Long Live The Corporate Office: Our Hunger For Status, Belonging And Gossip Means Working From Home Will Never Cut It For All – Forbes

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In the summer of 2001, a strange phenomenon swept across Britain. People who spent their days listlessly plugging away at corporate jobs in a soulless office came home in the evenings, switched on the TV and watched people listlessly plugging away at corporate jobs in a soulless office. And they thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Office, a sitcom created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, proved a riot that transcended borders and generations for its ability to take the banal and turn it into the banterous.

It was adapted across a clutch of countries – America’s iteration lasted nine seasons from 2005 until 2013 – and almost two decades since debuting it continues to delight millions, no doubt numbing the pain of lockdown in at least a handful of households.

But with pundits forecasting the imminent demise of the traditional corporate office because of Covid-19, the mockumentary and our collective obsession with it have acquired fresh value.

The show is an unlikely reminder of just how much we derive from the bricks-and-mortar structures we superficially associate with the hard graft, as well as from the creatures within them: a sense of belonging and community, of course, but also a delightful daily refrain of gossip, and valuable regular reassurance that there are people out there who will never be as successful as we are. 

In the last century, the western world has witnessed a bizarre shift in what is commonly perceived to indicate status. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen, one of the preeminent theorists on status signalling, suggested “conspicuous abstention from labor” to be the most powerful way of demonstrating status. In other words, being able to do absolutely nothing. 

In 2020, the polar opposite is true. Being a person of status means working all the time. It means getting the red-eye and jumping on crack-of-dawn calls with clients in an alphabet soup of time zones. And of course, it means having huge monoliths of offices to be driven to, where one can sit in imposing chairs at large desks in corner offices on top floors sipping lattes and talking loudly into flashy headsets.  

Privilege and power create the luxury of choice – the choice to work from home, for example – but offices are the fortresses of corporate influence.

“If you go right back to the Pharaohs, you will see that our history is based on physical objects and structures that represent power, wealth and success,” says Boe Pahari, global head of infrastructure equity at asset management firm AMP Capital. “That’s definitely changing, simply because the way we create wealth as a society is no longer as tied to physical objects as it used to be. But human beings are still very attached to symbols and, as such, physical structures are still very important.”

When Covid-19 subsides and the dust settles, CEOs will still want an imposing HQ on the urban skyline to point to as an emblem of their professional (but also very personal) glory. Even in the throes of a pandemic, a concrete iteration of their influence is not something they’ll cast aside with no fuss. They’re just not wired that way. 

For those further down the pecking order, offices play an important role too. They provide life infrastructure: they delineate between the personal and professional, and help us create an identity that’s not, in the first instance, defined by the mother, father, wife, husband, housemate or carer we are at home. They help us discover self-confidence. Scholars of Abraham Maslow might even seek self-actualization.

Alex Sutton, founding director of London-based architecture and design consultancy Studio Sutton, says that in the last few months “technology has proven to the whole world that we can do almost anything remotely”. But work is not just about what’s practically possible, he says. It’s about recognising the value of having a common space: the opportunity for collaboration and serendipity, for building a culture, promoting teamwork, a sense of belonging and offering a better work-life balance.

“The nature and purpose of work are obviously changing, but the office will have a role to play in whatever the future of work looks like,” Sutton says. 

The ritual of going to the office – yes, even that commute we think we hate – can create comforting predictability and rhythm. The cognitive dissonance many of us experience when working from home – the conflicting signals of having to be professional in an environment in which we’re usually relaxing – can be exhausting. 

Having a dedicated office to travel to and work from is also the great leveller we never really acknowledged before Covid-19. Video calls can display huge social and economic rifts beyond the books we see in the background.

Paul from accounts might have turned the library of his inherited countryside pile into a sun-drenched workstation, lined with leather-bound copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But Lucy on the same pay grade is chopping potatoes and feeding her toddler just inches from her laptop, while her husband leads a conference call from the only other room in their rented apartment.

Before all of this, neither Paul nor Lucy considered their contrasting fortunes. Now it will always define their relationship. A 2003 research paper titled “Monkeys reject unequal pay”, which examines what a capuchin monkey does when its mate is given a grape to snack on that’s far tastier than the cucumber they’re lumped with, demonstrates just how much more humans care about relative prosperity than absolute wealth. 

There are other things about working from an office. The impromptu meetings we have that we don’t think are meetings but somehow inch us closer to promotion. The unplanned conversations that generate ideas that change everything – the serendipity, Sutton refers to. The connections and dynamics and chemistries that are spontaneous and unconscious and will never be replicable across a screen or phone line. Or as Stephane Guinet, chief executive of Kamet Ventures, a company that invents and builds businesses, says: “While we can easily continue to work from a distance, I believe that true innovation and the ability to collaborate and create something together cannot be replaced by Zoom calls.” 

Finally, there’s the entertainment value we get from our own David Brents or, in America, our Michael Scotts or Andy Bernards. We might come to work for the career progression and pay check, but the kaffeeklatsch and water cooler scandal certainly sweeten the affair. We love company. Or, as Pahari put it: “By and large we’re doing extremely well working from home, but the simple truth is that human beings don’t fare well in solitary confinement.”

So yes, some ways in which we work will definitely change because of Covid-19. Communal fridges, shared stationary and free-for-all mugs may become relics of an unsanitary time before this enlightened era of armchair epidemiology.

Some workforces will become more scattered across cities – even continents – with each person beavering away in splendid, hygienic isolation. But there’s too much at stake for the office to be killed off entirely. We’d get lonely. We’d get bored. And then of course, there’s always the ego.

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