The Office Is Not Dead, It Just Stopped Pretending

Every few months someone declares the office dead. Having spent years inside flexible workspace, I think the truth is more interesting. The office did not die. It stopped pretending that showing up was the same as getting work done.

The old bargain

For a long time the office ran on a quiet bargain: presence equaled productivity. Be at your desk and you were working, whether or not anything got made. Flexible workspace was the first widely adopted challenge to that bargain, and once people experienced an alternative, the old logic could not be un-seen.

What people actually want from a workplace

Running coworking spaces taught me that people do not want to avoid the office. They want a reason to be there. Community, energy, a place to focus, the chance to bump into someone useful. When a space delivers that, people show up gladly. When it only offers a chair and an obligation, they do not. The Urban Land Institute wrote about how coworking was reshaping the office around exactly this idea.

The hybrid reality

What replaced the old model is not remote-only or office-only. It is a more honest arrangement where the workplace has to earn the commute. That is harder for employers, and far better for the people who work for them.

Where this leads

The winners will be the organizations and the spaces that treat the office as a product with a value proposition, not as a default. More in The Future of Work, the companion piece on what the coworking model got right, and my background.