.jpg)
I have to say that I much prefer my backyard office to my work office. Even though my work office has an ocean view. With gas at $4 a gallon, it now costs me about $8 a day to drive to work! Not to mention the hour I waste in traffic and the wear and tear on the car. Driving to an office just seems like an absurd waste of resources.
A lot of people like to talk about how high gas prices will lead to the death of the suburbs. As if we're all slaves to our jobs and we'll gladly uproot our families and change our entire lifestyles simply to live closer to the office. I think that high gas prices will instead lead to the death of the offices.
See, these people that think we're all going to move closer to our jobs are still living with this old mentality that people will work the same job for 25 years and retire with a huge pension and a nice pen set from the company. The problem is that people don't work jobs like that anymore. In fact, jobs like that hardly even exist anymore. It makes no sense to move closer to your job because in two years you'll probably be working for someone else, and the karma gods would make sure that your new job is on the complete other side of town that you just moved from.
The more you think about offices, the less they make sense. Why do I need a separate place where I can plug in my laptop and make calls on a different phone number? Why can't I just plug in my laptop at home and use my cell phone for calls? Then it really doesn't matter where I work - the tools I need to do my job are portable.
Think of how much money a company could save if it didn't pay for office space. In San Diego, office space costs an average of
$2.15 a square foot. I'm assuming that's the monthly rent cost, not yearly. So for a 10x10 office (or cubicle), it costs $215 a month just to have a space to put me. Add in the cost of a phone, Internet connection, janitorial services, utilities, etc, and you're probably looking at something like $300 a month just to stick me in a little box. In a company of 50 employees, that's $15,000 a month. Instead, the company could just pay everyone $100 a month to help cover the cost of their own phone, utilities, and Internet (which would probably cover about half of what I pay for those services at my own house) and save $10,000 a month. I'd actually come out ahead in that situation given the savings on gas. It's a
win-win situation (see, I even worked some management speak into this post).
What about meetings and "office camaraderie"? Most meetings that I'm in now are conference calls anyway, so again it doesn't matter whether I'm at the office, at home, or at the beach. Nobody on the other end of the call knows, or should care. If there needs to be a company wide meeting, have it at a park. Or rent out a hotel conference room. Or a restaurant room. Any of those options are cheaper than renting office space, and they're all equally effective places to gather a bunch of people who are going to zone out for an hour while management rambles about company paradigms and organizational charts.
As for "office camaraderie", take every other Friday afternoon (or one Friday a month) and schedule something fun. Bowling. Happy hour. Video games. Beach volleyball. Pool party. Hiking. Pay everyone to take the afternoon off and spend some time with their coworkers. I'd be willing to bet that company morale would be much higher and your money would be much better spent than cramming everyone into little cubicles in a sterile office environment.
What's even better about ditching the office space is that you could save oodles of money on IT support as well. Just give everyone a laptop computer when they start. Here. It's yours. You own it now. You take care of it. You pay to get it serviced (we'll reimburse you, of course). You pay for any accessories you need (we'll reimburse you, of course). In two years, let us know if you need an upgrade. Keep the old machine. We'll buy you a new one. Mac? Windows? Linux? It's up to you. Company Exchange email servers? Useless - we're using GMail instead. Microsoft Office products? Useless as well, we're using OpenOffice and Google Documents. One more thing -
encrypt important or sensitive documents. There you go. IT problems solved for less than the cost of employing one IT person (or deploying one Exchange server).
So, what's holding us back from the work at home revolution? I think it comes down to trust. Management just doesn't trust employees to get the job done when working outside of an office. They'd rather have you there so they can watch over you and guilt you into working. But as high gas prices push more and more people to work from home, these unfounded fears should disappear. Maybe then this working at home setup will become obvious enough that even managers will get it.
.jpg)
