I spent six months working remotely in 2004. What led me to start my company in 2005 was not the desire to make money; I had enough back then. I really missed the in-person interaction with other hackers. I was living in Buenos Aires at the time. What I wanted did not exist there so I had to create it.
If you work remote then there are avenues for socialization outside of an office space. Just because you find it lacking in one area doesn't mean that's the same for everyone nor should you ignore the possible advantages.
To see working patterns shift back to "the farm", so to speak, doesn't seem unreasonable at all in my mind. It probably will not completely eliminate the office, but we could see only, say, 10-20% of the population still working in offices in the future.
Perhaps we will never shift to mostly working alone simply because we're basically herd animals.
I suspect this is not ever going to match the efficiency of a good team with history.
In the US, that could mean a number of 1099 employees instead of the normal W2. Possibly long-term contracts would become the norm. Much of this would be the employer pushing the cost of employment onto the employee.
Also, I'd imagine that there are several examples where having a good team with a history is not much of a consideration. If you have access to enough people in the field in your area that have experience, it most likely would not be difficult to ramp up a good team that can suit your needs quickly. Professionals tend to be professionals.
The obvious alternative is to maintain a group of people that have developed a good working relationship together for a longer period of time. Of course people would come and go occasionally due to other opportunities & changing needs for skills. But wait - that sounds an awful lot like what we already have.
Of course no one knows the future (maybe lifetime union jobs will be back in 30 years?) but I just feel this is the way the wind is blowing. But then again maybe it's just where I'm standing.
However, that's not the interesting part of the conversation. What we pretty much both agreed on is that as the technology progresses, what we term in person interactions will change drastically. Today, when we talk about virtual reality, we are still bound in our conduits into that world.
Imagine if we had the ability to completely immerse ourselves into a virtual reality, Matrix-style. In that world, your commute is nothing more than going to a chair and loading the program. From there, you can appear anywhere in that virtual reality. It can be in the shape of an office, or a green field with desks, or no desk, pretty much anything the organization/group of people wants. With the totality of human senses present, neither of us debating the issue could see anything missing that a physical presence would provide.
Throw in the current trend of shrinking employment, and the future of the office buildings in the next few hundred years seems to be in question.
Technologically, we are not there yet and it's not clear if this will happen in our lifetime. However, it no longer feels like a pure sci-fi notion.
Oculus Rift - fully immersive digital environment
Leapmotion/Kinect - natural UI for interacting in 3D
Google Fiber - high-speed bandwidth networks
Modern GPUs - can already produce movie-level graphics in realtime.
I'm talking about all of the non-verbal signals that feed back into your visual cortex without you even realizing it. Things that inspire you to follow someone, or realize they aren't understanding you, or that you are offending them, or that they don't themselves believe what they are saying.
Lots of human factors work has gone into this and we don't have a clue yet how to transmit that stuff much less render it in a virtual world. I expect we will get there, but its an area that I am not seeing much in the press about.
Would love Trevor to jump in here with what they've been learning with the AnyBot with regards to present/not-present sort of work.
I'm thinking gesture capture (hands and body) and words/sounds in a virtual environment. You can fluidly interpret those inputs into sights and sounds which illustrate ideas. It won't be intimate in a physical sense, but it will be extremely expressive, and that's what the office needs.
I hate working at home - I get cabin fever, bored and lonely. I prefer being around other people and having that interaction (IM, video calls just aren't the same). I like a change of scenery during the day.
It's nice to have the option to work from home when necessary (e.g. to avoid having to take a sick day, wait in for a delivery etc) - but I'd hate to do it every day.
I don't doubt that the nature of offices will change (e.g. I find it hard to imagine that cubicle farms have much future), and that the number of people working remotely will increase, but I'd be very surprised if offices disappear completely.
Also how much does it cost per month?
Also, Mr. Branson does not look too comfortable in his outdoor chair next to the street. ;-)
Also, how is this going to work out for couples/families?
But if holographic teleconferencing becomes mainstream, then I could see a lot more knowledge based work being done remotely. That has downsides as well. Why employ an American, if you can get a qualified person in say, Poland, who speaks fluent English, is willing to work in your timezone, and has the equipment to virtually be around in 3D?
