Do we really want the Bureau?

My office desk is a cluttered mess of books, stacks of folders, co-worker's gifts, and a slew of pens that have run out of ink. And, I like it too. They sit on either side of me, their desks are noticeably neater. Once we zoom out, we can see that the rest of our digital team, which is dispersed throughout an open space, is seated in the middle of the organization, while our print colleagues tend to work in cubicles. However, it is not entirely perfect: It is almost always bitterly cold, and it's nearly impossible to find a quiet place to edit. While we have working internet, coffee, and a printer, we can get our work done. The large windows overlook a highway. I perform a mental exercise each day in which I crumple up parts of the day and "throw" them out until tomorrow.

The offices are closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so I'm typing this in my sweatpants, in my living room. I'm usually having a problem with my internet at least twice a day. While answering emails and Slack messages, I exercise in the same space. By the time I am finished making dinner in the kitchen, I have mentally crumpled up my day. My role in the accidental grand experiment is nothing compared to the entire endeavour.

5% to 15% of Americans worked from home before the pandemic. Pre-Covid findings from a group from MIT, NBER, and Upwork indicate that about half of all Americans who were emp

loyed prior to Covid are working from home now. Even while many U.S. government workers return to the office, public health authorities are dealing with multiple ongoing outbreaks and new evidence of airborne transmission that could lead to extended office closures. According to a colleague in China, whose insights we value greatly, there was an outbreak in Beijing in late February, but other offices remained open as they implemented widespread monitoring and aggressive testing and tracking. This has been communicated to the Indian office workers, who have been told to work from home as much as possible. As reported in the October 2016 issue of Fortune, Covid restrictions are still in place in most European office buildings.

Although this shift appears sudden for some, the direction knowledge workers have been heading in has been gaining speed for quite some time. This statistic comes from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, who notes that the share of the labor force working from home has nearly tripled in the past 15 years. Covid-19 has turbocharged this movement, allowing

both the rewards and risks to be more clearly understood. For the most part, the research does show that remote work improves productivity, but as the industry continues to shift, we must stop and point out all of the existing harmful norms, including the "ideal worker" fallacy, which puts undue stress on parents and especially women (Joan Williams and Brigid Schulte both wrote smartly about this topic early in the pandemic, though new data is revealing a bleak picture of how forced remote work is impacting U.S. mothers in heterosexual dual-career households). Gigification has several interconnected implications for employees in knowledge work, the types of WFH (workforce flexibility) workers face, how employees develop their careers, and even how to negotiate. Everything is fair game.

When it comes to offices, we've been talking about office space for a long time, with a primary focus on how they influence productivity, collaboration, and the environment. Many people know, for instance, that open office designs have lots of side effects, and that it is possible to design work spaces to produce certain outcomes. We are learning more about how to plan for and help employees prepare for returning to work, as well as having conversations with employers about making WFH a more permanent option.

For companies that have come through the earlier stages of the Covid-19 WFH life, we wanted to synthesize this research and add to it by bringing in experts from various disciplines, such as organizational behavior, workspaces, and collaboration. Whether a rotating or hybrid work environment is most suitable, as well as how long employees will work from home, will be some of the key decisions that must be made about your company's workplace. These decisions have both financial and personal ramifications; moreover, they are long-lasting and will affect how people work together and identify themselves for years to come. In turn, these decisions will determine the overall success of your business or career.

We hope to continue contributing to ongoing and creative conversations about the future of the office by providing a survey of everything from early research on how people are adapting to WFH life, to how workers have experienced past office innovations, to more existential questions about what an office is truly for and what people may lose if these spaces go away.

As of this month, we'll be working from home exclusively. I'm not sure if my desk looks the way I left it; it seems as if all of the “worker” aspects of myself are scattered all over it. It's ready for me to start fresh if it has been completely cleansed and disinfected (someday). My heart is nostalgic, to be sure, and I might be using the “fresh start” metaphor too frequently. However, I'm also open to other possibilities, as well as what could be possible when it comes to how I work and where. In this series, we hope that you'll take this forward with you.