The idiocy of RTO and hotdesking
We will start off on a high note, with a long-deferred remodel project in our primary home.
The house, while well built, is an older structure, with the attendant considerations -- lack of insulation, layout meant for a different time, services not well suited to expansion; and other factors. As all homeowners do, we had been trying out various ideas for a change in layout, with some small improvements and rearrangements to go with that work. There was a screened porch on the south side of the building. We closed that space in to create a modern-day office/study space, suitable for taking the now-ubiquitous Zoom calls in privacy while the rest of the household runs around in pajamas.
The Zoom genie is well and truly out of the bottle now and we're looking at a future in which homes must necessarily provide this new function -- a semi-permanent work from home space. We've effectively had our employers outsource their real estate overhead to us, making us responsible for providing office space to conduct their work in. There are several dimensions to this problem and I'll touch on some of them briefly. While I was working in Financial Services in New York, I saw the early indications of a move towards remote work and the outsourcing of commercial real estate services to employees'homes.
In the early 2010s, many technology workers were able (with supportive managers) to work from home one or two days a week. This was a perk, and much appreciated. It made all kinds of things easier for families, including mundane things like dentist's appointments and picking up the dry cleaning. Some home duties were even possible, like changing the laundry between meetings. Child care was still largely out of scope. As the notion of one or two days "wfh" changed from the exceptional to customary practice, some second order effects emerged.
These included
Needing to account for people's wfh schedules when arranging meetings. "I work from home on Wednesdays, please choose another day" would become commonplace responses to calendar invitations.
The awkward fact that desks, chairs and computers(*) would be unoccupied, but at the same time, unavailable. Fridays were notable for the office having a quarter or fewer of the staff physically present. Managers would find themselves walking out onto an open-plan floor and feeling that perhaps their teams had abandoned their jobs. Naturally, everyone would respond immediately to an Instant Message, but that didn't change the nature of the appearance of empty desks -- expensive real estate sitting around doing nothing.
On the second point, there were some creative ideas tossed around. First to go was the notion of a physical computer at a desk being one person's computer. A key to making better use of real estate would be the decoupling of the keyboard, monitor and mouse from a single individual. Vastly more preferable to have the "actual" computer be a virtual thing, where anyone could sit down at any terminal (monitors, mice and keyboards having effectively become terminals whose only service would be to connect the user to their virtual computer) and reconnect to their computer located somewhere in the corporate cloud. This allowed several new economies of scale, including allowing for better resource concentration. Several virtual computers could be squeezed into one physical computer, which in turn could be located in a data center, which provided other cybersecurity benefits as a side effect.
Having virtualized the individual user's computer, you no longer needed to have a desk specifically for Mary Jones. Instead, Mary could simply take whatever computer was available, in much the same way that one might sit down at a computer in a public library, with the difference being that Mary would then log on to her "personal" instance through the internet. Having decoupled people from furniture, it was a simple step to "hot-desking", one of those modern evils visited upon us by businesses looking to reduce their expenditure on real estate (second only to salaries in the expense column of the P&L).
Much like the airline industry, hot-desking encourages overbooking, with hapless latecomers relegated to squatting in common spaces or bouncing from conference room to conference room trying to find space to work. These are not hypotheticals by the way -- this is actually how firms run some of their businesses today. Managers naturally have assigned desks, sparing them from the indignity of having to hunt for a space to squat for the day. Also naturally, there is now a race to get to the office ever earlier, as the good seats get gobbled up by the early birds, further driving a wedge between the haves and the have-nots.
The privileged few have actual apartments in the city, not far from work. They can walk to the office in scant minutes, without having to swim through the commute on subways and trains. Having arrived early and unruffled, they simply take the good desks and start working. Meanwhile, Dave from Long Island has to get up half an hour earlier just to make sure he can get a seat at all, never mind a good one.
Hotdesking was nasty and foreseeable. Covid was a temporary bandage on that problem, allowing people to briefly stop trying to swim out of the vortex and think about their lives. Briefly.
Soon enough, corporations were back at the balance sheet though, this time with the added incentive of Covid economics and the implosion of the commercial real estate market.