The new commute – to your home office

The big FANG companies – Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google – love referring to their gigantic establishments as ‘campuses’.

This gives them an agreeably bookish, academic air. Campuses are portrayed as offering a new way of working; somewhere to work, rest and play. Google says that ‘building a sense of community is one of the first steps to creating a more positive company culture’.

However, as we all know, there is nothing really new under the sun, and these campuses and their owners’ dreams would come as no surprise to the 19th-century Cadbury family who created the model village of Bournville near Birmingham for their workers.

The similarities are marked. In the Internet world, just as in Bournville, thousands of people, employed by one company, are transported into work at the campuses on company transport, and are given offices, laboratories, restaurants, cafés, kitchens, gyms, sports fields, shops, gardens, crèches, swimming pools, lounges, medical services, evening classes and more. The chocolate entrepreneurs provided all this and then went even further by building schools for employees’ children and houses for the staff.

However, a Covid-19-shaped spanner has been thrown into the works, threatening to derail the FANG companies’ lofty ambitions. Whatever you call their huge buildings, the pandemic emptied them while everyone worked from home. Many of the staff found they liked it; Facebook and Google will allow staff to carry on at home until the end of 2020. Twitter has even said staff need never come back.

The companies, so keen to foster an internal sense of duty and community, have been forced to think afresh. The head of Google’s ‘People Innovation Lab’ has spoken about the difficulties of maintaining the company ethic remotely. The head of Apple is concerned that they risk losing opportunities for fruitful collaboration by chance.

As things stand, if you don’t need to be in the office all the time, from now on you probably won’t be, COVID or no COVID. Companies have discovered that online meetings work, productivity does not suffer and overheads reduce.

International conferences have had their bluff called, too – irritating to some academics who regard these junkets as a perk of the job. They must now present their research online. Organisers have found that this is just as efficient, more people attend and it’s cheaper.

Indeed, I expect to see house-builders begin to include small ‘working from home’ rooms in new houses. They might call them ‘work-life-balance flex points’, but really it will be the return of the study.

All that said, I am a big believer in the pendulum theory: whenever society moves in a certain direction, it carries on to a tipping point and then turns back.

So don’t be surprised if, once we have abandoned our offices and moved online, some brilliant business idea emerges: why not get all the staff into one large room, get them talking and exchanging ideas in a random and exciting manner?

And once we’ve done that, someone else will propose giving people private rooms so that they can think without distraction – and suddenly offices will be as they were in the 1950s.

And then someone will suggest we might as well all work from home – and off we’ll go again.