This is the aspect of the argument that makes me have to take a self-imposed time-out.
The prime time of every major online site is during office hours. Ebay, Reddit, Slashdot in its prime, Digg in its prime, even our loveable Hacker News. Most of the people here are sitting at a desk in an office, biding the day away until they clock out.
We know that many (if not most) office workers piss away a significant portion of time that they're in the office.
A good manager of people knows the realm that their charges work in, and understands the contribution each of them makes. That they warm a seat 60 hours a week is absolutely irrelevant if they make no contribution, yet for mediocre managers everywhere it is the only thing they can competently measure so you see that desperate fear of people working remotely.
Marissa Meyer has become the hero of terrible managers (and jealous people) everywhere. I mean no ill towards her (Yahoo is in tough times, this may be a way of letting go of some people, they're regrouping everyone, and the initiative might not even have been hers), but there is a cluster of mediocrity that is raising a banner around this action of Yahoo.
Choice empowers people and makes for a more content workforce.
people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed
There will always be jobs were people will go to a place and work with other people (McDonald's, Prisons, Hospitals.) But there will be a increasingly large sector of the economy where it will be economically beneficial to "do away" with the office. Those who have those skills are destined to benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a task that a machine cant or wont be able to do. I cant get further than art and thinking up things for machines to do, but even then I'm not so sure. I'm sure even philosophical issues could eventually be determined by a computer program. Robots can perform most mundane tasks, and equally highly complex tasks we cant even do. We even have machines that design and build machines.
So yeah, offices will be a thing of the past, because workers will be a thing of the past. Well, just a few workers who watch over the machines. But, wont they be deemed inefficient?
Some jobs (highly self-directed, autonomous, don't need teamwork) can be done just fine from home.
Other jobs (collaborative, creative, culture-building) just can't, or it's very difficult.
And then there are obviously a lot of gray areas in the middle, since a lot of jobs are a mix of things, as well as accountability and productivity-measurement being a big factor too (some people will get away with slacking off if they can).
Every kind of job and company is different, and needs to figure it out for themselves. And when you don't work at a specific organization, it's hard to know what they really need.
Let me ask you this: why do you automatically assume that this decision rests with the organization to fit its needs? Don't a firm's workers also have a lot of different situations that may require different solutions? Some workers love working at the office. Others love working from home. Others like to have a mixture. It sounds to me what Branson is saying isn't necessarily "telecommuting good, office bad" as much as "It's a bad idea to rigidly force choices on your employees", and I think there's some truth to that view. After all, I don't buy that employment at Yahoo necessarily means that a person won't be successful working from home.
Regardless of my views, I don't think it's accurate to say that this is black-and-white thinking.
I was skeptical at first as I was prone to the common, ephemeral ailment of loneliness. However advances in group video chat, online whiteboards, cafes with high-speed wireless and power bars, shared working spaces... I prefer it to working in an office. I can choose when I am distracted, I can change my environment to suit my mood, and I get more work done over all.
I also get to spend more time with my family and less time commuting (which is a complete waste of your life).
I look forward to offices being "optional," but I doubt they will disappear completely. We are, by nature, social creatures. I predict that we will instead employ communal spaces instead of the traditional, "company office."
Just as when I started my first job, I had to learn new skills. As a diligent, good employee, I tried to learn quickly. And, now, I'm probably more productive than I ever have been.
But, then again, I don't sit on FB or Twitter all day. Each morning, I set out with a focused list of goals, and I try to get them done. And, I need a quiet space.
The hardest part, for me, was learning when to shut off. As an office worker, there was a natural dynamic and rhythm of the team. When the lights started going off, or when the cleaning staff showed up, you knew that it was time to go. But, sometimes, at home, I forget to turn off. I think I have gotten closer to burnout, working from home.
Collaboration is an issue, but we work in such small teams nowadays, that there aren't as many communication channels. Long gone are the 15-20 person teams. Now, I work with targeted groups of 4-5. We communicate regularly. For more high-fidelity communication, I have face-to-face meetings with subject matter experts and stakeholders and designers maybe once a month.
