollande, CEO of Pacific Workplaces and Cloud VO

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Commuting sucks. But so can working at home, which while avoiding the commute often lacks in the sense of community that for many sparks engagement and creativity. And not everyone has a suitable home office environment.

This podcast’s guest Laurent Dhollande, CEO of San Francisco-based Pacific Workplaces and Cloud VO, offers a solution: shared co-working spaces located in communities where people live offering fast Internet connections and the amenities of the centralized commuter office — sans the commute to a different community.

These community-based facilities fit nicely with the maturation of information and communications technology and its increased adoption, making time and location increasingly less important in knowledge work. This is the sense of history over the longer term, but it has not yet reached a tipping point, Dhollande observes. Many large organizations with staff living at the affordable edges of metro areas haven’t yet embraced the idea of distributed staff or have learned to manage them effectively.

We can’t build ourselves out of the rush hour

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A new policy brief by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation once again highlights the futility of expanding road capacity to reduce traffic congestion. Moreover, another expected benefit of doing so — economic development and job creation — isn’t generally realized.

In short, we can’t build ourselves out of rush hour traffic. We need a new, post-Industrial Age paradigm where information work comes to knowledge workers via information and communications technology rather building more pavement to transport workers to centralized, commute-in offices. Plus modernizing and building out telecommunications infrastructure to serve every premise in the communities where knowledge workers live.

The Office Space Isn’t Dead, It’s Making A Comeback | Jacob Morgan | LinkedIn

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The office space is far from dead, it’s re-emerging, in fact a recent report from commercial real estate company CBRE found that U.S. Office investment is at a 7-year high hitting $119 billion. So, if the office space isn’t dead then what’s going on? Office spaces are re-emerging as employee experience centers. All of the companies that are investing in new or redesigned spaces are doing so because they realize one crucial change that has happened in the workplace. That organizations can no longer assume that employees need to work there and organizations must in fact create environments where people actually want to show up. These beautiful new spaces aren’t being created for fun or because it’s a nice thing to do. Companies are leveraging their physical environment as a new strategic competitive advantage. Modern cafeterias with catered food, modular work spaces that can be moved around, wood-trimmed walls and floors, colorful art-work, stylish furniture, smart lighting and sensors are all part of creating great employee experiences where people actually want to show up to work.

Source: The Office Space Isn’t Dead, It’s Making A Comeback | Jacob Morgan | LinkedIn

Updating centralized commute-in offices for the 21st century still has a major downside: the fact that people who work there remain separated from them by distance and time, requiring the daily slog and time suck of the 20th century commute. A true 21st century approach is to leverage information and communications technology advances to decentralize knowledge work out to the communities where knowledge workers live.

Is your economic development opportunity commuting out of town EVERYDAY? | Michael Shear | LinkedIn

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We know there is a huge cost to getting people to work everyday: to the individual, the community and, to some extent, the employer. The costs are vehicles, gas, roads, pollution and time.

Is there a way to provide local job access to these commuters? Is there a model that would appeal to employers to have networked facilities in these communities. The costs of sending bits of information is minuscule relative to moving bodies. If you knew what companies/government agencies where hiring people from your community, might they work to examine how securely networked offices could create wins for communities, employees and employers alike.

Source: Is your economic development opportunity commuting out of town EVERYDAY? | Michael Shear | LinkedIn

Much of the push back directed at the decentralization of knowledge work out of centralized commuter offices (CCOs) due to the proliferation and maturation of information and communications technology is that CCOs provide an essential venue for daily collaboration. However, Shear — as do I in my recent book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century — point out that daily, face to face collaboration comes at great cost. That cost isn’t adequately taken into account by the “CCOs are necessary to enable collaboration” adherents. In other words, the argument goes, we must endure the time suck and personal costs of daily commuting in order to collaborate.

I don’t buy that argument and I imagine neither does Shear. As he notes, with today’s level of ICT that allows thought work to be conducted most anywhere with decent Internet service, it’s far less costly to use ICT to collaborate by moving ideas and not the bodies attached to the brains that generate them. Shear proposes in order to facilitate that, communities can create shared office distributed work facilities that would allow knowledge workers to work in their own communities rather than trekking daily — often in congested rush hour traffic — to a CCO in another.

How Silicon Valley Made Big City Housing The Cause of and Solution To Inequality (In 9 Visuals) | Gregory Ferenstein | LinkedIn

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The alternative (California’s current solution) is commuting, as tech companies and their tens of thousands of employees are scattered throughout the peninsula, forced to find shelter anywhere they can. The Bay Area suffers from one of the worst commutes in the country. For decades, Silicon Valley’s suburbs have refused to accommodate high-rise apartments for tech workers and their massive campuses, which have slowly been pushed up north, from San Jose to San Francisco.

