Tag: centralized commuter offices

The ongoing paradox of the SF Bay Area

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The transit agency suffered Thursday from the same woes that impacted service the day before with no trains running between the Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord stations in the East Bay. A bus bridge ferried passengers between the two stations and the entire system operated with more than 50 cars fewer than usual.

Source: Down at least 50 cars, BART chaos expected to spill into Friday – SFGate

This story points up the continuing paradox of the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the nation’s most information and communications technologically advanced metro areas of the United States. It has all the tools to operate in a distributed, 21st century business environment. But it remains stuck in the 1970s (when BART went into service), with its residents needlessly schlepping back and forth each weekday to centralized, commute-in office buildings and enduring much wasted time and frustration.

5 reasons why ‘no office’ is better than ‘some office’ | Paul Miller | LinkedIn

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Two weeks ago I was given a tour around the iconic new London headquarters of a large financial services company. They had considered many aspects of the shared working areas, pop-up meeting spaces, quiet areas and how to subtly influence better collaborative working. There is just one problem for this company – and for almost every other large organisation I know that is investing in ‘future workplaces’. No matter how many comfy lounges you have and how good the coffee, workers are voting with their feet and leaving offices.

Source: 5 reasons why ‘no office’ is better than ‘some office’ | Paul Miller | LinkedIn

Just recently came across this thoughtful post by Paul Miller, CEO and founder of the Digital Workplace Group. While many observers of the changing world of knowledge work still see a place for a centralized, commute-in office (CCO), refurbished as a comfortable space to meet up with colleagues and collaborate some part of the work week, Miller sees it as no longer serving a useful purpose.

He even goes as far as to predict the CCO will in the 21st century become an obsolete white elephant. Citing his own company’s experience, Miller argues that organizations that try to adopt a virtual work culture but retain the CCO will suffer an identity crisis of sorts and related in group/out group adverse organizational dynamics.

Suburban office parks are dying because young people don’t want to drive there | MNN – Mother Nature Network

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At a New Year’s Eve party, I was talking to a business exec running a tech company located in a suburban office building. He was complaining about the number of times he would interview a person who would say he wasn’t crazy about taking the subway and then a bus all the way out to the ‘burbs every day. The exec got increasingly frustrated and at one point responded “So get a car! That’s what grown-ups do when they get jobs!” The candidate responded that he didn’t know how to drive, didn’t have a license, and would keep looking for a job that allowed him to use a bike or transit. This scenario has played out more than once, so the company is now looking for new office space downtown. The suburban office building in his business sector is functionally obsolete. It may well become what we used to call a “see-through” — a glass box with nothing inside.

Source: Suburban office parks are dying because young people don’t want to drive there | MNN – Mother Nature Network

There’s actually a bigger story here. Centralized commuter offices are also falling out of favor because they come with substantial geographical access challenges in sprawling metro areas. Plus as the story notes, millennials aren’t keen on bearing the non tax deductible expense of getting to and from them by car in congested daily commute trips.

The solution here isn’t moving the office — a 20th century approach — but rather moving the work by leveraging today’s 21st century information and communications technology to make work more accessible without the time and money suck of the daily commute. That way, people can work in their residential communities rather than having two communities: one in which they live and another where they work, located in a distant suburb or downtown.

Conversation with Kate Lister, President, Global Workplace Analytics

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Global Workplace Analytics conducts independent research and consults on emerging workplace issues and opportunities, specializing in making the management case for workplace flexibility, well-being programs, mobile work, activity-based work settings, and other agile workplace strategies.

In this podcast, Kate Lister shares her observations on how the world of knowledge work is has evolved and continues to change under the growing influence of information and communications technology that’s dispersing it out of traditional 8-5, Monday through Friday centralized commuter office (CCO) settings. Lister also discusses how this trend lowers real estate and human resource costs for employer organizations.

While UK organizations are in the lead, a tipping point has not yet been reached and won’t until more knowledge workers demand change, according to Lister, and employers realize it is far easier to recruit and retain engaged employees by adopting agile work policies. Lister predicts that by 2020, 25 to 33 percent of knowledge workers will be working outside of CCOs as offices function more as meeting and collaboration spaces rather than full time workplaces.

Facebook’s 10-Mile, $10,000 Solution to Workers’ Long Commutes | Boomtown | News Fix | KQED News

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We know all about the legions of tech workers who live in fun, urbane San Francisco and commute to work in Silicon Valley. They’ve been blamed for driving up rents in the city. And the luxury buses that carry them to and from Google, Apple, Yahoo and other tech campuses have been likened to “spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed” to rule over the locals.Now, one big Silicon Valley company is trying to get its employees to move closer to work. Facebook is offering payments of $10,000 and up to workers who relocate to within 10 miles of its main campus, just off Highway 84 at the western end of the Dumbarton Bridge.


Source: Facebook’s 10-Mile, $10,000 Solution to Workers’ Long Commutes | Boomtown | News Fix | KQED News

Wouldn’t it be far easier and less costly to both Facebook and its employees to simply go virtual to end the time wasting three hour daily commutes endured by staff living in San Francisco? And do employees really need to be sitting in a cubicle to do their jobs and have co-located face time collaboration Monday through Friday?

The irony here is these Silicon Valley companies innovated information technology tools that erase time and distance in business communication and collaboration, yet remain mired in the pre-information, Industrial Age economy where knowledge work is centralized in commute-in offices. Those tools enable collaboration without the commute.

Another option Facebook should consider along with other Silicon Valley companies is bringing the work closer to the workers by using on demand “office as a service” providers in San Francisco and elsewhere instead of building massive commuter campuses and deploying bus fleets to bring the workers to the work.

Conversation with Michael Shear on distributed office spaces

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Much of the discussion around the decentralization of knowledge work out of centralized commute-in offices is on telework — which for many connotes working from home. But that’s just one way today’s advanced information and communications technologies (ICT) can be utilized to manage transportation demand and traffic congestion, particularly for those who lack suitable home office space or don’t wish to work at home. Another is distributed office spaces located in communities where knowledge workers live offering social interaction, professional collaboration and IT support without the long commute and the stress and wasted time of rush hour traffic. Instead of thinking of access to centralized commuter offices via transportation infrastructure, a new way of thinking is emerging that flips the focus to providing access to knowledge workers where they live via ICT infrastructure.

Michael Shear heads the nonprofit Broadband Planning Initiative and Strategic Office Networks LLC (Website). He works with communities and organizations through public-private partnerships to establish and manage distributed workplace networks. These benefit knowledge workers by making work more accessible and employers by providing access to a broader labor market and better staff retention. Communities also gain “gas dollars” that would otherwise be spent on commuting and related costs by keeping them in the community. With increasing traffic congestion and reduced proximity to jobs in many metro areas as well as concerns over natural and human caused events in urban centers posing a disruptive threat to organizations, Shear believes a tipping point for broader adoption of distributed community office spaces is at hand. He has written several LinkedIn posts on the topic that can be viewed here.

California falling short in push for more clean vehicles

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Even as California sells itself as an environmental success story during the United Nations summit here, the state is in danger of failing to meet its own targets for getting clean vehicles on the road.

Source: California falling short in push for more clean vehicles

Another strategy the state should adopt is to cut down on daily commute trips by encouraging employer organizations (including itself) to more widely adopt distributed work. Rather than driving to a centralized commuter office in another distant community, people would work in their own communities in co-working spaces shared by multiple employers as well as in home-based 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.