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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Office design has gone through many iterations in the 20th and 21st centuries. There was the industrial open office plan of the 1960s, the cubicle farms of the 1990s, and the modern open concept originating in Silicon Valley and WeWork. Each iteration brought with it notions of individuality, worth, teamwork, and privacy, to greater or lesser degrees.

Now as American offices lie empty across the country and millions of people have shifted to working from home, what will happen to office design and office culture as we know it after the pandemic? Will companies want to keep paying astronomically high rents for midtown real estate, when they can get the same productivity without it? For the offices that do come back, how will health and safety concerns change how they look? With me now is John Seabrook, staff writer for The New Yorker. His new piece is called Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? Hi, John, welcome to WNYC.

John Seabrook: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

Brian: Let me open up the phones right away because I know, listeners, you'll have a lot of input on this, opinions, and questions. Are you looking forward to going back to the office, if you're working at home right now, or are you hoping to keep working from home, or a little bit of both? What problems have working from home solved, and what other problems has it created? Does it change how you relate to your co-workers, for better or worse? How productive are you, for better or worse, or the amount of time you're expected to work, for better or worse? 646-435-7280.

How has working from home changed your office, for the people who are going in, and work culture? 646-435-7280. John, let me jump in in the middle, sort of, because one of the things that struck me about your piece is that you write about how some employees in companies who have gone from fully in-person to fully remote, don't necessarily want to go back full time, but that a hybrid model, like they do in the schools, some days in-person, some days at home, some remote, which people might think is the best of both worlds, might actually be the worst of both worlds. Why do you go there?

John: It makes sense that it seems that most people don't want to go back five days a week. They want to go back sort of one to three days a week, and spend a couple of days at home. You have an office where not everyone is there at any one time and perhaps not everyone has a desk. You have a reservable desk rather than your own desk. It only accommodates a third of the workforce at any one time.

The issue there is that people who choose to work remotely, are they going to miss out on opportunities that people who are full-time at the office are getting, and will that create these rifts in the culture that don't exist now? I think that's the great fear of going a hybrid model. Some people say it's better to go either fully-remote, like have no office at all and do it all in the cloud, or go everyone coming back, or most people coming back, and not try to do in the middle.

Brian: One of the companies you profiled conducted surveys with their employees about the pros and cons of working from home. The cons are not that surprising. Zoom fatigue, ergonomically incorrect seating at home, family stress. What was surprising was that employees did not seem to think that working from home negatively impacted their ability to collaborate or that it eroded office culture. It makes you think, what is a physical office really for? Is it a reason to leave the house, and is it a good enough reason?

John: The great paradox that I feel like the piece tries to explore is that on the one hand, the movement toward the open-plan office is to create these great spaces where everybody can get together and collaborate, and the walls all come down, and you have team-based working instead of private offices, and that's supposed to spur innovation and productivity.

The problem is that those offices were often very distracting and noisy, and the way people have responded to them is to do a lot of their work remotely in the office. They go online, they put on earphones, they tune the office out, and they're essentially doing remote work. The pandemic has offered a chance to try to reset this paradoxical situation and come up with a more rational approach to what the office really should be for.

Brian: Do you come to any conclusion or any speculation about how much you can effectively collaborate with people you never see in person?

John: It seems that globally, if you're talking, one of the advantages of at least these surveys that I write about turned up, is this idea that New York headquarters, where it's New York and everybody else, versus if you're a global company, that sort of vibe is not as conducive to team-based work as a more global, everybody is a potential center of productivity, innovation. You don't have this kind of one-to-many innovate. I think remote work allows for that kind of new alignment and that could, if you're not in the headquarters city, make you feel more involved in the company.

Brian: Interesting. Jessie in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jesse.

Jessie: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. This is a first-time caller, longtime listener.

Brian: Glad, you're on.

Jessie: I'm working remote. I live in Manhattan, and I'm working remote from home. This happened automatically since the pandemic. I've been working since March, every day. I find I'm working longer hours. There's more email and correspondence going back and forth. I miss the interactions. I find quirky things like the computer going down. I do get fatigued at times, just because I work as an accountant. I have clients that I work remotely and sometimes the information doesn't get conveyed as easily as if I was in the office, but all in all [inaudible 00:07:01]

Brian: It sounds like you're working more hours and information doesn't get conveyed as effectively, it sounds like what you're saying.

