Why do we have offices?

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Friday, June 18th, 2010 | blogging

Is the office an outdated technology? Seth Godin (via Andrew Sullivan) thinks so:

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘the Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity and happiness is massive.

Hmm. This morning I have worked on the journal I co-edit, corresponded (and resolved a few outstanding issues) with my supervisor, other faculty, and staff, done some profession-related reading, and … I’m still at home.

But … a few things to think about. One is whether everybody gathering in the same place from 9 til 5 M – F allows the development of valuable aspects of organizational culture (which we’ve mentioned a few times recently) that cannot be achieved if I’m at home and one co-worker is on a laptop at the Pour House, and another is in her garden in Bean Blossom. Even Richard Florida’s tragically hip offices described in The Rise of the Creative Class are still offices – indeed his whole theory (such as it is) of creative clusters and spillovers depends on, well, clusters: people hanging out together. Now, SG might have a point that “you can get energy from people other than those in the same company″ … that’s why we have conferences after all – I can hang out for a few days with people who work in other schools and agencies and find out what they are up to.

A dozen or so years ago I recall seeing lots of trendy articles that with the internets and all, businesses would no longer cluster, and good jobs could be had by workers moving to small towns in pleasant locations where they could still be connected electronically with their colleagues, and without the high rents and hassles of big cities (and similar arguments were made that online learning would replace the on-campus lecture method of higher education). But it never happened, and it′s not clear to me that this is the result of some irrational hanging-on to 1970s organizational technology.

Note: photo by Jaime Vives Piqueres at POV-Ray.