You had one job…

Imagine a Volvo races a Formula 1 car around a racetrack. They complete the circuit at the same time.

People respond with, “not bad.”

But this - after having watched a family SUV match a relentlessly engineered carbon-fibre monster at its own game - would be absurd.

Yet something similar happens whenever we compare work-from-home productivity with working from the office.

Last week a paper, published in Nature, found that working from home, as part of a schedule of hybrid work, has no negative impact on employee performance.

The commentary around it was eminently calm and reasonable.

But hold on a minute.

We’re comparing performance in a setting literally designed for work (the office) -- to settings never meant to be used in that way (the home, a cafe, whatever).

This is absurd.

Since the first purpose-built offices emerged in the 18th century, they’ve supposedly been optimised for work.

This was an innovation. At that time, for most people, there was no distinction between home and the workplace. You lived where you worked, and worked where you lived.

When the Baring Family, founders of the eponymous merchant bank, set up at their Mincing Lane home, the banking happened downstairs, and the children raised upstairs.

This wasn’t to last. With the emergence of the office (and factory), the home gradually became less important as an economic centre.

We stopped designing homes as places to both live and work, and created two separate types of spaces. 

The home became the place to live. The office (or the factory), the place to work.

Since then, for the best part of three centuries, the office’s purpose was to be a better place than the home to work from. That was its one job.

And it’s evolved constantly along the way. Think of the adaptations, the practices, the rituals, all the things that define offices, and office life.

What’s it up against? The home. A place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to relax. But definitely not a place to work.

It’s like comparing a wolf with a chihuahua.

The modern office boasts many innovations, yet - in the most comprehensive paper on hybrid to date - it’s currently on a par with a small (often not-air-conditioned) space designed mainly for sleeping and relaxing

It should not be the case that spaces ruthlessly optimised for one thing (to help you work) can be replaced by spaces designed for the opposite, without any drop in productivity.

A 40%, 50%, 60% drop in performance I can understand, but to remain flat?

It’s bananas, as is the fact that the baseline for most commentary about this is to hold the home to the same standard as an office.

Instead, let’s ask the right question: how on earth can the family SUV beat the Formula 1 car?

We should ask this question because it lets us ask two others.

First, if we’re equally as productive in homes that are not designed for work, how productive can we be in homes that are designed for work?

This is the point made well by Ethan Evans on Lenny Rachisky’s podcast:

“We’re about 300 years into learning how to use offices well, and what that means is that offices aren’t going to get that much better. Working from home, we’ve only been doing that for a few years since the pandemic began. Which one is likely to have more opportunity for improvement?”

We’re only four years into the hybrid experiment.

What comes next, as our homes return to becoming places designed to work in, is incredibly exciting, and I think presents a big bull case to productivity - both personally, and in aggregate.

Once we all have our own personal bat caves, VR headsets, and the freedom to work in ways we’d never be able to in an office: how much higher can at-home productivity go?

Second, when did the office stop making us more productive, and why?

I’d wager that this has been the case for longer than we think. Offices solved two problems.

The first problem offices solved was coordination: allowing people to communicate easily with each other when not instantly reachable. This has been solved for over 30 years now.

The second problem was how to keep people motivated, especially whilst doing extremely boring work: think of the lives of a clerk in Dickensian London, chained to a desk copying things out by hand all day.

This shows up in other recent studies about productivity: experiments on employees doing tasks such as call centres and data entry generally show a drop in productivity when wfh (e.g. here).

But if the tasks involve an element of creative thought, the opposite happens: in one recent paper tracking Federal Reserve economists, output rose by 25% when working from home.

One paper even compared the both directly: doing simple, repetitive tasks remotely led to a 10% drop in productivity; but when it came to tasks needing critical thinking, productivity rose by 20%.

This, I think is the rub: as more and more tasks became automated, and more and more of us moved higher up the cognitive stack, we outgrew a need for a full-time office.

Yet like a spandrel in evolutionary biology, we stuck to it because it was too difficult to imagine an alternative. Until we were forced to four years ago.

It’s the answer to these two questions - I think - that tells us where work goes next.

By accepting it’s a modern miracle that the kitchen table can compete at the same level as a WeWork - we open up a whole new world of opportunities.

Not only designing homes that are just as good for working in, as for living in, but also building better spaces - away from home - that more adequately reflect the way we live, and work, now.

This isn’t a radical change, but simply a return to the past.

As Marc Andressen puts it: the Roman empire didn’t need any offices.

Neither, probably, do we, at least for five days a week.

aled@ashore.io