Working from home will mean permanent changes to office life

Linda J. Dodson

As far as employers are concerned, the biggest risk is that their staff split into a two-tier workforce – the office class and the work-from-home class. Perceived discrimination against either group when it comes to career opportunities or pay differences mean a potential wave of lawsuits.

The divide could be particularly stark because it is likely to be a generational one: graduates and city-dwelling 20-somethings are more likely to gravitate to the office; older suburbanites with family commitments and established social circles will embrace working from home.

Companies will therefore attempt to give staff the same experience whether they are at home or in the office. That means more work and interaction taking place online, where there is a level playing field.

Meetings that once took place in boardrooms will now happen on video calls, even if most of the attendees are in the same building. Each person will have their own webcam and tile on a computer screen, in order not to ostracise those who are not in the office. Far more communication is likely to take place on tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams than in person, even for those within eyeshot of one another.

Digital gurus have a name for this: “remote-first”. Darren Murph of tech company Gitlab, whose staff worked from home before the pandemic, says it means treating the office as just another place to work digitally, not a company’s physical hub. He says that going back to pre-pandemic working patterns would turn those outside the office into “second-class citizens”.

On Friday, software company Box announced that while it will retain its offices, it planned to move to a “digital-first” model in which company-wide meetings took place online, rather than on the floor of its headquarters. Its chief executive Aaron Levie claimed the physical and virtual office would be seamlessly stitched together.

The open-plan wave of the last few decades, in which individual offices and then cubicles were replaced by bullpen-style floorplans, already look under threat as we try to social distance on our return to the office.  If we are going to spend more time on video calls – or, if another Zuckerberg prediction comes true, virtual reality – it could reverse open-plan working altogether.

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