A story of how traditional offices may change after Covid-19
All photographs were taken by the author in April 2017.
Covid-19 has disrupted our lives for months now. Perhaps the luckiest of us are those who are healthy, employed, and working at home. It hasn’t been easy for many people, though. Late-night talk show hosts continue to struggle. For some people, remote work or telework has been around for a while. The U.S. government has actually been encouraging telework for a decade.
The Untold Story
This article tells the story of how one office of one Executive Branch Agency developed and implemented an innovative telework program for over 400 employees. The effort began in 2012 and was supposed to conclude nine months later with a new 135,715 sq. ft. office space, 15% smaller than the existing workspace, that was designed to accommodate an expanding workforce of teleworkers. It didn’t quite happen that way. The move to the new leased space took place at the end of 2015, and the acclamation period lasted another six months.
This story focuses on the many issues that were anticipated and creatively addressed by the transition team, as well as the MANY unanticipated issues that also had to be dealt with. It purposely omits the obfuscatory drama manufactured by arbitrary and rigid directives from Central Headquarters, misdirected management policies, and the fears and irrational attitudes of some staff. While entertaining for a screenplay, those aspects of the adventure would make the story too hard to follow.
Finally, the information presented here isn’t a reformatting of second-hand Internet sites. I was there and was the person responsible for collecting and analyzing all the data on the transition. I conducted a dozen surveys of employee preferences, analyzed employee work styles, modeled workloads, and monitored employee morale, satisfaction, and engagement. I wrote thousands of pages of reports and presentations. Mercifully, I have left out the volumes of statistical information I amassed. This story is based on that data and my personal observations.
Telework
In 2010, Congress had an innovative idea — give Federal employees the flexibility to work some portion of their week outside of the office, even in their own homes — called telework. The idea was to allow government offices to function during emergencies, promote management effectiveness, reduce environmental and societal impacts of commuting, and enhance the work-life balance of employees. Never mind that the concept of telework was forty years old, they still did the right thing in enacting the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. Unlike many laws, it is brief and easy to understand.
Even before Covid-19 arrived a decade later, telework had been proven in the private sector to be beneficial in many ways. Individual employees benefited by not having to spend time getting ready for work and then commuting. They could work at home during inclement weather, work when they are too ill to travel into the office, and accommodate personal commitments like caring for a sick dependent or taking the car into the shop. By working remotely, employees also found that there were fewer interruptions, more privacy, and less noise than they would have to deal with in the office. This is especially valuable for introverts, who make up half of the workforce. Environmental impacts of commuting as well as congestion on commuter highways and public transportation were also reduced
There were also a few drawbacks. Not everyone could telework; some individuals have to do their work at specific locations. Those who could telework had to pay for their own home offices, including internet connections and utilities. Some employees perceived a loss of office culture and camaraderie. But, the biggest impediment to teleworking turned out to be supervisors who believed their charges were goofing off when they are not constantly watched.
Workstations in area 2-West.
On the whole, though, telework was doing fine, increasing steadily in the government over time after passage of the Act. While government agencies did save some money on office supplies (toner, printer cartridges, and paper), rent and utilities were fixed and those were the BIG costs. So decision makers in Headquarters decided to reexamine the classical office paradigm. This is where the story takes a turn for the absurd.
Wanderwork
In a traditional office, employees are assigned specific workstations. When they work remotely, their workstations are unoccupied. Decisionmakers noticed that at times, particularly Mondays and Fridays when most employees worked remotely, a large proportion of workstations were unused, 65% by one count. They reasoned that with telework, they didn’t need as many workstations. Fewer workstations meant that less office space would be needed. Less office space would reduce utility and real estate costs. And so it was decided. New office leases, some running over ten years, should be much smaller than in the past, even too small to accommodate all current employees. Telework made that acceptable.
The only way it was possible to provide fewer workstations than employees was to institute what I called wanderwork. Wanderwork means that employees would not be assigned their own workstations as they would be in a traditional office. Instead, they would have to use whatever workstation that was available. There were three strategies that were used to ensure that workstations would be available.
- Hoteling — Workstations are reserved by employees for some finite time period, usually no more than a few days at a time. The workstations have to be vacated at the end of the reservation so that they will be available for the next employee. Hoteling requires either specialized reservation software or a human concierge to keep track of available workstations.
- Hot Desking — Workstations are available on a first-come basis. They have to be vacated at the end of the day so they will be available for the next employee. No tracking software or concierge is needed.
- Coworking — Workstations are shared by specific individuals on set schedules. For example, one employee who works remotely on Mondays and Tuesdays would use a certain workstation on the other days of the week while the coworking employee would use the workstation on Mondays and Tuesdays and work elsewhere on the other days of the week. Coworking requires some management system to ensure that desks do not go unused.
