Why The Office Is The Future of Work
Knowledge workers are likely to return to the office to work. And this comes down to some very basic reasons; being human. How and where we work though, will change.
There is a social revolution underway in the very nature of how we work, what work means, where we work and managing workforces. Today, it’s an utter mess. Some companies demanding a return to the office, some have gone fully remote, others a hybrid. And while it is a mess, this is just a phase and the outcome might actually be better for workers and businesses.
We are in the process of shifting the very nature of work, not just from where we work, but compensation, contract versus full-time, benefits packages and retirement contributions. Leadership styles and the rights of employees and contractors. What might the future of work look like?
I’ll look at where we are with digital work, knowledge work, and why, oddly enough, we all may end up back in the office. And why shaking hands is part of the reason.
The whole concept of working Monday to Friday from 9AM to 5PM comes out of the manufacturing world and the early days of industrialisation. As workers gained rights for days off, safer workplace conditions and benefits, knowledge industries modelled the manufacturing world. It worked fairly well. Now it doesn’t.
All of this arose mostly out of what is called Scientific Management, or Taylorism. It is a theory of management evolved from the ideas of Frederick Taylor in the late 19th century. It boils down to the idea that every single movement a human makes can be broken down into efficient moves. It was designed for the production line. Essentially, it is an attempt to turn humans into automatons. Robots.
By the 1930s, Taylorism was considered obsolete, but many of the concepts and the general thinking of scientific management prevails in business schools today. But as manufacturing becomes increasingly automated and information technologies along with GAI provide increased cognitive support to workers, Taylorism is gone forever and scientific management needs to be shown the door.
The tension between entrepreneurs, management and workers today is how to measure productivity in a world where most knowledge work can be done from anywhere. For most of today’s senior executives, they come from a world where work is done in a fixed place, during fixed times. With the assumption that office workers pound away on keyboards for eight solid hours a day. They never have and they never will. That’s not humans.
But that’s the expectation and belief system of senior management. Yet at the same time, executives in charge of various departments are seeking to gain budget efficiencies by using as many contract (gig) workers as they can.
Some businesses have also deployed GAI tools like Microsoft Copilot, Claude or Google’s Gemini into their businesses with the belief employees could now do more. The opposite has happened. Employees cite having to do more work to oversee and fix hallucinations and bad results from GAI tools, increasing, not decreasing, workloads.
Over time, as GAI tools evolve and companies spend some time and a good chunk of budgets, this will likely get better. When this might happen is a mystery. Consider that IT was supposed to drastically improve worker productivity. Instead with been stuck in the productivity paradigm for over 25 years.
Yet the nature of work is changing. There are some estimates that over 50% of the workforce in the future will be gig or contract workers. Perhaps. But probably not.
Companies that have gone fully remote are still in their early years of operating with this model, same with those going the hybrid route. It’s far too early to claim that these two models are successful.
Some workers won’t work for companies that don’t allow fully remote or hybrid options and require in-office work only. Some folks just love gig work. Others feel ambivalent. Some actually prefer to work in an office environment and go to work somewhere five days a week.
Why We Will Return To The Office. Sort Of.
I don’t think all knowledge workers will end up back in the office, Monday to Friday from 9Am to 5PM, but I think most people will. For one primary reason.
Humans are social animals. Part of the reason so many got what was called “zoom fatigue” at the end of the day during the height of the pandemic, working from home, was because our brains struggle to understand each other via a screen only. Over 90% of our communication with one another is non-verbal and touch, from a handshake to a tap on the shoulder, is a key aspect of how we find belonging in social groups.
Scent also plays a role.Often times, when we shake hands, we often end up smelling our own hand afterwards. Which is a very ancient human trait, since scent can tell us a lot about another person, including whether or not we can trust them.
We also know that we are more creative when we are gathered in a physical space. This benefits the changing nature of knowledge work, especially when it is augmented by GAI and other AI tools. Knowledge work is going to become more about being agile, the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. An emphasis will be places intellectual outputs and value creation and continuous learning.
This only works so well in a fully remote option. Even companies with fully remote teams tend to have physical meetings once or a few times a year. Either as a full team or by departments.
What we are likely to see as well is how workplaces are designed. Some companies have turned their office spaces into places where teams are encouraged to gather in communal spaces and use hot-desk approaches as workers come and go.
What we are likely to find over the coming years is that physical togetherness will become more valuable, but how, when and where we come together will vary by business and industry.
Fully remote work won’t be the majority. But contract work will become more normal. A person may contract to work only 2–3 days per week with one company and another for the other days, while also doing other projects on the side.
We know enough now about the nature of fully remote work that it is not the be-all and end-all solution some had hoped for. Humans just aren’t built that way. It is for the same reasons that social media leads to loneliness that fully remote work leads to work loneliness as well.
In my next article I’ll look at the differences between Taylorism (scientific management) and management in the digital age.
While for some CEO’s and entrepreneurs, it may seem like a power move to get everyone back in an office, that’s only a small part of it. Subconsciously, it likely has to do more with humans as social animals and hundreds of thousands of years working together. That’s part of human culture and some parts of human culture take far longer to change than others, especially when it is hard wired into our brains.