I am a Senior Editor at Forbes, leading our coverage of the workplace, careers and leadership issues. Before joining Forbes, I wrote for the Washington Post for more than a decade covering workplace issues, corporate management, leadership and governance.
In-person mandates are up. Bosses have more power to enforce face time. Yet after years of remote work, the role of the office has fundamentally changed, prompting a vast rethinking of what the ‘workplace’ is really for.92-year-old insurance giant Allstate had a sprawling 2-million square foot headquarters in suburban Chicago that by 2020 housed some 5,200 people across roughly 280 acres. But last year, the company sold the Northbrook, Illinois campus.
The pandemic changed that, decoupling management from facetime and accelerating technology’s untethering of professionals from the office. Prior to 2020 teams had already been getting more distributed, but Covid put the trend on steroids. Microsoft, for instance,the real need of workers to avoid crippling commutes while meeting life’s many commitments.
The near religious rhetoric about “return to office” and “remote work” obscures a simple fact: Much of this comes down to common sense. Not all businesses are the same. What works for an established law firm may make no sense for a startup toy company. Consulting firms have decades of experience working remotely at client sites. Insurance companies long have had armies of field-based employees. A biotech startup might need a physical lab. A software company typically doesn’t.
If the metric was more than three times higher post-pandemic than before, says Annie Dean, Atlassian’s head of “team anywhere,” “we figured this office is something we need to consider downsizing or reducing its footprint, so we can go reinvest this where there are new communities that are popping up.”
Then there’s Dropbox, which calls itself “virtual first” and is subleasing nearly 400,000 square feet—a majority The drumbeat of announcements about post-pandemic office spaces, says Phil Kirschner, who advises executives on real estate and workplace issues at McKinsey & Co., are so similar that if you take out the name or location of the company, “you basically can’t tell them apart.”
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