A few years ago, I got asked by someone why I don’t have an office. They were confused that I didn’t have one, despite having four people in my co

The Pandemic Was Office Culture and Middle Management's "God Is Dead" Moment

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2021-07-23 21:00:06

A few years ago, I got asked by someone why I don’t have an office. They were confused that I didn’t have one, despite having four people in my company. It was a bewildering conversation full of sentences like “but you should have an office,” with no further substance other than questions that looped back to “how companies work.” I kept a WeWork with an address for many years simply to use their conference rooms, and found that nobody asked whether I had an office anymore, because they assumed that having a conference room meant that I had a room upstairs, which I neither had nor needed to have.

Similarly, I’d get asked why I didn’t “hire more people” and could never seem to satisfy anyone with “I don’t need to.” There is a professional-cultural trope with companies that your success is attuned directly to the number of people you have and the amount of real estate you occupy, and that is the matrix through which your business is measured. I can understand where that came from - most companies (my own included) don’t want to share revenues, at times because they’re bad, at times because they don’t want to give any ammo to their competitors, and at times because they just don’t want anyone to know their business.

In any case, the pandemic forcing every office-based company into remote work has ripped the bandaid off with most of the skin, making some companies realize that going to a building to use the computer to do work was remarkably similar to using one at home. It also bruised the idea that those who are “worthy” of working from home are some form of a magical self-starter, above the crop of regular people who must be herded into the office and whipped by managers to keep going. Companies didn’t immediately implode because they didn’t have people in the office, work still got done, customers still paid, the world went on despite expensive pieces of real estate sitting empty. And they still are, with office vacancies growing across the country.