PANDEMIC EXPOSES FOLLY OF WORKING IN OFFICE TOWERS
The pandemic has given rise to a massive work-at-home experiment — the house a test tube, pyjamas a lab coat.
It’s early days, but what should our workplaces, our companies, our urban landscapes even, look like when the dust settles and all the swab kits and masks are put away?
I was struck by the utter desolation of Tunney’s Pasture the other day, while walking alone in a ridiculous wind. Acres of quiet asphalt, floors of unused desks, elevators going nowhere in towers of sealed, fluorescent emptiness. (There was, in truth, a smattering of humans here and there.)
Think of it. If we can empty an office campus of 10,000 employees, shutter all those cubicle farms — and still do the bulk of the work — what does this say about how we design work, and workspaces, in the post-pandemic world? Or how we plan roads or transit, or site “employment nodes,” as the laser-pointers like to say?
A neighbour put it this way: we empty the suburbs, clog our roads and highways with commuters, to gather in expensive, tax-funded skyscrapers for eight or 10 hours a day, and not on weekends, to accomplish what we might do from desks in a spare bedroom.
And on a massive scale. Public Services and Procurement Canada houses about 260,000 public servants across Canada, in 1,500 buildings, with seven million square metres of space, about 40 per cent of which is, on a typical day, empty.
Maybe, stuck at home but making the essential bureaucracy work, we’ve arrived at this moment in time: is there a better way to work?
“People have talked about telecommuting since, maybe the ’80s, but I think urban planners haven’t really wrapped their heads around what this could mean at scale,” said Robb Barnes, executive director of Ecology Ottawa, which has a keen interest in healthy cities.
“And I think this gives us some indication.”
Working from home seems a particularly potent alternative in a city like Ottawa, which has a huge administrative sector that works electronically. (Remarkable, is it not, that huge programs like the Canada Emergency Care Benefit got up and running so quickly, probably from 1,000 dining room tables?)
“One possible silver lining is that it might spark a culture change, where more employers are willing to experiment with different work-from-home policies, or think about more (at-home) days per week,” added Barnes.
“It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
And the feds, at least, are already moving that way. Its “activity-based workplace” pilot, being tried in about a dozen places in Ottawa, takes assigned desks away, frees staff to work from almost anywhere, but creates bright, roomy spaces for collaborating and meeting.
Charles Montgomery is the Vancouver-based author of Happy City, a book that looks at how urban design meshes with the well-being of inhabitants of dense cities around the world.
He is on the opposing end of the work-at-home panacea. He doesn’t like it.
“What’s striking to me is, many more people glamorized the idea of working at home before the pandemic than are doing so now,” he said.
“I work with a team of 10 and we miss each other terribly. We are less productive, and more anxious and more prone to conflict now than when we were able to work face to face.”
It may well be true that we should be decentralizing the core of large cities, he said. (The cost of housing, of downtown office space, the pressure on transit, may well be doing this for us.) Then why not more “complete neighbourhoods,” where residents can live, work and shop within a 15-minute walk?
Montgomery says economies that are growing these days are ultimately in the “idea business,” whether in technology or different types of media. And ideas, he said, can pop up in interactions that are serendipitous.
“Ideas come, often by accident, and frequently through light, social encounters with others.”
This is why high-tech workplaces, commonly, are more like clubhouses, rather than cubicle farms, he said. “Above all, the workplace is a social venue.”
He says he actually feels a physical chest pain from a combination of “digital overload,” isolation and Zoom fatigue. “The more time we connect with others online, the more distant we all seem, even when we’re talking to each other.”
Interesting insight.
I think we know this already, though. There are many smaller companies, service providers or associations that have expensive office space and are feeling a triple-whammy right now — revenue down, rent due, staff cobbling it together from home.
So, when the storm passes, the experiment ended, is it time for smaller, cheaper, more flexible work digs?