Thread by @chris_herd

The media would have you believe it’s 50/50 whether people want to return to the office or continuing to work remotely after Covid-19

The reality is far clearer

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

90% of never want to work in an office again full-time
50% of never want to work in an office ever again

The dissonance around this is huge

People who love offices *love offices* and think everyone else feels the same way as them.

The problem is that clearly, most don’t

The office is broken & always has been

It’s great if you're in a specific demographic. It discriminates/disqualifies a huge number of people who find it impossible to work from there

- single parents
- those caring for family
- people with health conditions/impairments

Remote work should enable the most diverse and inclusive workplaces in history

This is the most important thing yet it’s almost universally washed over

People say we need the office because:

- collaboration
- water cooler chat
- lonely/isolating remote work is

Such bullshit

The reason they want to return to the office is that they are scared and don’t trust their teams

They're concerned that if we move to a system that measures outcome rather than just the time you spend sitting in a chair they will be detrimentally impacted

We must never accept what’s happened before because it’s the way things have always been

The office transplanted factory line workdays onto knowledge workers because it was familiar

Then the office became the only place we could access the tech we needed to do our work

Work in an office? There's no difference between:

🌎 remote on different continents
🏢 on different floors of same office

In both situations people use:

📲 slack
📧 email
☎️ phone

Convenience will always beat proximity

We travel to a grey building in a city center to work on tech designed to be used anywhere

We’ve already been working remotely for at least a decade while continuing to pay the tax on our quality of life that the office extracts

This is the definition of insanity

As that’s happened the amount of time it occupies within our life has been elongated by transparent measures to squeeze as many hours — not productivity or outcomes — out of workers as possible

Food on-premise, masseuses, games consoles, ping pong tables. Toys

Offices have become distraction factory adult kids clubs which are the worst place imaginable to do deep focussed work

They actively destroy productivity while expecting longer hours to do the same amount of work. I’d rather do a higher quality of work more quickly

The office became the anchor of social life

The people we spend the most time with selected by HR teams. The deepest common bond a dependence on the economic success of that business

If that ends the relationship typically does. Our most frequent social contact our most fragile

The office increasingly contributes to the shallow superficial relationships that plague modern life

We don’t need more relationships that never go below the surface, We need more time with the people we care about most doing the things we love

Friends, family, and hobbies

Remote isn’t even about a new way of working

It’s a shift in human patterns of living and access to opportunity

Another 'issue' is that young people suffer:

- They don’t have space in their cramped homes
- They need the mentorship of the office
- They must learn Professionalism

Nonsense peddled by Office Saviors with misaligned incentives

Remote work doesn’t mean you never meet in person.

Cramped living an implication of big cities and the need to live close enough to only have to commute daily

Millennials & younger gens build relationships online

The final piece, that irks me most, is the most wrong

‘What about vulnerable jobs and the losses they will suffer’ at the expiration of the ‘Office Economy?’

Do they not understand economics?

This is typically suggested by people who don’t give a shit about the people losing their jobs (hello Deutsche bank and their moronic suggestion of a 5% tax on remote workers)

It assumes that these roles won’t move to wherever remote workers end up working from. I still buy coffee and lunch. Actually, I buy a lot more of both. The difference being I buy it locally, not from a faceless chain on the high street

The roles they are referring to expect workers to commute hours a day

This extracts a massive toll in terms of the high cost of living and low disposable income

Remote work leads to a renaissance of commuter towns that sit abandoned during the week killing local commerce

That’s not to be naive to the fact there will be issues

But to succumb to the suggestion of bag holding commercial real estate holders isn’t right nor should we accept their idiotic arguments for a continuation of a way of life that taxes our quality of life so much

People love remote work and ultimately employees will vote with their feet

The only companies that can afford to go back to an office full-time are monopolies

Even they’ll be forced to pay even higher wages to compete for talent that wants to work remotely

Companies that go back to being office-first lose all their best people to their biggest competitors

They will then be killed slowly then suddenly

They will bleed talent while becoming less cost-efficient. Every office first company will lose to a remote-first competitor

This is a replay of brick and mortar retail vs. eCommerce. Initially, everyone thought stores would win because nobody would buy things online

When they did it destroyed brick and mortar

This is about to happen to office working

By 2030, there will be 128m+ roles done remotely most of the time

Modern life has become digital
Work must become digital as well

It will provide access to better opportunities to billions of people globally. It will uncouple opportunity from location

The office should be dead

Killed by remote work and living

The biggest quality of life upgrade in a generation