How much are companies willing to spend to get workers back to the office?

With more and more companies wanting to bring employees back to the office, I pointed out last week the ill-kept secret that there’s a widespread aversion to open office floor plans — or activity-based workplaces, as they have often evolved into today — and that it partially explains why many employees want to continue remote and hybrid work. 

This is not rocket science. For many years, it has been the consensus in the research community that open office landscapes are bad for both the work environment and employee performance. (There’s really no need for research at all — just talk to workers. They hate it.)

To be honest, open office environments are not downright bad. But it takes the right business, and the right type of people, for them to work. For example, I work in an industry where the ideal image is a teeming newsroom, where creative angles and news hooks are thrown back and forth, just as you see in a movie.

Even so, you don’t have to go back more than two or three decades to a time when most journalists, even in large newsrooms, had their own offices. That’s how Swedish offices used to look, people had their own rooms — not “cubicles,” but real rooms, with a door, and a small Do Not Disturb lamp. There was desk, pictures of the children (and maybe the dog), a plant and a small radio. It was a place where you could feel at home, even at work.

Then real estate development took over and today only 19% of office workers in Stockholm have their own space. The largest proportion, 42%, have no place of their own at all. And, according to researchers, it is the real estate companies that have been driving the transition to open office landscapes. 

It’s easy to see why: an open floor plan is, of course, much more surface-efficient than one with walls and corridors; it is much easier to scale up or down based on the tenants’ needs; and you can house more and larger companies in attractive locations in the city rather than large office complexes in the suburbs.

It’s not just the real estate industry’s fault. A little over 10 years ago, “activity-based offices” — otherwise known as hot-desking — arrived. Workers have neither their own room or desk. And here, the tech industry has taken the lead. 

When Microsoft rebuilt an office in Akalla in 2012, execs themselves called it one of the first large activity-based offices in Sweden, and it helped spark a trend where even the traditional companies and organizations adopted the “cool” scene from startup environments and Silicon Valley companies. (Puffs! European stools!) The office quickly evolved from cool to corporate.

Researchers actually welcomed the shift, as it at least gave people an opportunity to find a quieter place if they were disturbed or to avoid sitting next to colleagues they didn’t like. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we know what happened next. Many people discovered how nice it is to work in their own room, at their own desk, that picture of the children, with maybe the dog at your feet, a plant nearby and some music. You didn’t need the Do Not Disturb light and there were no chattering colleagues.

As a Stockholm Chamber of Commerce’s survey found: 46% say that permanent workplaces in the office have become more important, and 45% of younger people would come in more if they had better opportunities for undisturbed work. (Whether it’s correlation or causality, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most important selling point for headphones these days is how good their noise canceling is. It makes public transportation bearable, certainly, and with headphones, you create your own room — even at work.)

As a result of these recent trends, property owners and companies alike find themselves in a tricky, but self-inflicted, position. To say the least, property owners have begun to see the disadvantages of the open solutions they pushed: vacancies in downtown office buildings are skyrocketing as tenants have reduced office space after the transition to hybrid work.

Yes, companies see the chance to save money by reducing office space, especially if employees aren’t there all the time anyway. But at the same time, they want their workers to be in the office more. And the employees say, “Okay, but then I would like to have my own place, preferably my own room.”

Of course, that equation doesn’t add up. And this is where the whole “return to office” trend is brought to a head. If company culture, creativity and productivity are so critical that employees need to be forced back into the office, how far are companies willing to go?

How big does the office space need to be, if everyone is to be there basically at the same time — if half also need their own desk to be productive, perhaps even a room of their own? 

Property owners and landlords would rejoice, but how many companies want to take on that cost? Very few, I would think.

Perhaps that tells us just how important a forced return to offices really is.

This column is taken from CS Veckobrev, a personal newsletter with reading tips, link tips and analyzes sent directly from Computerworld Sweden Editor-in-Chief Marcus Jerräng’s desk. Do you also want the newsletter on Fridays?  Sign up for a free subscription here.