I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later.
Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours. The employee wastes 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Similarly the employer wastes time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms in building B, etc.,etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself.
The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
Given that description, it's completely illogical. You've described no differences at all between buildings A and B!
In reality, though, building A might be poorly-suited to work because of children, pets, or other people, or it might be located in an area that's very noisy during the hours in question, or it might be maintained to a different standard of cleanliness, one not conducive to focus, or it might have poor connectivity options available, or...
In reality, building B is the destination for many people working on the same or related projects, so people focused on the same thing can focus and share information easily, and people focused on similar or related things can focus and share information easily. The single-use environment is oriented entirely toward the work expected, without having to support any other uses. Equipment failures can be easily handled because of onsite spares. Connectivity is assured. Comfort is assured. There are likely more meal options in the vicinity, given the nature of office buildings vs residential areas. And so on.
Personally, I prefer to work from home, and I have a dedicated workspace with a 1GB fiber connection and no pets or young kids underfoot, so I don't have a commute, which averages 30 minutes where I live. But it doesn't seem ridiculous or illogical for companies to expect employees to show up at work, and many people seem to prefer separating the two.
I just remember, I've got a friend and former coworker who lives a few blocks from me, and he chooses to drive into the office a couple of days a week to work by himself, echoing in an mostly-empty building, because his wife is a real estate agent, and both of them working from home disrupt each other. She doesn't have an office outside the home, so he drives 20 minutes each way (no need for rush hour), and finds the location much preferable to either staying home or working from a coffee shop.
Different people have different life experiences, for sure, but it turns out that there are many, many logical reasons why people might work from offices given a choice.
I work in building A, and for me, that seems true. But my building A doesn't have pets, or children, or other people working in it. It's not noisy, very clean, and has a gigabit internet connection.
In short, you've completely ignored the entire content of my last comment, which is unfortunate.
And yet again: I love working remotely! Given a choice, I'll never work from an office again. Although I also felt that way from 2008-2018, and then ended up working in an office for a year or so until the pandemic, because one doesn't always have an easy choice.
I dont see why having pets or children makes WFH an issue.
I have both, and it's a joy that I can take breaks throughout the day to see the people that matter most to me (and my pets, who aren't people...but still matter)
I don't, either, since I have no pets and my youngest child at home is 12. However, when my previous company ran a survey, many parents of younger children mentioned children and pets as reasons they wanted to spend one or more days in the office.
>Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both being heated/cooled for 24 hours.
Don't know where you live and work, but that's not the case for me. In most buildings I've worked in, aircon/heating switches off around 6pm. And I certainly don't leave my home heated while not in it.
Of everything wrong with modern society, the inefficiency of having separate home and office buildings ranks pretty low imho.
> Of everything wrong with modern society, the inefficiency of having separate home and office buildings ranks pretty low imho.
Another way to look at this inefficiency is to imagine how much cheaper (and, on average, bigger for an individual) housing could be if we had no need for offices. The inability for the young people to buy their own place seems to be universal in (at least most of) developed world (Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, EU, NZ, Japan, urban China, ...).
The cultural impacts of that change are pretty interesting as well, though that sounds like a thesis topic to me.
I can definitely say that for us, going from a company which was 95% in the office to 95% remote, the culture has been negatively impacted. Productivity might be on par or even slightly up but overall I believe most people are less happy.
IRL meetings are important - but you don't need them 3 days per week. My team has found meeting once per month, or even once per quarter is highly effective. We get together all day, have plenty of whiteboards, and even some team games. We make it fun and productive. It has been working extremely well.
We even fly in the folks who are truly remote - they don't live in the same metro area or even the same state. It's still a lot cheaper and more energy efficient than commercial real estate.
Yea over here (Scandinavia) people started saving money by turning off aircon during the nights.
...which caused huge issues with moisture and air quality. The buildings were designed to have forced air circulation 24/7. Changing it to 12/5 just messed up everything.
There is a maximally efficient way to operate buildings when people are not in them. This is some function of building size, ambient air temperature and amount of time people will not be in the building (and probably other things). The key point is, unless the ambient air temperature is close to 20C, it is unlikely turning off heating / cooling completely is going to be maximally efficient.