Jessie: A lot of times, it's like you have to double-check everything to make sure you do have the correct information.

Brian: When the coast is clear, it sounds like you want to go back?

Jessie: No, because I had a three-hour commute, which I no longer [unintelligible 00:07:25] I no longer have that and so the time that I add to it is more productive, getting more work done.

Brian: Jessie, thank you very much. Holly in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Holly.

Holly: Hey, Brian. Thank you [inaudible 00:07:42] I just wanted to say I work for the government right now and there is currently no plan whatsoever for us to return to work. They're going to reassess this summer. Whenever I talk to my colleagues about, do we want to come back, I don't think anyone misses the commute, but we really miss the social aspect of it, like the coffee breaks and getting lunch together. We're all so close.

I think for a lot of people who live alone, that's what we miss, is the camaraderie at work. I don't think we're going back anytime soon because even if the vaccine is rolled out, what if people don't get it? They can't just say like, "Okay, optional to return," I don't think, and if you want to not get the vaccine, then telecommute forever. I don't see it being anytime soon, but I definitely miss my friends at work. They were my closest friends.

Brian: Holly, thank you very much. One of the things she brings up, I don't think you addressed it in the article, but is that different people who have maybe the same job description are going to have different preferences once the coast is clear. Some people are going to want to keep working from home, some people are going to want to go back.

John: Yes. A human resources person, it makes it a lot more complicated, that's for sure. It's almost this whole new level of standards in the workplace. As a recruit, you'll look to an employer, "Will I get a chance to work remotely? Do I have to live in the city?" These can be advantages why you would join that company and not another company. The modern office is all about flexibility, whether you're in the office or not, and remote work is almost the ultimate in flexibility.

Brian: One of the companies you profiled is working with a high-end design firm to figure out what a post-pandemic office should look like. What were some of the design elements that stuck out to you? You talked specifically about something called the donning and doffing room.

John: Yes, donning and doffing room. Some call it a mudroom, a little more English country house style. This is a feature of going back to the office that everyone is going to encounter in one form or another and that is a temperature check, which is now standard in many offices, although not that useful because if you're asymptomatic it's not going to pick up the fact that you have COVID. Then there's going to be an area where you remove clothes that you came in or shoes, bags, and lockers where-- I don't think people are going to be going back to their own personal desk, at least not too many people.

There's going to be more of what they call hot-desking or a hotelling situation. Your personal things that might have been in your office or on your desk before, would more likely be in a locker that would then be moved out and moved in, and then when somebody else wants to use that desk they’re going to put their own things there. I think there's generally speaking, a decline of private space, which has been the trend in office designs ever since the ‘80s, really and I think this is going to continue it.

Brian: In fact, you put this in the context of some of your own experiences and preferences. Let me read a line from the article that some people might relate to. You wrote, "Like many older workers who once had offices, I hoped the pandemic might reverse the open-plan trend." Do you want to do a little bit of the history of this, of why open-plan office design came in in the first place, and what you think the pros and cons of it have turned out to be?

John: It came from the west coast. It came from the technology industry, and really it came from the rise of the software engineer as the kind of engine of creativity and capital in any internet company. Engineers coding, building things with code, they tend to work differently than salespeople or marketing people. It’s much more team-based, the teams are free-floating, they add and subtract people as you go, and that method of working demanded a more open office style approach.

Cubicles and hard wall offices weren’t as useful to that kind of collaboration as open offices where you had areas where you had war rooms, and other areas where you had focus areas. It was really that style of working, and then the fact that these companies were so profitable, other companies said, "Let's get some of that in our office," and so it quickly spread through corporate America, open-plan offices. I saw one statistic that said 70% of all big corporate offices are now open plan. It was just very quickly embraced.

Not a lot of data on whether it actually does spur productivity and innovation, particularly when you’re outside of the software industry and into the publishing industry. At The New Yorker, we have an open-plan office. It doesn't work as well if you're a writer trying to actually think about your work. That's why remote work has taken off, it's partly because these open-plan offices are so distracting that you finally get some work done. You're at home, you have a desk.

