Whatever it is that you do, you obviously – on some level – actually want to be working at Google. You want the status, yes, but you also want the perks: the free laundry, the free haircuts, the endless on-site activities, and all the cereal you can eat. That doesn’t just sound better than your job: it sounds better than your life.
That’s what former Googler Brandon Oxendine felt, anyway. For three months in 2012, he eschewed more conventional living arrangements to set up home in his car in the Google car park. Yes, Brandon technically lived in a station wagon when he could have had his own place somewhere in Silicon Valley. But, for all intents and purposes, he lived in Googletopia, and he loved it – despite the practical complications. “I had told everyone I had moved into San Francisco,” he told the BBC. “But I was always coming up in the same outfit from the parking garage.”
Brandon’s experience might be a little extreme but, for most workers, it will ring a bell; where once the division between work and leisure was pin sharp, it’s now unnervingly hazy. We send emails to our bosses at 11pm, and play table football instead of going to meetings. “There’s no doubt that this is a phenomenon of contemporary work life,” says Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. “Work bleeds into everything else.” And so does the place where we do it.
That’s one explanation for a remarkable piece of news that emerged from a Deloitte study last week: over the six months to March this year, the amount of new office space being built in central London was up by 24%, to a total of 9.5m sq ft. That’s an area about the same size as Battersea Park, and the second-biggest increase in 20 years. Meanwhile, offices were in such demand in the capital last year that rents rose by 7.7%. And British Land, a major landlord, saw a 12% rise in the values of its properties.
You might attribute this boom to Silicon Valley’s trickle-down: we all want to work somewhere with soft-play breakout areas and a slide in the atrium, and so big companies need more space to accommodate us. But there’s a problem. At the same time this is happening, there’s a deep shift in the exact opposite direction – there is a rise in technologies that make remote working a piece of cake, and shared office space has become a booming business in its own right. “In any industry 15 years ago, they would all have had huge offices with pictures of them shaking hands with the Queen,” says Tim Robinson, head of property asset management at Knight Frank and chair of the judges at last year’s British Council for Offices awards. “But most of that has gone away now. Nearly everyone else is flexible space.” These days, he observes, nearly all offices are open plan.
So flexible that most of us could earn our living in our pyjamas. For some tasks, yes, we’ll always need to meet face to face – but, for the most part, we’re not much more than email drones. “The office is in inverted commas now, because it’s what you make it,” says Julian Cheek, a director at architectural firm Chapman Taylor and expert in workplace design. “I can contact whoever I want from anywhere, and find out whatever I need. I can have my office in the coffee shop.” So why the building boom?
It’s not a coincidence that the growth is in London, and mostly in the City: whereas high-end knowledge workers are sufficiently sought-after that they can take a job in the capital at the employer with the most avant-garde selection of amenities, the rest of us will have to make do with the prosaic benefits of a more efficient approach to hotdesking.
“You do see private equity firms with 10 people in 5,000 sq ft,” says Tim Robinson. “They have to have the table football and the snooker. They employ people on big salaries with big bonuses who want to be able to boast about it.” For everyone else, he says, it’s more a question of consolidating dispersed offices and cutting down on wasteful space for each worker. “We don’t have any of those facilities in our office,” Robinson adds. “If we ended up with six table tennis tables, it wouldn’t work culturally. You’d have the senior partner wondering why people weren’t working.”
Saval asks what’s going on outside of metropolises. “[That culture is] in cities such as New York or London, not Cleveland or the rest of the UK. In those places you have a preponderance of empty buildings. You’ve had these waves of office development throughout history, and they always represent speculation. Unless capitalism has solved some of its problems in ways that I’m unaware of, it’s likely to follow the same pattern again. It will come to seem absurd.”
There are, of course, stories about less august businesses trying to take a page from the Google playbook, but by and large they do seem to be a bit daft. How many times can you go down a slide at work, after all, before you start to yearn for the lift? “They attempt these things because they see the accoutrements as the creative things about those workplaces,” says Saval. “But that’s not really what’s innovative. You can’t replicate Silicon Valley by replicating the trappings.” This approach can reach a comical pitch. Cheek knows of one media company, determined to imprint its left-of-centre credentials, that made everything in the office red. “Well, it’s fine, but it’s very fleeting,” he says bemusedly. “What do you do with the Tories in [power]?”
If that construction boom is a mirage, then, how can we really expect to be working in 10 years? The office, suggests Cheek, could become a meeting place and a branding opportunity, and not much more. “You still need that presence but, ultimately, that could be a shoebox.” What’s more, he predicts, the more faddish aspects of the environment that led Oxendine to live in his car will quickly fall out of fashion in the face of cold, hard financial reality. “I think you’ll hit a bubble where it is not efficient to create 20 sq metres per person,” he says. “We’ll hit a new balance between what’s realistic and what’s affordable.” That likelihood only seems to grow when you consider the difficulty of conducting thorough research on the subject. It’s easy to show that free food makes people happier; it’s harder to show that it makes them more productive, or that it has more of an impact than a chunky bonus.
If you’re getting ready to hand in your security pass, though, you may want to hang on to it for a while yet. Whatever changes have been wrought in the workplace over the years, one factor has proven decidedly irritatingly intractable: the workers themselves. Consider Chiat\Day, an innovative US ad agency that made an early attempt at hotdesking in 1993 – only to find that managers would send their assistants in before dawn to bag the best desks, and to endure the spectacle of one staffer doggedly wheeling his documents around in a little red wagon. The experiment didn’t last long. Perhaps we’re all Dilberts in the end.
