Episode Details

With the shift to working from anywhere, many people have questioned why we still need an office. For others, getting everyone back into the office is seen as mission critical. In this episode we explore five reasons why you still need an office.

Hello and welcome to episode 101 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore the five reasons why you still need an office.

There has been a lot of debate and discussion about the need for offices. The global pandemic revealed just how possible it was for many people to work from anywhere. This has been combined with challenges moving people back into offices, while also maintaining a safe work environment. All of this is likely to lead to a shift in thinking about the need for, and role of, offices.

Most surveys reveal a mix of people who can't wait to get back into the office, people who never want to go in to the office again, and a larger group in the middle who want a mix. It's easy to foresee a challenging road ahead as organisations and individuals negotiate a seemingly endless range of options for people. Some organisations will no doubt declare it all to be too hard and push most people back into the office. Others will jump at the chance to save on prime real estate and reduce their office footprint significantly if not entirely.

But much of this debate and discussion misses the core question - what do we actually need an office for? And, to be clear, this is really about why we need to get our people together, whether that's at an office or some other venue.

Research suggests there are five main reasons to get people together:

1. Community - As people were forced to work from home, this was one of the most cited reasons why people missed the office. We are social animals and long for connection with others. Video conferencing doesn't match the connections people can build face-to-face.

2. Collaboration - While collaboration software and platforms can help, they fail to allow the kind of constructive conflict needed to truly collaborate and generate new ideas. To be clear, I'm not saying that all collaboration needs to happen face-to-face, but there are efficiencies provided by being in the same room at the same time when deeper collaboration is required.

3. Culture - "How we do things around here" is difficult to establish and sustain when we're not in an office together. Communicating strategy and direction, celebrating milestones and achievements, establishing agreed ways of operating - these are all much easier when we have a group of people in a room together. Without being physically together, it becomes much harder to build trust. People then tend to create identity with their team rather than the organisation. This can lead to conflict between teams and competing interests, rather than trying to work together to better the overall organisation.

4. Climate - It's difficult to generate a consistent experience of "how it feels to work here" when people are having such diverse experiences of the workplace. Getting people together helps to create a shared climate.

5. Capability - This, I believe, is the sleeper issue in the work from anywhere movement. Picture yourself at the start of your career. How much of your development occurred just by being around more experienced people, being invited into meetings to observe, and having that chance to be mentored? All of this is harder when people aren't together.

Now, please don't hear me wrong - this isn't an anti work from anywhere statement. In fact, I've been a work from anywhere guy for the best part of ten years. But it's easy to overlook all the seemingly small and incidental interactions that build