Designed for Collaboration
Ideally, workspaces should be designed to reflect the work styles of the staff. This workspace was instead designed to encourage collaboration based on the assumption that more interpersonal interactions would boost productivity. That decision gave rise to an open-plan with only low partitions between workstations. The open office led to less privacy, more interruptions, and more noise. This was problematic because surveys showed that more than half of the work done by staff required concentration rather than interaction. Furthermore, half of the staff tended to be introverted, requiring some privacy. As a consequence, staff dissatisfaction rose. White noise generators proved to be ineffective, even annoying. Policies were put in place prohibiting the use of speakerphones outside of conference rooms, which had been a common practice in the old high-walled cube-farm. Even conversations at workstations were discouraged although they could not be prohibited.
Because of the focus on collaboration, considerable attention was given to meeting areas. There were fewer large, 10+-person meeting rooms but double the number of small rooms for 2, 4, or 6 people than in the prior office. All of the meeting rooms were enclosed by glass walls so they provided no privacy. Rooms for 4+ people were all equipped with white boards and conferencing equipment that occasionally worked. Even large staff meetings could be, and often were, conducted from 4-person conference rooms on days when most of the participants were working remotely. The 2-person rooms, called focus rooms, were in constant use for small meetings, work involving confidential information, and conference calls. In addition, there were a half dozen informal meeting areas for 4 to 8 people, which had no walls.
The lesson, perhaps experienced but not learned, was that workspaces are for working. They should be designed to accommodate the work styles of the staff. Meeting spaces are for interacting. They are the areas that should be designed for collaboration.
Challenges
Wanderwork presented several technological challenges. Employees who were teleworking and wanderworking wouldn’t be able to use the traditional desktop computers and desk phones. They couldn’t carry them around from workstation to workstation. So, all the existing desktop computers and desk phones had to be replaced by laptops and cell phones. Employees also had to be provided their own accessories — keyboards, mice, and headsets — for hygienic reasons. Workstations were all outfitted with monitors and power supplies compatible with the computer hardware. Video conferencing software was used in place of physical meeting rooms in the office. All staff had to be trained to use the new technologies and IT support had to be expanded. Costs for the transition from a traditional office to a wanderworking office mounted.
Informal, non-reservable meeting area.
There were quite a few logistical challenges. Workstations had to be cleaned after every use, just like a hotel room would be. Employees were supplied with disinfectant wipes for this purpose. Desks and chairs had to be easily adjustable, so that they would be usable by individuals of all heights and weights. Adjustable desks allowed employees to work while standing. Handicapped individuals also had to be accommodated. Transitioning to wanderworking required purchasing all new office furniture, which was planned anyway.
Wanderworkers wouldn’t be able to carry around all the paper files they might use in their work, so the decision was made to go paperless. Existing paper files had to be scanned into electronic formats and stored on servers accessible to all employees. Going paperless was a HUGE endeavor, not anticipated at the beginning of the transition effort, and a very hard cultural attachment to overcome. Nonetheless, it was accomplished in three months by the sheer force of will of one highly-effective project manager (Jeannine A.) and several support contractors. When the office was finally paperless, there were no more naysayers. Nobody—absolutely NOBODY—missed all the stray papers on desks or the the endless banks of file cabinets. The only remaining hitch was working out the bugs in getting electronic signatures, which took a few months.
There were also personal challenges. Wanderworkers couldn’t have some of the personal items they had become accustomed to because they had to be removed from workstations every day. That included not just pictures of loved ones, but also coffee mugs, seat cushions, fans, heaters, footstools, air cleaners, and other things that made individuals more comfortable working in the office. They also had to carry around their own office supplies — pens, paperclips, staplers, scissors, tape, stationary, reference books — or borrow them from a central repository. Because employees couldn’t leave items at workstations, they had to have their own personal storage. Each employee was assigned an 18-inch cube in a central “locker room.” The lockers were also used for overnight storage of employees’ computer hardware. The self-setting electronic locks sounded great in the brochure, but after a few weeks of malfunctions, everybody just used the default combinations taped to the outside of the cubes.
Room for employee lockers.
Business Not As Usual
18-inch locker for employee personal items.
Management originally set a policy limiting staff to two telework days per week. Most staff picked Mondays and Fridays. The office was virtually deserted on those days and packed during the middle of the week. Conference rooms were booked weeks in advance for midweek meetings and empty on Mondays and Fridays.
All workstations were not created equal. Some were located in areas considered to be more desirable, like near windows or pantries. Some were in areas considered to be more isolated and less noisy. Some workstations had larger or multiple monitors.
Because the number of available workstations was fixed while the total number of staff was growing, the issue of seating capacity garnered considerable attention. Contingency plans were drafted involving changes in telework scheduling. Furthermore, a variety of seating alternatives for days when the office was full were provided. These included tables, sofas, and isolation chairs. Some employees even preferred these options.
