Micro offices
One large issue with returning to office is that offices are often in large cities where the cost of living is insanely high and traffic is terrible. This makes working remote significantly more attractive.
My uneducated opinion is that we should move toward distributed small offices – the size of a few teams. This would allow offices to exist in small cities resulting in:
- Lower cost of living – small city are just more affordable
- Better work life balance – many aspects help here, a shorter commute, still being able to meet people in person, lower financial stress/pressure etc.
- You need less global policies – e.g. you don’t need a blanket policy that says “no dogs”, just let people in an office decide if dogs should be allowed based on whether someone is allergic for example.
The main reason I believe this can work well is that once companies reach a certain scale, people are spread across buildings/floors and hop on VC to chat anyway. At this point how far you are from the other team doesn’t matter – I vividly remember VCing with people in the building next door just because we were lazy (also because we had back to back meetings and didn’t have time to switch buildings).
Thoughts? This is somehow similar to my experience moving to the Amsterdam office – my commute is biking a few minutes, I still hangout with coworkers and still can perform my work pretty well. I would definitively love to have dogs around the office :)