Before Stripe moved out of its third office, the head of workplace sent out lots of surveys about the design of the fourth office. She asked employees whether they wanted soft seating or hard seating, certain kinds of coffee, certain room naming schemes, etc. But in the two months before the move, she sent a hilarious email throwing all the survey results in the trash. Paraphrasing: “I’ve surveyed everyone! It turns out 50% of you want more hard seating, and 50% more soft. It seems like half of you like coffee from this place, and the other half want it from the other one. We’re equally split on decisions around big and small conference rooms, phone booths, and everything you could possibly imagine. So, I’m going to be making all the decisions from here on out.” That’s how Stripe ended up with an office that played weird language tapes in the bathrooms (you could learn how to say “give me a beer” in Chinese as you took a shit), conference rooms named for nautical tools (sextant, anyone?) and “hot desks” everywhere. I love an opinionated, thoughtful, creative leader!
I’ve been thinking a lot about office spaces as I’ve been commuting to an office these days (an hour and change on the train!) The office is a building, a mindset, and a container for community. It’s an outgrowth of whatever culture you want to foster in your company. As the culture crumbles, the office deteriorates.
Office buildings are melting away. If you haven’t heard, the commercial real estate market is in the dumpster. “Office property prices have declined significantly in recent quarters, with an index of office property prices more than 30% below its pre-pandemic level as of September 2023. The U.S. office vacancy rate has risen from 11% in late 2019 to 18% today, higher than at any point during the 2008 global financial crisis.” (Source: Moody’s Analytics)
But even the worst of them have some kind of ineffable quality. I’ll first say: there is something very magical about the office building. It’s like going to a Starbucks in a foreign country, or a Marriott in a random American city. It is remarkable that someone has been able to create a Starbucks in Delhi that looks exactly like one in Bellevue, it is equally remarkable that the Deloitte offices also look the same in Delhi and Bellevue. You know exactly what to expect.
Nevertheless, some offices are amazing. Look at this building in Sweden, called the Kuggen. The shades rotate around as the sun moves. The architects describe the building: “The plan is designed to foster opportunities for informal meetings. The lower floors house a Science Park where students can meet with representatives of the business community. The second level is also designed for public use, with its circulation paths providing the most intense interaction between the building’s occupants and its visitors—they can even be used as exhibition spaces. The floors above have general-use leasable offices. The building has only one elevator, making the stair the primary means of vertical circulation, which promotes contact between people and is also good for their health. By equipping the building with motion-activated lighting and ventilation sys¬tems, energy is used only where it is really needed. The result is a building with a calculated energy consumption under 55 kWh/sqm annually.”
Business Insider, The Office Crush: And as for what goes on inside offices itself? Crushes! This absolutely unhinged Business Insider article claimed 50% of people have an office crush? And it’s what gets them up in the morning to go to work?! 50%?! This seems wild. Can you please reply to me and tell me if you have one?! Have I just worked in incredibly asexual places? “Year after year, in annual surveys from the Society for Human Resource Management, about half of respondents consistently report having a crush on a colleague. All around the office, your managers, direct reports, and peers are spending some untold portion of company time daydreaming about or flirting with each other.”
LARP-ing your job: Offices help you LARP (live action role play, like in a Civil War re-enactment!) your job. Slack had published a survey that highlights 27% of executives use visible activity (such as what time people show up and how many hours they log) as a primary measure of productivity. The same survey found that, on average, employees spend 32% of their time “on performative work that gives the appearance of productivity” because the boss is looking over their shoulder, literally. If anyone’s created a digital solution to LARPing your job while getting rid of the office, it’s… Slack. I find it so ironic that Slack, of all places, is warning about the risk of performative work by showing up to offices, when the real performative work is sending a little message on Slack as proof of life?!
Revisiting work from home research?: This essay, pre-economic downturn in tech, suggested that WFH would accelerate because talented workers have more choice than ever. This turned out to be patently false. Layoffs and impending layoffs from automation hang over the heads of white collar workers, leading people to do whatever their employers require. Fancy benefits? Gone. Demands to work from home? Voiced quietly and with much less leverage than they used to be. I am genuinely curious how much power labor has to work from home any longer, and think we need some post-pandemic follow up research here.
The office and its ends by Nikil Saval: It’s so funny to read a 2014 article on this topic (which spends an awful lot of time on Github’s office as the future of offices) and then contrast it with Nadia’s take on the end of the Github office. One thing both articles agree on is that the office as a physical building is the embodiment of the company’s culture. When Github was earnestly engaged in the mission of re-creating the way software was built, sans managers but with kooky employees who identified as raccoon-dogs, the office was a symbol of a magical world that could become the future. When Github started to tear itself apart with its own microcosm of the broader debate about technology’s values, the office also was torn apart and then disappeared. It was a monument to a set of ideals, and when those ideals were challenged, the building literally crumbled.
I wonder if office workers will start to unionize: Office workers have had very little reason to do so in the past, but are increasingly becoming more and more unionized as certain “office” professions are torn apart. Journalists are in unions, and I was surprised that the engineers and PMs at those companies are also in the unions too. I am curious to see how this develops as more and more white collar work becomes commoditized and not “equity holding.” I know most people who subscribe to my newsletter believe tech unionization is a sign of the decline of the engineer and the technologist profession at large, which I’d say…is absolutely correct, and is why unionizing is the protection measure for the disempowered, no-longer-upwardly-mobile worker.
Severance’s Office Design: A friend recommended that I watch Severance, a creepy show about people who have to “clock in and clock out” by wiping their memories of their work self…entirely. The office design in Severance is so intentional, including the oil paintings of the company’s lore (remind you of anything?)
Office design trends through the decades: So visual! Love the images. I also do think a lot about WeWork’s design influence on offices, and what its downfall means for the future of office design.
For me, the most exciting thing of building a startup was I will be able to setup our own office! We decided to go with always in-office setup and hence wanted to create one cozy place for ourselves! Did that 1 year ago and then that became a routine.
Last couple of months I got a chance to visit bay area! The startup offices there were too beautiful and thoughtful. Now after I am back, we started working on the office again in our free time. You are right, office is a mindset, and so it should have a character!