Illustration by Rachel Wada
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I know I’m living in a dream world to imagine my office life of yesterday coming back any time soon. Yet, I can’t help my childish frustration when I hear influential tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Shopify suggesting that they are doing their employees a favour by already announcing a shift to primarily work-from-home in the postpandemic future.
I get that cutting down on commuting emissions is good for the world and I know that companies are keen to save on real estate costs. I’m an ardent supporter of personal flexibility that makes work manageable for everyone at every stage. But for organizations to claim that confining social animals to their places of rest, family and solace while they make a living is a good idea, is actually a very bad idea.
Right now, the office needs some good PR. In the past three years alone, I’ve rented three offices for my software startup, been part of four different co-working spaces and met my clients in dozens of their own offices. I’ve worked in spaces that were stunning (and honestly a bit over the top) and some that were overcrowded, windowless and questionably clean.
Regardless of how they looked, these offices were vibrant gathering places filled with interesting people doing fascinating things – together. They were containers for a lot of laughter, joy, friendship and camaraderie. They were spaces that gave life to all types of learning and led to the building of businesses, communities and careers. As a leader in my company, I’m trying desperately to recreate these real-life moments. I chat casually with my team and try to understand how they’re doing as people in this crazy time, we laugh, we talk about books we’ve read, we ask if each other’s families are hanging in there. We’ve even had some really funny wine-downs with hilarious team trivia. In those moments, glimmers of our past office life emerges.
I ought to be reasonably well positioned to keep my team connected, I’m a leader at a company that makes tools to drive team cohesion. But despite my best efforts, I’m still falling down at keeping the same level of connectivity alive. It’s hard to recreate the laughs enjoyed over your colleagues' reactions to your fashion-forward mom-jeans, the battles over whether peanut butter stays in the fridge or on the counter or who ate the last slice of the cake your CEO wanted during a late-night meeting. It’s hard to recreate the small gesture of kindness by grabbing someone’s favourite coffee when you know they are too busy to leave their desk all day. It’s also hard to recreate the human connection created during the moments when your colleagues see you in tears over the loss of a big client.
I hear people suggest that because we can see one another’s choice of living-room art, we are creating deeper personal connections than we did before. We’re not closer because we can see how tidy one another’s houses are or what time of day our children get out of their pyjamas. The deep connections come from seeing people flow through their day and flowing through it with them. By helping them figure out tough problems and knowing how they celebrate the wins.
I love my work, it’s part of my identity and from it I get a sense of community. I know I’m not alone. How can we preserve that sense of community if we have no place to go? How can we separate ourselves from the labels we wear at home if we don’t ever get a chance to leave it? Can we really slip from parent to sales executive with the click of a calendar invite? How do we continue to apprentice one another if no one can observe us? How can we learn from one another if every quick question requires a Zoom call? How can we casually build on one anothers' ideas as we see a pair of colleagues thinking about a new solution on a whiteboard? Or overhear someone solving a problem similar to ours? It saddens me to imagine some people’s first day of work is in their living room.
An office is not the antithesis to flexibility. To me, abandoning the office forever feels rigid and reactive. Of course, at this moment we need to be safe and do whatever we can for the public good. But longer term, is turning our back on the office an answer that’s good for everyone?
Many of us have been lucky going into this pandemic crisis as members of teams with strong foundations of friendship, loyalty and trust. If we never see each other again, how do new team members get the chance to develop these bonds that actually make the hard work more enjoyable, rewarding and possible? When the next crisis hits, will the teams at home be able to conjure up the same resolve and strength that the teams of today have had and needed?
I look forward to the day I’m back in the office. I’ll set my alarm, blow dry my hair, put on my mask and embrace the world as we knew it with much more appreciation than I did when I had to leave in March.
Alex McMurray lives in Calgary.