Prepare for the extended workplace – and why the office is remote

Andy Lake has for long been a strong advocate for what he calls smart or flexible work. He describes it as flexible working practices, using new technologies and new styles of workplaces, supporting more choice and mobility. Activity-based workplaces is one of the outcomes, although smart working is more about improving work and productivity, rather than a certain design of premises. The post-pandemic scenario shows clearly that smart working to a high degree involves not assuming the office should be the centre of all knowledge work.

“We still tend to think that the office is the place to be. One example is Google’s CEO, who said that he is expecting people to work three days a week from the office and two days from ‘wherever they work best’. But shouldn’t they work five days a week from wherever they work best? The basic smart work principle is that work gets done at the most appropriate location at the most appropriate time. It depends on the nature of the tasks. We need to think in terms of the extended workplace,” Andy Lake states.

Everyone is remote

Remote working has been forced to be the current way of office working during lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions all over the world. Andy Lake stresses that it should be considered just as normal and equal to working in the office.

“I think one of the interesting developments is that some organisations are adopting a ‘virtual first’ or ‘remote first’ approach. These are designing their ways of working to ensure the best possible experience for those who are working on a distributed basis,” he says.

This contrasts with many organisations which are trying to model remote work on the experience from the traditional workplace. That is a mistake, Andy Lake says.

“The word ‘remote’ implies people are somehow remote from where the important things are happening. However, the people in the office may find themselves in a minority. They are then equally remote. So, we need to move toward seeing the traditional workplace as one location amongst equals. All places we can work from need to be treated on an equal basis. From that, there is a challenge in how to design workplaces with a smooth interface between each of the locations. The traditional model of desks and meeting rooms just does not work.”

Do you think this is actually going to happen, or will people be forced back to a kind of office-business-as-usual?

“I think distributed working is here to stay. There are quite a lot of people who are unwilling to go back to the workplace. They are still worried about covid, partly from being in the office but perhaps more from traveling with public transport. People have found that they can work elsewhere and that their employer has the equipment to do that. It is an attractive option that saves both time and money for the employee.”

If this is happening, why should employers offer and invest further in offices?

“I think it is an opportunity. The concept of activity-based design has been given a boost. More space is designed for collaboration, other spaces are designed as quiet spaces, project spaces and so on. I think this is an opening for some new ideas. One area of evolution is how technology fits in to all of this. Just converting a meeting room with a bigger screen for video meetings will not work.”

How do you mean, why does that not work?

“The size of the meeting rooms is usually wrong. The acoustics are often poor, and it affects how people in these rooms can be heard by people elsewhere and vice versa. People need smaller spaces, a mixture of enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces. I am sure there will be a lot more innovation in this direction. I know, for example, a couple of organisations that treat all meetings as virtual. Everyone signs in on their own laptop with headphones, rather than having challenging hybrid meetings in traditional meeting rooms.”

Your point seems to be that there is no longer any need to separate work from other places?

“There are already completely virtual organisations that are doing well. More organisations are also recruiting people without considering geography, so you can get the right person wherever they are. Their attendance at a central workplace might be just occasional. In that sense, there is a declining need for an office. On the other hand, there are a lot of organisations that do physical work as well, like in the engineering sector. They do have a need for premises. Their people need offices as well as access to the hands-on work.”

The pandemic has resulted in a huge impact for video meeting services. Will we ever meet again like before, do we need collaboration spaces at all?

“One of the reasons for having an office is that people like to get together, both for professional and social reasons. New recruits, either in the profession or in the organisation, need to meet experienced people and be trained. Also, the way we look at focus work is changing. The traditional model is that people are doing focused work on their own. Then they share it with others and the collaboration starts. Now, with the technologies we have, a lot more can be done focusing together, merging collaboration and focus work. We need spaces designed for that, enabling people to do it together in the same space – or joining from elsewhere. The traditional open plan office dominated by desks is the completely wrong environment for this.”

Has the pandemic helped to raise the awareness of and potential in what you call smart working?

“Definitely. There has been a considerable acceleration and we have overcome many barriers. On the other hand, I think there is an issue with just thinking about whether people should work at home or at the office, rather than discussing how we improve the work. Adapting the old work to hybrid work or whatever we call it, is a mistake. That is just doing the same work in different places. This leads us to fill our days with Teams- or Zoom-meetings. Instead, we should think of how we can interact more dynamically, liberating time from these endless meetings to be more productive.”

It is not only about the space, but as much about how we work?

“Yes. First design the work – then design the workplace.”

Text: Lars Wirtén