The other day I unfolded my trusty Brompton and cycled fifty blocks through a deserted Manhattan to my office. Once I finished what I’d come to do, I got back on the bike and – breaking every health and safety regulation in the book – took a ride through the interior of the building. Everything was exactly as I remembered it: the work stations, the photos of loved ones, the potted plants. On one desk, five bottles of hot sauce in a row. On another, a cardigan still lying where it had been thrown, one sleeve hanging limply over the side.
The only thing missing was the people.
As I write in May 2020, the office where I used to work is more or less empty. Instead of the five thousand daily security card swipes we normally see at the New York Times building, currently there are fewer than forty. The only people venturing in nowadays are security guards and a handful of other essential workers.
We don’t expect to even begin re-populating our skyscraper for months yet. Indeed many of us – managers as well as employees – doubt whether we will ever go back to working as we did before. What goes for us, goes for offices across the developed world.
Covid-19 has given the themes of this excellent book added relevance and urgency. By showing how much we can get done without offices, the virus has forced us to ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we work, and how often and in what settings we need to come together to get that work done. Once, employers and employees alike accepted the inevitability of office-working despite the costs and inconvenience involved. Now we all know that we have a choice.
The office will only survive if it demonstrably adds value to our endeavours – if it promotes creativity, enhances team-work, breaks down barriers between disciplines, nurtures a community with bonds that go deeper than the effective execution of each individual’s allotted responsibilities. This agenda – the re-imagining of the traditional office work-space – has been Chris Kane’s preoccupation for more than two decades. He’s had not one but a whole series of opportunities to challenge conventional wisdom and put new ideas to the test at scale. Where is My Office? tells the story of those experiments and the many insights that Chris was able to derive from them. We need these insights now more than ever.
My part in the re-thinking of the office began in the 1990s. By then I’d spent nearly twenty years at the BBC, an organization that combined astonishing and often anarchic creativity with an office environment redolent of the mid-century British civil service at its worst: drab desks, green and brown decor, flat fluorescent light. Environment and management culture often went hand in hand. It was an inner sanctum and a drinks cabinet for the bosses; open plan and tepid tea for the rest of us.
On the fabled sixth floor of Television Centre, where the most senior executives had their suites, the bathrooms were kept locked, and the one key entrusted to one of the corporation’s fiercest assistants to ensure that the leaders of the world’s greatest television service would never have to place their posteriors on a toilet seat that had previously been used by an underling.
Of course it couldn’t last. By the turn of the century, neither the BBC’s physical or technological infrastructure were fit for purpose. It had been obvious for years that the future was digital. By the millennium, we’d also come to realize that it would be distributed. Whether news, drama or feature, content would be increasingly made on location rather than in central studios. Talent itself was becoming increasingly portable. The old arguments in favour of a massive concentration of investment and operations in London no longer made either practical or political sense.
Soon a vision of a very different BBC took shape with a re-imagined Broadcasting House in central London and new fully digital broadcast and production centres across the UK. We then began the boldest set of building projects in the history of the Corporation – projects which were often the critical first piece of even more ambitious public/private schemes for urban regeneration. Chris Kane played a significant part in much of this, as you’ll discover in the chapters that follow.
But the office revolution went deeper and broader than this. In broadcasting as in so many other industries, the twentieth-century model of a division of labour between separate siloes of expertise, each with their own offices and hierarchies, was also breaking down. Nearly all the new challenges were multi-disciplinary and were best solved by agile teams coordinated by empowered junior front-line leaders. Silicon Valley had demonstrated years earlier that teams like these work best when their members sit together in informal and inspirational shared spaces. The reasons are practical – it’s much easier to keep a team in sync when everyone’s in the same room – but also psychological: teams who no longer sense the beady eyes of their host departments on them feel far more able to take risks and try new ideas.
This revolution in team-working wasn’t limited to the BBC or the media industry. It’s been unfolding across sectors and around the world. One of the few positive impacts of the coronavirus crisis may well be a further acceleration of our transition from the regimented offices of the past (and the archaic management philosophy that built them) to something more flexible, more individuated, more human-shaped.
The best new talent requires it. Our more seasoned colleagues have found they prefer it. The sheer speed at which the future is hurtling towards us demands it.
Mark Thompson
Former President and CEO of The New York Times Company
Former Director-General of the BBC