The Saturday Morning Post: Change and the Office

Most people hate change, they resist it, they resent it, they want it to go away, they yearn for the "good old days." I have been chasized over the years for suggesting that people need to adjust to the new normal.  But we need to.  

My office is looking at options.  I lead one department of 5 people in an office with a couple of dozen departments and 250 desks.  After paying for empty space for 25 months, we have started to return to the office.  People were asked how many days a week they wanted to be in the office, and how many days they wished to work remotely.  The average in office is two days a week.  Only a handful of people have elected to be in 4 or 5 days a week.  (We have a core of 4 people who cover the front desk, mail, and operations who have to be in 4 days a week - they worked through the pandemic.) Fridays are a ghost town, typically less than 10% of the staff are in. 

In a managers meeting recently we were asked how many people wanted to return to the office full time, and not one hand in the meeting went up.  This was followed by a request for a careful analysis of how much office space we need to meet the new normal of office use.  

In my little department we are paying for 20 desk days per week, (we have fewer desks than people, one of my staffers was hired as a full time remote) and we are using 9 desk days per week.  Simple math - we are paying for more than twice as much office space as we are using.    

Efficiency requires a major change.  Sharing desks, sharing offices.  One model is my department pays for and uses five desks on Monday and Tuesday, another department pays for them and uses them on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday - we both pay for and anyone who wants to use them probably can, 90% of our office space is empty on Friday, if you want the big corner office with the sofas, it is probably empty on Friday. Please don't raid the bar.  

When I think about it, my office is wherever my office laptop computer is. Our current phone system allows me to forward my extension to any phone on the system, we are buying a new phone system that will tie our phones to our laptops.  Eliminating that box on the desk we think of as a phone.  I am looking forward to hearing the screams when the desk phones are removed later this year.  

I have been working in offices since 1979.  Traditional offices and desks, my office is filled with my stuff.  So this will require a change.  Working cleaner, making the personal stuff more portable. (I have a neat scales of justice clock in my office I will need to find a new home for.) 

I am very open to the change.  My colleagues are a little mixed, mostly a fear of change, a loss of identity in their space.  There are a couple of departments that are massively opposed. They are not saying they want to be in 5 days a week, but they don't want to desk share, they want "THEIR DESK" to be empty when they are not there. 

My desk, my 106 sq. ft. office (a little less than 10 sq. metres) costs us about $30,000 per year for rent, utilities, common space, and cleaning. And I am using half of that. Multiply that by five staff people, and we are spending a lot of money, on space we are not using and have no intent of using.  

Embrace the change.  It is going happen.