The Zombie Office of Zoom

One effect of the 2020 pandemic has been to flatten many office workers from cubes in the office to squares on a screen. The workers, and many of their organizations, have learned a lot from this experience. Remote work is often more possible than expected. Meetings on a screen are harder than meetings in person. Separating work from home is more challenging when you are always at home. Commutes may be annoying, but they also offer a buffer and time of transition from home to work and back. Being on Zoom all day can be exhausting in a way that physically being in an office is not.

I happened across a book review, The Road to the Zombie Office, written by architecture critic Martin Filler from the June 19, 2014, edition of The New York Review of Books. The book in question is Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval (Doubleday, 2014). Filler's review is both thorough and fascinating, although in the midst of a pandemic that has scattered us from offices, it feels like an exploration of bygone days.

But that doesn't mean it isn't relevant. His essay, and likely the book itself, which I have not read, can help us think about how offices might work in the post-pandemic, post-all-Zoom world. We have an expanding array of technological tools claiming to eliminate the need for the office, yet they all lose some aspect of human interaction that we may notice only when it's not there. There are real opportunities for organizations that figure how to blend these things well, and real dangers for organizations that fail to do so.

Filler concludes his review with an idea we should take seriously as we eventually emerge from the isolation forced upon us by the pandemic:

What has not changed much throughout the two centuries that Saval examines in his delightfully readable, sporadically penetrating, and regrettably uneven study is the still-persistent belief that the physical aspects of an office will strongly affect the quality of work produced there. This is often an illusion. For, as with all other architecture and design, the way we make our offices offers an accurate reflection of our values, and not a formula for improving them.

There's a long history of business drives to efficiency in office work and in knowledge work, often with side effects predictable and not. The pandemic has jolted the system, and the lesson is that if we want the newly reconstructed workplace to be better, we need to think carefully about the values and choices guiding its design.