A few months ago we were talking about the end of the office. People were adjusting to WFH – working from home – and the isolation of the COVID pandemic was just still a novelty.
It sparked talk of the future of the office itself. Would commercial real estate or offices hold any value when the pandemic passed? Companies were encouraged to think about the savings that would flow from the need for less office space.
Now, here we are a few months later and talk of the office has additional angles.
People, it turns out, like getting together. They’re social. That word – social – came into the being for a reason. Forty years ago John Naisbitt wrote about it in his seminal book MegaTrends where he predicted the golden age of movie theatres just as the VCR hit the market. People would watch movies at home but they still needed to go a building to sit next to other people just for social contact, he argued.
It seems we’re having the same conversation today. People can communicate on Zoom but they also have a need to physically interact with colleagues, to collaborate and exchange ideas.
