Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
Also working from home is not as productive.
I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more.
It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
What can be much more manageable is to have comfortable cubicles for everyone (not the cramped desks with dividers, which is what probably gave cubicles the bad rep), and also have many small and large meeting rooms where people can congregate and collaborate in. This has the benefit of defaulting to semi-private workspaces which can easily scale, and moves the noisy collaborative areas to closed rooms, so that they don't bother anyone else. The smaller rooms could even serve as rotating private offices, if needed, that anyone can book for a limited period of time.
But the open floor office only has practical drawbacks, and definitely has to go. It only got popular because it's really the cheapest option for companies; just place some desks, chairs and monitors in a huge space, and sell it as "collaborative". But if they really want to entice people to come back to the office, they need to invest in better working conditions.
Some companies like Microsoft routinely provided them
Go visit any good law firm or CPA firm.
I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
Do these companies hire thousands of employees a year? I doubt that.
Private offices for everyone just doesn't scale at the same growth rate of tech companies. Where would they realistically fit thousands of new employees per year if everyone had their own office?
> I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
And you expect the buildings to just magically expand for new employees? I'd rather not take a pay cut, and "settle" for comfortable cubicles. Or better yet, work remotely, and get a raise from the money the company is saving on not having to pay for my office space.
One approach is for an organization to use open offices while they are building out proper offices.
They have significant churn.
That said, when I worked at one, I didn’t have an office. I didn’t even have a dedicated desk.
Wasn't a problem for Microsoft and other companies. But then again, those valued their employees...
I recommend that all those who might compete with me adopt these situations and give up on the difficulties of managing office space.
It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.
Not saying it's just offices that saw the... Sun-set... but there are things companies that survive do -- and private offices ain't common.
A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently.
When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.