Brian: Yes. If you're a writer like you are, it helps to have quiet. I guess different people have different needs in that respect to different degrees but that certainly would be true of a lot of writers I think. I'm thinking of how Mayor Bloomberg may have helped push this when he was in office, because he was such a big proponent, that when he instituted what he called the bullpen office, I think that was his word for it, in City Hall, the goal was to get as few people at the top of the company to have private offices as possible.

If you're really trying to be open office, top of the heap, status CEO, even you wouldn't have a private office. For a while, that was becoming an ethic. I'm not sure it lasted so long for the CEOs.

John: Andy Grove famously had a cubicle at Intel. He gave up his office and had it, so a part of it was, again, this sort of west coast democratizing, the big shots no longer have the corner offices with the views, instead you get the light that now floods across the whole floor and everybody has more access to the boss because he's out there.

Brian: Though you note in the article that people working in open offices take 62% more sick leave according to a 2011 Danish study. Does that mean they more relish the opportunity to be away from everybody?

John: Yes. I think the open office definitely, in an era where we're trying to keep people six feet apart, the very ethic behind the open-plan office is at odds with social distancing. There's been a lot of different interventions in these places to try to- for people who wanted to get back sooner, although it seems that most offices only 10-- I think in the US it’s 10, 11% of the offices have returned. Almost everyone has just stayed away from their office until the vaccines come. I guess that's how it will work.

Brian: Josh in Riverdale, maybe more of a fan of the open office, Josh?

Josh: Hi, thanks for taking my call. As I told your screener, the observation I wanted to make is I live in an apartment in Riverdale, I'm married with kids.

While I was at the office, I definitely longed for being at home having dinner with my kids, but what I've noticed since working from home full-time, and we have not gone back to since March, is that the office, the physical office, actually gives you equality. Equality to participate, equality to compete if you're in a competitive industry, and working from home, you're at the mercy of your personal circumstances.

Brian: Josh, thank you very much. A fair observation, I think. One more. Gus, in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Hi Gus.

Gus: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to ask your speaker what he thinks about tech companies [inaudible 00:16:57] in Manhattan and what it means for trends in LA.

Brian: Your line was breaking up but I got the question. John, I don't know if you did. Gus asked why, despite everything we're seeing about the trend toward working from home and it's maybe going to become permanent, some of the big tech companies are still buying massive amounts of office space in Manhattan and developing them?

John: True. The tech companies are really the one big leaser of office space in Manhattan right now. Again, it's a bit of a contradiction. These are the companies that invented the tools that allowed us to work from home, but these are also the companies that invented the open-plan office that was all about getting people together in the office. The tech companies have this Janus like aspect where they look both ways and I'm not sure. Ultimately, it seems to me that, Twitter said that everybody can be remote in 10 years, Facebook has said that half of their workforce can be remote in 10 years.

That's pretty radical for voting remote, in the confidence of remote working. These real estate moves also seems to suggest they still want to keep a footprint in offices, so I don't know exactly where they're going to go.

Brian: It's such a paradox. In our last minute or so, as working from home becomes more of a cultural norm, do you anticipate larger conversations about how office space could be used to better serve the public good, like creating more affordable housing units in some of these abandoned offices?

John: Absolutely. In San Francisco, 16% vacancy rate, the highest ever recorded. Manhattan's pretty close. I don't see that coming back anytime soon, so the idea that this empty space could be used as affordable housing is really a great idea.

I think the other thing that really will have to happen is if you're a parent and you have young kids, remote work has placed all these new stresses on you, that your company needs to help you out a little bit more. I feel like that's an area, employee rights, employee-- What they can do for parents with children, it's more than daycare if you're working at home with your kids. It’s just--

Brian: Not to mention that kids are also remote learning at the same time. I guess CEOs everywhere must be scratching their heads and trying to figure it out because there's no right answer yet. Right?

John: Right. It seems like the history of office [unintelligible 00:19:46] is when in doubt go with the bottom line. Densify and reduce your real estate footprint. I feel like that's probably, just by the nature of numbers, the way things are going to go. Less office space for people.

Brian: John Seabrook staff writer for The New Yorker. His new piece is called Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? Thanks for thinking a lot of this through for us, John, and coming on with it.

John: Thanks a lot, Brian.

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