\n<\/p>\n
I want you to concentrate. Cast your mind back. Try to recall what life was like in the Before Times. Do you remember \u2026 The Commute?<\/p>\n
Way back, before the pandemic, many of us would leave our homes early in the morning and travel to our collective workspaces. Then, when we were finished doing all the work things for the day, we would leave the workspace and travel back home. We would do this because \u2026 well, because that\u2019s the way things were always done. We physically moved ourselves from a living place to a working place (and back again) every day, because we accepted the unspoken corporate assumption that everyone needs to be in the same place for work to get done.<\/p>\n
This approach made sense back when people were manufacturing locomotive boilers in a factory or building cars on an assembly line, because you need a lot of people working together to physically turn massive crankshafts or to install each individual car part. If Fred or Carl doesn\u2019t show up for work, then the remaining guys can\u2019t get the crankshaft to move, or the fender doesn\u2019t get soldered on properly, or whatever. The work can\u2019t be accomplished unless everyone is there to pitch in.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re in the service industry today, pouring lattes or changing dressings or fixing leaky pipes, then your physical presence continues to be necessary. But as our economy has increasingly shifted from a manufacturing base to a knowledge base \u2014 as more of us exchanged our blue collars for white ones and shifted from group tasks to individual tasks \u2014 we forgot to update our thinking about workplaces. We unconsciously carried over the factory model into the office space. We continued to leave our homes and commute to a centralized location even though, in many cases, we didn\u2019t need to be in direct physical proximity with our co-workers anymore.<\/p>\n
Was it sometimes helpful to ask a co-worker to look over some advertising copy or give some advice for closing a sale? Sure. But these were exceptions; for most of the day, we sat on individual chairs at individual desks in individual offices (and then cubicles) and did our work individually. Work was something everyone \u201ccame in\u201d to do, whether or not everyone needed to be \u201cin\u201d to get the work done.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s taken two years of rolling pandemic lockdowns to shake us from our torpid habit of gathering together only to work alone. Over the next decade, a Stanford professor estimates, US workers will spend a quarter of their work time at home<\/a> \u2014 \u201cthe number of person-days in the office is never going back to pre-pandemic average, ever.\u201d This has obvious ramifications for corporate office space<\/a>, employee well-being<\/a>, and even climate change<\/a>. But the workplace itself is ground zero for this change, and there will be enormous ramifications in this regard alone.<\/p>\n