Is office working now a thing of the past?
REMEMBER offices? You know, those places many of us used to go to work every day. No, not the smallest room in your own house, but a big room in an entirely different building, where loads of people would all go together.
It’s easy for the idea of office working to feel like a thing of the past already, with the sudden explosion of home working after the Covid-19 pandemic (you knew we’d have to mention that somewhere).
The number of people working from home has gone from around five per cent last year to around 50 per cent in April this year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
There are obviously plenty of jobs where you cannot work from home, but for anyone in an office, all it has taken is an internet connection, a laptop and a desk and you’re away.
No commute, no packed lunches and no shared workspaces.
Meetings are held over videolink, through one of the online providers like Zoom, Google or WhatsApp, and you can have a chat with your colleagues over a live messenger service instead of face to face. There were, of course, some benefits to being in the office. You could walk up and chat to anyone, without having to reach out in an email or digital chat.
The tea round must surely be the best part of office life: you make one round of hot drinks for up to half-adozen colleagues and other people would then bring you hot drinks for the rest of the day.
There were usually some treats in the office, albeit at an extortionate cost, from the vending machine. It took me some time before I realised I was not going to fit that machine into the back of my car with the office chair, laptop and screens.
There was also that feeling of going home, instead of just finishing work and moving from one room in your house to another, as we now do.
The trip home from work, whether you drove, cycled, walked or took the bus, provided some distance between your workplace and your home life – as much mentally as physically.
For others, the chance to have a different wardrobe for the office is something they probably miss – it’s much more difficult to power dress for an online meeting where most of your colleagues can only see your head and possibly shoulders. Maybe powerful-looking hats will become more in vogue in the future.
It is easy to think that the changes we have had to go through this year are temporary; that we will all be back in the office by this time next year, remembering that time when we all worked from home.
But somehow, I’d be surprised. Setting up an office is an expensive business, and it is a cost that many firms will no longer want to bear any more, particularly as they are already chasing the losses incurred from the months that the economy all but shut down.
Offices that close are unlikely to be opened up again, I’d wager, not least where bosses realise that they can instead employ a greater number of staff – or let fewer of their workers go – by foregoing a physical premises.
Such a change would surely be cheered on heartily by green groups who realise it would mean cutting a huge number of journeys every day.
Workers themselves, while having to fork out for their own electricity, internet service and the like, may also find the benefits of remote working outweigh their desire to have the tea round back again.
The costs of going to work – the travel, possibly with parking or bus fares, the lunches and maybe extra clothes just for the office – would be cut dramatically if you only had to wander into your spare room when it was time for work.
So let’s raise a homemade cup of tea to the office. It was good while it lasted...