By Osman Aboubakr
COVID-19 has forced us to consider the office.
The office is sometimes described as: “a room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.”
COVID-19 has shown that the office can be the kitchen, the bedroom or the bathroom (as one viral video made the unfortunate point).
Here is a relevant article that piqued my interest: The Economist | Death of the office
Of particular interest to me was the following reference to a Roman lawyer who pioneered Argentum Law’s model a little while ago.
“Romans didn’t have to go to a special place to work. Their tablets and styluses were every bit as portable as our own, a feature that elite Romans took full advantage of. Two thousand years ago Pliny the Younger, an author and lawyer, wrote a letter to his friend Tacitus. He had found, he said, a splendid new method of working. Instead of going about his business at a desk, he had decided that day to combine it with a boar hunt. He sat next to his nets “not with boar spear or javelin, but pencil and tablet, by my side”. After expanding on the pleasure of his method for some time, Pliny (the office boar) concluded that this was a remarkably productive way to work since “the mind is stirred and quickened into activity by brisk bodily exercise”. He concluded by advising Tacitus, “whenever you hunt, to take your tablets along with you”.”
Although the article is called “Death of the office” and the writer dedicated most of it to bashing the office, in the end, surprisingly, the writer seems to conclude in favor of the office. I disagree with the following two apparent conclusions of the article in favor of the office.
- The insinuation that people hate home and themselves and that's why the office is important - to get away and be someone else. Perhaps people would do better to focus on fixing their homes and themselves (or getting comfortable with it all)?
- That remote working leads to an unhealthy “leveling” of the office hierarchy. The levelling of the office hierarchy that can occur over a video conference meeting taken in your t-shirt from your kitchen table surrounded by your kids, pets and dirty dishes just means that one has to work harder to overcome the intrusive new communication medium to earn the respect of colleagues.
While I do not think the office is dead, I think the affectation of it is. Most people have realized that the office does indeed have a function – in an office you can focus without outside distraction and can team-build. The office, however, should not effectively imprison workers and its cost should not be a burden on the business or its clients.
