Good Riddance to an Anachronism

There’s only a day left to the end of Singapore’s circuit breaker and like much of the nation, I’m about to head back to the “normal” life of being in an office. The prospect of going back to an office like existence brings me back to a letter I submitted to the Today Newspaper, which they subsequently rejected.

The letter in question was a response to a commentary by the FT correspondent Lucy Kellaway, who had praised the concept of office and said that we would miss the office when it died. Ms. Kellaway’s commentary can be found at:

https://www.todayonline.com/commentary/covid-19-we-will-miss-office-if-it-dies-it-gives-work-meaning-workplace

I think Ms. Kellaway has hit the nail on the head in her description of offices as social places. Think about it, we spend at least a third of the day in an office and most of the people we probably spend more time with people in the office than we do with our families. Offices are great melting pots and I’m surprised that our social planners seem focused on creating the imaginary “kampong” (Malay for village) experience in housing estates when they should be focusing their efforts on offices. Offices are effectively social places masquerading as work places. My only joy at returning to the office is that I’ll have a reason to leave the house for a few hours each week.

However, with the exception of its social value, I don’t miss the office and I believe that far more can be achieved outside the office. Offices are generally bad for productivity both for the business and the individual.

I have had two stints working in an office and I’ve found that my happiest moments in both stints came from doing task that required me to be outside of an office, even if it was just for 15-minutes. Leaving the office was when I actually did productive and meaningful things. If one looks at the eight hours a day that one is obliged to spend in an office, one has to question how many of those hours are actually spent on doing productive things. Contrary to what you may be told about an office being a place to do work, the truth is that an office is often a place where people indulge in petty power plays and ego building.

The main case against offices is that they are often vanity projects and focus a corporation on paying for the vanity rather than actual work. I think of the common complaint that clients had against advertising agencies, which was they expected 50 cents on the dollar of advertising spend was wasted, they were just not sure which 50-cents was wasted. Big agencies are known for having big offices in the swanky parts of town. Advertising isn’t the only industry where the big players need big offices.

The need for offices, particularly the big ones has made landlords very rich. This is especially true in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where land is scarce and the service economy is larger than in other parts of Asia. With the exception of Li-Ka-Shing who ventured into ports, telecoms, retail and technology, the great fortunes of Hong Kong and Singapore have predominantly been made from owning office space. Think of Lee Shau Kee of Hendersen Land in Hong Kong and the Ng and Kwek Families on Singapore.

Having worked in liquidations in Singapore in the last five-years, I did notice that the landlord was inevitably one of the largest creditors in most cases and the business that went down was inevitably paying rents that were forming a high percentage of the actual revenue.

Hopefully, the “home-based” work that was forced on us by Covid-19 will get businesses to question the high rents. Why do you need to pay millions a month for office space when the revenue is generated by people working from home? Hopefully land used for office space will be used for more productive things like residential property, hospitals and schools. One should also hope that the tycoons like Lee Shau Kee and the Ng’s of Far East would then focus their money in more productive technology industries.

The other issue that I have with offices is that they encourage tribalism. As was often discussed in anthropology, humans have a tendency to define their identity by finding opposites. In the old days, race and religion were the usual tools of forming identity. These days, its increasingly about profession and being in the right office.

While there is nothing wrong with being a working professional in itself, the problem with offices is that they give you a false sense of the wider world. They encourage you to sort yourself out according to profession (accountants, lawyers, architect, PR professional etc) or by department (finance, marketing, HR etc). You are obliged to spend the day with “your people,” which gives you a sense that your people are the only people around and that only function in a business is yours.

Lucy Kellaway talked of the great office romance, where people fell in love with the people they met at the office. I guess this is to be expected, that one meets a future mate from one’s immediate social circle. However, isn’t that the crux of the problem, that we only meet and mingle with the people from our industry and organization. This is a form of intellectual inbreeding, which like other forms of inbreeding is distinctly unhealthy.

Let’s not mourn the office and celebrate freedom from the right to inbreed with our own kind.