Everyone had a different concept of what made a workstation desirable. Some people wanted to sit near their friends in a neighborhood. They would spread personal items on nearby unoccupied workstations to save them for their friends. Staff began to arrive earlier and earlier, up to two hours before the official beginning of the work day, to find a workstation location they liked. They would nest, sitting at the same workstation every day they were in the office. Workstation selection turned into a highly competitive game.
Once the office started to fill to capacity, it was difficult to find unoccupied workstations. This was called wayfinding. There was no way to find an unoccupied workstation except to wander around. Some workstations could be reserved via a computer application and a small number of employees used this hoteling approach all the time. Most employees never used reservable workstations because of their locations or the additional inconvenience.
It was often difficult to find co-workers when necessary because wanderworkers changed workstations every day, and sometimes, more than once in a day. A location system was devised to identify areas of the office, shown in photos as number-East/West (e.g., 2-West). A phone app was also created to show available workstations on a map, but management decided to abandon it because of the burden of constantly having to update the data. Some wanderworkers set up Google calendar notifications with their locations or put physical signs at their workstations, but these were largely unused and ineffective. Employees usually just called ahead or walked around looking for their co-workers. Since everyone had different telework schedules, it was difficult to know who was even in the office on a given day.
Wanderworkers didn’t necessarily know the individuals they were sitting next to since there were no nameplates and employees from all the organizational units were mixed together. This was fine for the extroverts but an irritant for the introverts. Because they moved around, wanderworkers had to know where all the emergency exits were.
Productivity
Then there was the issue of productivity. Remote work improved employee productivity in several ways, like during inclement weather or when an employee might otherwise take sick leave. Less commuting saved time and reduced stress. Working at home provided the privacy and quiet that the office didn’t. Remote workers also worked longer hours than they did in the office. Wanderwork had the opposite effect. It took time away from the workday to find and set up at an available workstation, and then clear off the workstation at the end of the day. The loss of personal space in the office, moreover, led many employees to feel they were not valued, resulting in less job satisfaction.
The problem with assessing the productivity of most office workers is that it can’t be measured accurately. It’s not just the ratio of outputs to inputs in a given time period, the way it is measured in manufacturing where every item is created from the same raw materials, using the same processes, to produce identical outputs. In an office environment, knowledge workers, start with different inputs, follow slightly different steps to utilize the inputs, and produce outputs that are similar but not alike. They have to think about the tasks they are working on and adjust their actions to accommodate any unforeseen events. They may have to wait for information from others or change a product on the fly to meet new requirements. As a consequence, changes in productivity attributable to telework and wanderwork can’t be verified no matter what the pop business articles may claim. Based on the opinions of employees, productivity did not change in the office despite the issues associated with wanderworking and the open plan. Productivity was thought to increase while working remotely.
Denouement
At the beginning of the transition planning and for much of the effort, management was adamant that all staff, regardless of position or seniority, would be required to wanderwork. Within a year of the transition, the office manager commandeered a six-person conference room for her exclusive use and added privacy screens. A special workstation area was set aside for upper management. Group managers were provided with additional storage cabinets, which were largely unused because there was no more paper to file. Some contractors were assigned fixed workstations so they would be easier to monitor. None of this would be unusual in a traditional office, it just wasn’t what the staff was promised. Furthermore, policies weren’t applied uniformly. Some supervisors were lenient in letting staff adjust their telework schedules as they needed, others were intractable. Some people were even allowed to telework four days per week instead of just two. Again, this complaint is also common in a traditional office.
Despite the huge change in the work environment, employees ultimately adjusted, more or less, to the open-plan office and wanderworking. They had no choice. Many government Agencies have already redesigned their offices to be smaller, have more tightly-arranged workstations, and be geared to wanderworking. Given that office space is usually leased for long terms, this trend isn’t likely to be reversed.
Does wanderwork save money? Certainly not in the short term. In this transition, the costs for building at the new lease space, buying more-expensive, adjustable furniture, and moving were anticipated. The costs of extending the old lease because of schedule delays and going paperless were not anticipated. Future cost savings are, of course, uncertain. But, the effort did establish a considerable knowledge base for offices in the new world of remote work.
When the Covid-19 quarantine is over, remote work in the private sector may not go away. Many people have set up home offices, learned to communicate over the internet, and become accustomed to working from home. There are many benefits. Some business owners may also decide that adopting a remote workforce, where the business is amenable to it, makes sense to reduce costs and provide flexibility. Extroverts addicted to face-to-face interactions and supervisors who don’t trust their subordinates will be outraged.
In the future, there will still be traditional offices, only now there will be a greater recognition of how another pandemic, riot, extended weather event, or other crisis could disrupt business. Some businesses may elect to have their entire workforces operate remotely on a permanent basis. Many businesses already operate that way. Problems arise, though, when open office designs collide with remote workers necessitating the curse of wanderwork.
Main area of open-office plan.
An earlier version of this article was published at http://randomterrabytes.net on March 4, 2014. This article includes updates from 2014 to 2017, and was originally published in Medium on September 1, 2020.
Random TerraBytes 