The Future of Workplace

We spend a major part of our lives in our workplace-don't we? Have we ever thought about how workplaces should be designed for maximum productivity or growth? Guess we don't , so long we are getting paid every month end. But productivity results in enhanced revenues and maybe decent net profit. So why aren't we worried about it. Wait!! Don't tell me , you're waiting for management to fix this. Let me bring some bad news to you- they aren't gonna fix this as they themselves are oblivious to it. But if that be the case then why haven't we really thought about such an important thing? Before we go there , let's try seeing the current workplaces that we have seen all our lives. Here is a clip from Office Space that portrays our workplaces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsayg_S4pJg

Now Milton might seem funny to you and you perhaps would be at the point of cracking up but listen up. He represents each one of us. He represents the work culture we have been part of all our lives. In fact it inspired Scott Adams to quit his job and start Dilbert, one of my favourite characters. Scott has been quite vocal about what really happens in office spaces and the nine yards around productivity, innovation,culture, product, technology etc. His satire is proof enough. Open spaces really don't cut it. Let me show you why?

Well for starters- the human brain is capable of focusing on just one thing at a time. All the stories around multi tasking are pure BS. People who indulge in multitasking are fooling themselves but it usually is at the cost of one task or the other or maybe both. It is a scientific fact now that effective multitasking is a myth. Read this amazing article to know more. But how is that relevant to our conversation? Well let me show you how? Every single day when we come to work, we subconsciously don't realise that we are actually working more than what we are expected to work. I am assuming a typical work week consists of the quintessential 40 hours unless you wanna do a 100 hour work week like Elon Musk. So that translates to around 8 hours per day plus one hour where we do all activities like lunch, dinner, breaks etc. Our work also is framed in a way where project managers tend to calculate a focus factor of 75% which is anyway on the higher side if I'd be even 10 percent optimistic. I am not counting the amount of travel one does to office which ideally should be be counted as part of work. So in a way working in open office spaces forces you to multitask by dividing your attention to innumerable events happening in front of you. From a movie review being dicussed to an insurance plan getting dissected to how much school fee has to be shelled out to almost anything has the capability to disturb you and there goes your focus outta window. Its congruent to multitasking which in this case if perhaps far more diabolical.

Anyway let's get back to office spaces rather open office spaces. So one is supposed to work and produce the desired outcome in a stipulated time that might add to the productivity of the organisation and rake in more revenue for the company. That's the belief or the underlying assumption. Now how about I say that the productivity we produce is proportional to the amount of focus we have. What that means is that our brains are circuited in a way that they need time to understand a problem and then create a solution which is either by recognition(the solution could be found by following a certain set of steps that solves the problem) or by design(a solution needs to be invented). Both these forms of solution development should yield qualitatively high work(more in the case of design since one is challenging the status quo). If that be the case then our minds need individed attention to focus on a job. This type of focus is kinda hard to achieve in an open space environment.

The reason why it is difficult is because although we don't realise but our subconscious is actually scanning the surrounding and registering every piece of information. But that also impacts our conscious mind and leads to chain of thoughts that take you all over the place. These thoughts are the actual reason why one cannot focus whole heartedly on a job at hand or more importantly the reason why a job takes more time than what is required? If you see an 8 hour schedule, its actually sufficient to do a job provided there aren't elements of distraction that can take your train of thoughts away from the core work. No matter how many people lay down the importance of destressing yourself from work by taking incessant breaks,it's a baseless theory. As part of Scrum when we define the time a task will take, we actually take into account the actual time a task takes plus a 10 percent addition for insurgencies(8 hour translates to 8 hours 48 minutes or 9 hours). But the task will definitely wrap up in a working day if it receives the due attention. Unfortunately its the deficit of focus and attention that increases either the length of the task or length of the day for an individual. We don't realise the noise around us is so distracting that it takes your focus and concentration away from the tasks at hand.