As a software developer, I can't see how this trend can stop. With the state of things, I will never again have all the people that I need in the same office every day. Skills are just too specialized now. And, services are specialized. To get everyone (and all their dependencies) in the same office would mean sacrificing a lot of quality and agility.
I think what's crucial here, however, is that I don't extrapolate my "I prefer to work in an office" sentiment to everyone, like Bloomberg does. Furthermore, I'm lucky in that I have a choice in this and my bosses are constantly encouraging me to work from home more.
So I think if there's one thing it's better to predict, it's that employee choice will be much more of the norm, not that offices themselves will be history.
Manufacturing desires and trumping economic needs over social goods is so entrenched now that I doubt most people would choose a more relaxed lifestyle over the next shiny bauble dangled in front of them.
I wish it were not so, but I see little to no evidence to the contrary.
Remote work may be somewhat inefficient now, but when our technologies get good enough to build a room for consistent telepresence, there will be little point in having a cubicle across town when you can own a customized office and virtually project it anywhere.
What do you mean by "recent"? They have existed for perhaps more than 100 years and before that there wasn't the type of work where they were needed and so they didn't exist. (There was no paper to be pushed? Or phones to be answered?).
"build a room for consistent telepresence"
There is much nuance you can pick up when someone is right in front of you vs. by telepresence. I'm not saying you aren't right or that what you say won't happen but don't discount the value of face to face at least in business, negotiation and management.
It takes much more work from me to buy something face to face (because I have to act and hide visual cues) then it does by email. But on the same hand I can pick up visual cues in the seller and make split second decisions based on them. It all depends on the situation of course.
<epic fail>
In my experience, offices are a painful place to watch the clock but a great place to actually get stuff done.
I'm a lot different from others, though, in that I'm not only easily distracted, I also have chronic problems with motivation. I.e.: when I'm at home I'm a slacker, and when I'm at an office I'm not (or not _as much_).
After a few weeks of this I began offering to spend full days, once a week, at some of my other clients, and observed a boost in productivity there, too.
I know of some work-at-home freelancers who have set aside a room in their home that they treat quite strictly as their office, even dressing in a suit and tie every morning and "commuting" from their bedroom down the stairs or across the hall. They find that it helps them get into the right mindset so they can more easily suppress the temptation to knock-off for a few minutes and watch TV, or play with the cat, or whatever.
Meyer might be doing something slightly different, though, which is that she needs to get Yahoo! onto a new track. This must be accomplished psychologically as well as technically and logistically, and I know many companies have tried a variety of tricks to get their employees to think differently, shift into a different mindset. Changing decor, company colors, cubicles-to-open-space or vice-versa, different dress codes, and so-on.
This might be a permanent thing at Yahoo!, or maybe they will begin slowly re-introducing work-at-home. A kind of reverse if what I did, perhaps: one day a week, or month, while keeping tabs on how the employee's performance differs. Some may perform better, some (like me) might not have the discipline.
The big issue is that of being able to control my own environment. If it's too hot, I can work someplace where it's not, same if it's too loud. When you require everyone to work in one shared area, this control disappears and you're often left to the whims of either the weak common denominator, the highest paid person, or the loudest (ie the small thin woman that keeps the office incredibly hot)
If you want dedicated employees, don't run a shitty company.
Marissa Meyer likely saw that the freedom wasn't producing the results she would like & decided to reel it in. I'm sure it will return when appropriate.
The wave of the future will be MORE offices that make people not want to leave.
But I would be less happy flying on Mr Branson's airline if the pilots were allowed to telecommute.
Maybe closer to a university's layout for a professor or postdoc than most commercial offices.
Self-driving electric cars and buses will help alleviate this pain point, but electric cars still cause pollution--just at a (often coal-burning) central power plant instead of an internal combustion engine.
The future will be completely weird and amazing, but it won't be the weird and amazing you thought of...
I really could not get past this introductory bit. It tainted my opinion of everything Branson said. If Branson has enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg, I can't really muster much respect for him in turn. Which is a shame, because I essentially agree with him on this point--working from home--in particular.
Though I also feel it's any company's prerogative to allow or disallow working from home.