Source: How Silicon Valley Made Big City Housing The Cause of and Solution To Inequality (In 9 Visuals) | Gregory Ferenstein | LinkedIn

This article proposes the construction of high density, hi-rise housing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley to alleviate the high cost of shuttling people to and from their homes and centralized commuter offices (CCOs). The problem is it’s based on Industrial Age thinking updated for the 21st century that promotes the false notion that knowledge and creative workers needs to be physically co-located daily in order to collaborate and be productive.

Is that really true? Couldn’t they easily use the information and communications technologies these Bay Area companies innovate to collaborate without the commute by moving bytes, not their bodies? That way people could skip the commute and work in home offices or co-working spaces in their communities. That’s an obvious and much lower cost solution to the traffic congestion that’s strangling the Bay Area. Colleagues could still get together for team building and in-person collaboration. But as needed and on their own schedules and not 8-5, Monday through Friday.

Millennials can’t afford O.C. homes and would do well to look to the Inland Empire, study says – The Orange County Register

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Buying an Orange County home would be “a bad idea” financially for most millennials, while commuting from the Inland Empire may be a very good path to homeownership for them, according to a new study by the online real estate site Trulia.That may not be news to home seekers, but the study underscores the degree to which it makes financial sense for 25- to 34-year-olds to look to the east.

Source: Millennials can’t afford O.C. homes and would do well to look to the Inland Empire, study says – The Orange County Register

Not a likely outcome. Millennials aren’t keen on working set hours in centralized commuter offices (CCOs) or long commutes to get to and from them. And especially the super commutes of three plus hours a day that would come with the arrangement suggested here.

It’s official: Working from home is the worst

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“If it’s just about you banging out emails or writing a report, sure, you can do that wherever,” Waber said. “But the vast majority of stuff we do at work today—teamwork, not individual work—that is the stuff that really measurably suffers.” For big companies, that decline in productivity can be worth millions of dollars a year.

In a 2012 poll, 62% of employees said they found telecommuting to be socially isolating. And “jobs where individuals are most likely to be telecommuting involve sitting in front of a computer,” Allen said, so it makes sense that people working from home would get less exercise than those who have to commute.

Source: It’s official: Working from home is the worst

For many if not most knowledge workers, that is exactly what they do most of the day: sitting in front of a computer and writing documents and emails. And in many workplaces, they are expected to do that with minimal interaction with others, which is viewed as socializing and break time in the tradition of the water cooler — not working. The cultural ethic is nose to the grindstone in the style of the Industrial Age assembly line.

Tolan is certainly correct that in organizations that encourage collaboration, being face to face is ideal. But as Tolan suggests, most knowledge organizations do not operate as full time focus groups or think tanks. Constant co-located and spontaneous interaction among their members isn’t an organizational expectation. Tolan is also right in pointing out that not all knowledge workers have a suitable home office environment. A growing industry is stepping up to address this need with shared co-working office space in communities where knowledge workers live.

In addition, Tolan ignores the enormous business and personal cost to both knowledge organizations and their constituents to maintain what I term in my book Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century as centralized commuter offices (CCOs) that involve hours of wasted time spent each week traveling between home and office, often entailing significant distance and time. CCOs are unnecessary with today’s information and communications technology that is rendering the Industrial Age daily commute trip obsolete.

What Your CEO Should Know about Productivity, Profits, Work, and Family | Anne-Marie Slaughter | LinkedIn

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But we actually have a growing body of data in support of the proposition that working less means working better. This relationship between working better and working less holds particularly true in any job requiring creativity, the well­spring of innovation. Experts on creativity emphasize the value of nonlinear thinking and cultivated randomness, from long walks to looking at your environment in ways you never have before. Making time for play, as well as designated downtime, has also been found to boost creativity. Experts suggest we should change the rhythm of our workdays to include periods in which we are simply letting our minds run wherever they want to go. Without play, we might never be able to make the unexpected connections that are the essence of insight.

Source: What Your CEO Should Know about Productivity, Profits, Work, and Family | Anne-Marie Slaughter | LinkedIn

Anne-Marie Slaughter bores down to the essence of where value is added in knowledge work: freeing the mind to operate creatively — and not as an Industrial Age machine putting in set hours in an office or cubicle in a centralized commuter office.

As I wrote in my book Last Rush Hour, a lot of this creative thought is stimulated by something sedentary and often obese and out of shape  knowledge workers desperately need: prolonged exercise that gets blood flowing to the brain — the knowledge worker’s essential tool — and releases beneficial hormones. Stimulating that creativity thus offers the added bonus of potential enhanced health and lower health care utilization.