In Atlanta if you turn off your A/C at 6pm you’re not going to be able to cool the building back down by the time the employees return in the morning. Reduce it a bit, sure, but it needs to be running 24/7.
It would be a better benefit to society to turn most of these office buildings into apartments.
Not to mention the assumption that everyone "sit[s] in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there)".
Even minutes add up. I only have a 5 min commute, but with my 260 workdays, that comes to 2 x 5 mins x 260 = 2600 minutes, or 43.3 hours. That over one work-week of lost time.
But I do work with people that have one hour commutes, each way. For them, that's 520 hours a year - or almost 3 MONTHS worth of working hours, just to sit in a car. And not all are blessed to have public transport - so that two hour commute means eyes on road and hands on the wheel.
We haven't even touched on things like fuel, tollbooths, vehicle maintenance, etc.
When I was working north of DC there were people commuting from West Virginia (couldn't sell their houses to relocate), so 2.5+ hours each way so that's about 32 work-weeks of lost time. And they would come in by 7am to leave at 3pm to avoid the insane traffic during rush hour.
i work remote but live in the northern dc area. i occasionally have to head up to the harpers ferry area after work (northwest of DC by about 60-70 min without traffic, for non locals) and the afternoon rush hour literally starts by 3pm, especially on thursdays the days i usually have to go up there.
its funny cuz so many people think "oh ill leave early and beat traffic" that you are often better off waiting until like 6pm.
i still cant believe how many WV plates i see on 270 on any given work day. i hope i never end up in a commute like that
I have a 30 minute commute in comfy air conditioned public transport. I'd rather spend that time home.
But I'm willing to do it 1-2 times a week if there is need. Some things are just better and faster to do in person. Brainstorming and onboarding new employees being the two big ones.
In the short term, kinda curious what would happen to all the people who are sustained by the economic activity of the things you deem superfluous. Someone works those jobs. Provides lunch, cleans the offices, sets up the furniture and AV, maintains the building, etc...
The pure fact that it provides increased economic activity and therefore is able to support different jobs and the second/third order consequences of those makes perfect sense to me.
In your stay at home model, what would all those people do instead?
I've never understood the argument that we should continue doing something just for the sake of jobs. At bowling alleys, we used to have pinsetters who replaced the pins after you knocked them down. We had leech collectors who would collect leeches for bloodletting. We had 'computers' who would calculate equations by hand. It'd seem ridiculous today if I told you that we should've ignored advances in medicine, software, and automated pinball machines in order to protect those jobs. Irrespective of whether or not working from home is a good idea, society changes once new technologies are invented or social norms change, and sometimes that means we have to find people new jobs.
I didn't realize it was my responsibility to find these people employment. I especially didn't realize I needed to keep paying for a car, consuming gasoline and destroying Earth's biosphere, contributing to smog, and wasting my time so that these people will stay employed. Maybe, just maybe, our system needs a top-down reevaluation and maybe we can find other ways to house, clothe, and feed people who don't have jobs. Or maybe we realize there's other, more important work, for these folks to be doing.
I don't think it's your responsibility, but the proposed and in-process change is going to continue to be very disruptive, nonetheless.
One way to think about offices is that they are appealing for much the same reason that people demonstrably prefer to live in urban areas instead of rural areas. Over time, people flock to cities because of the efficiencies of having many people in a concentrated area. In many ways, the same thing is true with office jobs.
People living in suburbs or exurbs shouldn't expect to have a dozen eateries within a few blocks of their home, but it's quite common to have those options at work. The economics works because there are many more people per square mile or meter at the office than at home.
Personally, I keep groceries in my house, and almost never go out for lunch, but most people eat lunches out, and offices make that easier.
The short term will obviously be problematic for those people. However, in the mid term they can move some of those service activities to residential areas instead of business districts (provided that zoning regulations become less senseless than they are now), and in the long term those demographics can be redirected to more productive endeavours (by the combination of the appearance of new industries that leverage increased workforce availability and a general decrease in working hours).
