A decade or so ago they sold office workers on the idea that open seating at the office was a great thing for workers. A boost to productivity! Collaboration! High ceilings and light! No more walls!
It was a lie.
They got rid of offices and cubicles to save money and increase density. But you'll notice the managers kept their offices…for confidentiality. The open offices became headphone galleries where workspaces were stripped of personality because you couldn't leave anything out that you didn't mind possibly walking away. All of the stuff that gave you a little bit of a smile during your 10 hour slog had to be stuffed into a little rollaround cabinet with a lock on it until the next day. We glared at our monitors trying to ignore the motion behind our monitors and in our peripheral vision, and we learned to use Slack to converse with people sitting right across from us. But hey, some places gave you free soda!
We didn't need COVID to tell us that sitting six feet away from your coworkers had potential health consequences. If one person came down with a cold, everyone came down with a cold. Lunches were an olfactory stew, and god help you if someone ate chips! But COVID meant you could DIE sitting next to someone, and all the offices were evacuated. And we learned to work at home.
Suddenly we all learned that hey, it was a great thing to have personal space, gain back 2 hours of our lives and be able to fix lunch in our own kitchen. Our individuality returned. And guess what? Since they taught us that Slack was the way to communicate we didn't lose productivity. Not having to slog away from our open spaces to another “community room” for meetings was a good thing! We didn't miss having to find a place along the wall to lean, or the one piece of funky furniture that had a back so you could precariously balance your laptop on your lap as you took notes…or kept up your slack conversations as your manager drolled on about “synergy”. We got work done, very well, for two years. In our own spaces.
But the managers were upset. Their offices looked out on empty fields of desks. Even worse this work-at-home was costing them lots of money, because aside from a little savings in housekeeping and electricity the cost of maintaining a building remains the same whether it is full or not. So they had to pay for the building AND the stipends for the work-at-home workforce, and that hurt them. A lot.
So now the lie begins anew…from Tim Cook to Elon Musk to pinhead managers whose names you'll never learn. They are all trying again to convince us that we're better off being in the office. The hell hole of dining hall seating that makes them feel so good because they can gaze out at the fields of people from their offices along the periphery and enjoy the control.
Fuck that.