Offices: Don't Say Goodbye Just Yet!

By Erica and Karen

Working in an office was an essential part of our identity. We never were the work from home types. We’re pretty sure if we didn’t have our offices and plenty of smart, interesting, great people around us, we wouldn’t have loved our jobs as much as we did. Our children are pretty sure that, without offices to send us to, they would not have survived. We were, and continue to be, office junkies.

In her NYT op ed, Farewell, Office. You Were the Last Boundary Between Work and Home, Jennifer Senior writes about why offices will always be important. She talks about “integrators” who don’t mind taking down barriers between work and home and “segmenters” who do. We were “segmenters.” We liked getting dressed and “going” to work and then “going” home. We liked the physical separation.

But that doesn’t mean that life and work have to be, or even should be, equally segregated. Many of our lifelong social friendships began in the office. We both met our husbands at the office. (OK, we’re dweebs.) Our children often came to the office. They knew our colleagues and our colleagues knew them. Our closest and most rewarding mentoring relationships were forged in the office. We never could “balance” our work and our non-work lives. They were both a part of us. At any particular time on or the other might have required prioritization, but figuring out how to be where we we needed to be was a constant calculation.

We’ve been listening hard to the speculation of what post-pandemic work will look like. Will offices be as central to the next generation’s lives as they were to us and to our parents? Will people be as creative and productive—will work be as much fun—without the everyday and unscheduled human contact that was fundamental to our success? Will the emotional and intellectual satisfaction that comes with teamwork be replaced by communities formed around passions other than work? What will our national productivity look like? How will we take care of each other economically and emotionally if we are all on our own?

The answers to all of these are up for grabs and maybe we won’t know the answers for a decade. Change is going to come, and like all change it will be in fits and starts with many steps forward and a lot back, too. We have no doubt that the next generation will figure out what works. And, as they think about it, there are lessons from the past and new lessons from the pandemic that will inform how they think about the office.

Offices have been the place where information and education are shared, relationships are made, cultures are embedded and transmitted, institutions are built, important work is done. Great accomplishments are rarely single handed. Providing a physical place for the magic to happen surely must continue to be part of the equation.

At the same time, the acknowledgement that people can work effectively off site is huge. Some jobs, of course, cannot be done from home. Manufacturing plants, brick and mortar shopkeepers, cops on the beat, firemen, doormen, shop workers. But for others, the pandemic has shown us that we can adjust to new ways of doing old things. Telehealth, which was pooh-poohed for years, is a really good thing. Governor Cuomo and Bill and Melinda Gates are thinking about how to use technology to make both in person and virtual education more effective.

So great things will come of this epic shift in our lives. We look forward to seeing what evolves. But we don’t think the office will disappear.