RTO (Return to Office) will fail.
Bad office designs meant to stimulate innovation …need an intervention.
US workplaces (for the most part) are set up in the context of factory models for workers. This hasn’t essentially changed in over 150 years. How space is bought and designed to accommodate a minimum footprint per person is the next level of hell in perpetuating this idea virus.
I have been through more than several office redesigns (some I have advised heavily on) and in the end ‘innovative spaces’ is a marketing term used on investors and employees. At first it was colorful carpets, then razor scooters, then foosball tables, then food, then drinks, then a hundred other attempts to make office spaces ‘sticky’ …in a good way.
At this time, offices are not built for anything other than efficiency. How that impacts culture and change is unknown and will likely remain that way.
What about that word …innovation? In its truest form it’s ephemeral. It does not depend on a space to work …and yes, some spaces are more favorable than others. At best it’s a marginal impact on the desired end result.
This is proven by the interior design and service design practices that show the ultimate goal is to create an emotional response in the user and that will stimulate behavior. The spaces that we all know are created to accommodate maximum use of footprint and thusly do not do that.
And with the flip-switching response of corporate operations, people are now being told to return to the office in the next month. The post-COVID world created a level of reflection that made people realize a few things:
- It’s cost me up to 1/3 of my income to commute, eat, park and socialize for my job.
- Whether its a common cold or COVID, I have no assurance that my fellow co-workers will be responsible and stay at a distance and not come into the office if they are sick.
- My employer is less interested in how efficient I have been while working from home than they are in my presence in a building they are paying for.
The current party line is that workplaces are bastions of innovation and an acceleration of collaborative behavior. There is no proof of that. Moreover, the word innovation in itself has a different meaning in their argument.
Innovation is a techno-centric replacement word for creativity …innovation sounds like something is actually happening. It rings of change and dynamism in corporate culture. The reality is that its a bankrupt word that sounds better to CFO’s and the investment/executive class because it sounds more like origins of a profit center.
There is a silent resistance going on. People are not RTO’ing. They are looking for flexibility, remote opportunities and companies that understand the next way of working is already here. The ‘digital native’ generations get this. So are all the others who support the value towards creativity as a precursor to innovation.
Today, we must see through what corporations claim about RTO benefits. And let the media world know that innovation and cross-learning are real, but not a reality in how our office worlds are designed. It never was and it won’t until enterprises realize the coming gig economy and how they need to come back to reality.