When I spent a bunch of years in Europe as a programmer, I noticed that there is absolutely no concept of open spaces in Europe. I used to sit in a big room with 2 other programmers and together we would work close to 8 to 10 hours without any form of distraction. It was blissful because you could get more done in less time. It was super productive. Its not that we didn't talk inside a room but it barely affected our focus and attention and more importantly concentration. In fact Joel Spolsky in one of his epic books 'Smart and get things done' talks about the same. He says its absolutely important for developers to have rooms to work because most of their time is dedicated in finding creative solutions for problems. That requires a lot of thinking and which boils down to focus. One cannot be innovative if one doesn't get the necessary environment for innovation. Creativity and innovation are by products of habitable environment.

In 2018, Harvard Business School researchers analyzed how the transition to an open workspace affected staff collaboration. It was the first study of its kind to objectively measure the impacts of open plan offices by using electronic badges and microphones to record employee interactions and track email usage.The study found that an open office reduced face-to-face interactions by about 70 percent. In contrast, email messages increased by 50 percent. The open architecture seemed to trigger a withdrawal response, where co-workers craved less social contact and chose instead to send emails and instant messages.As the study’s co-author, Associate Professor Ethan Bernstein, explains: “If you’re sitting in a sea of people, for instance, you might not only work hard to avoid distraction (by, for example, putting on big headphones) but -- because you have an audience at all times -- also feel pressure to look really busy.”(excerpt taken from the original article).

Somehow we have been made to swallow a conception that open office spaces are productive for companies which by any standards is a far cry from reality. Open offices are anything but productive and tend to affect the bottomline of the company if we tie productivity to revenue. But then why is the concept so popular? Its popular because companies want to optimise their cost on real estate and suffer from confirmation bias of the highest order. Companies will do anything to make people believe open spaces are productive for workers. It's like that movie 'Thank you for smoking' starring Aaron Eckhart who is a lobbyist and supports 'Cigarette companies' in their bid to undo any negative PR related to cigarettes. Watch this twisted logic given by him to convincingly prove how cigarettes are good for the economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrxRCTUt6OY

So open spaces or open offices actually suck but here's the thing-how many people realise it? We don't. Most of it because we are so busy acting like bots in our daily jobs that we forget to take a second out to introspect. I bet not many would have given this topic a serious thought till they read this. Many of you might treat this blog as unimportant but the fact doesn't change. Open office spaces reduce an individual's productivity to tatters. Most of what they had shown on social network where coders plug themselves to music in office spaces and become uber productive is pure horse shit. It really doesn't happen in real life. It's a mass illusion created by some of the most powerful companies on the planet and people love to eat that. In hindsight it results in billions of dollars of productvity losses Y-O-Y. It's worse than California Gold rush of 1848 where some people at least made some gold.

But if open offices aren't a solution to cubicles as thought earlier then how does one handle this 800 pound gorilla? Well I am not discounting the fact that creating individual offices will require a lot of capital investment. Generally a lot of people would argue against it since a company in the initial years tends to be as scrappy as possible. Only in the later years does one think of making large capital investments to buy real estate. If that isn't something one can't afford then is there something else worth a shot? There definitely is.

I tweet a lot and some of the guys I tweet are quite famous in the valley. I'd particularly like to mention Hiten Shah and Brianne Kimmel. Hiten and Brianne have been highly instrumental in advocating the future of workplace is remote work. Its a debatable topic to a lot of people with old school mindset. Many managers take it to be something that can cut down on productivity. The reason has less to do with productivity and more to do with control. Fact is, the industrial revolution has created a lot of control freaks in the corporate utopia. Most of these people love to exercise control on people for reasons unbeknowst to many and not correlated to productivity at all.

Productivity is a function of talent, discipline,focus and learning. It has nothing to do with supervision. In fact as we are speaking there are millions of companies working with remote workers across the globe who deliver on their timelines. I know its a disruptive concept but its actually the only way to cut down on a lot of factors hindering productivity. The real question is how much receptive companies would be to a model like this mostly because it is iconoclastic to the dogma surrounding productivity. It will decentralise control and increase productivity and it doesn't really need much validation. The global freelancing economy is around 204 billion USD and is growing at a CAGR of 17%. That is proof enough that remote work can not only thrive but deliver results exponentially. If OKR is what we follow in the modern world to measure productivity then it really isn't connected to the workplace but the outcome and a justifiable number to measure the outcome. The analogy is solid but its upto the masters to give it rigorous thought and lay the foundation for the future of workplace. Let there be only droids and remote work in the future.Amen to that.