The office is dead - Long live the office!

Remember when the pandemic started? All of a sudden, working from home was everywhere, out of sheer necessity. After years of prevaricating about the issuer, it seemed like working from home was here to stay. Open-plan offices, the “industry standard” for decades, went from the default setting to seething cesspools of filth and infection, a status heretofore reserved for the newsrooms of Fox News or the Daily Mail. The birds were singing from the rooftops that, come the end of the lockdowns, all those shiny new office buildings that had been built in recent years would be reduced to empty husks, forlornly waiting for a new purpose.

Yet, if you look at the news websites here in Cork, this is clearly not happening. Penrose Dock, where my own employer has their Cork office, is fully let. The two blocks of Navigation Square across the river are also nearly full following an announcement by NetApp earlier this year. Next door to Penrose Dock, Horgan’s Quay is filling up as well, with a second block there nearing completion, while out in Mahon, Logitech recently moved into their new campus. Just before the new year, it was announced that Cork had cracked seven million square feet, or 650,000 square meters in office space. If this is what the death of the office looks like, what’s the “prime” of the office supposed to be? 

The changing face of the Cork city docks, minus HMCS Halifax in the foreground, is a clear indicator that the age of the office is far from over.

To put it bluntly, the death of the office was always massively overblown as far as I’m concerned. Working from home is a nice concept in theory, but also, by its very nature elitist and exclusionary, something I’ll touch on in more detail later on in this piece. For now, the simple fact is that video calls, messaging apps and similar collaboration tools simply cannot replace in-person contact and face-to-face conversations, something a lot of us learned the hard way during those two years of lockdown here in Ireland. In addition, and there’s unfortunately no way of putting this politely, a lot of employers are paranoid control freaks, and it’s just simpler to keep an eye on things when your staff regularly show up in the office. I don’t agree with that type of management style at all, but it is unfortunately pretty widespread.

There are several other equally important factors at play here. One is that, with the removal of the last COVID restrictions, on-site visits with, and for, clients are now possible again, which requires some sort of representative space. Turns out that C-Level people don’t like it when you turn up outside their homes to close a deal. On a more serious note however, offices can actually be a significant draw for new talent, especially in a country like Ireland where the housing crisis is not only endemic, but has reached crisis levels and still keeps getting worse without any improvement in sight. In a situation where even people with moderate incomes struggle to rent a place on their own, the amount of people forced to share a house or a flat with others is climbing steadily. Simply put, a lot of workers, especially those in entry-level positions, will simply not have the space to set up a proper work-from-home space. To expect people in such a situation to just keep working from their bedroom, or a dingy bedsit or “studio” apartment is quite frankly foolish, not to mention that it poses a significant risk to the mental health of those affected. Yet, somehow this was postulated as the future of work throughout the pandemic and beyond, mostly by people who had the space to work from home, a thoroughly elitist and exclusionary attitude espoused by those who were in a position to comfortably make the transition, who had the space. Well guess what? A lot of people don’t have that luxury, and even though I am supremely lucky to be in a position where I was comfortably able to work from home, I can easily see why a lot of people wouldn’t be.

While I was lucky to be able to set up a proper workspace in my home, away from my bedroom and living room, a lot of people aren't in the same advantageous position.

In such an economy, a well-appointed and properly designed office in the right location can easily become a draw in its own right, doubly so if the company in question also offers a fully stocked kitchen, given the continuing spiral of inflation in this country. As mentioned before, I’m in a very lucky and privileged position of being able to work from home, having both an employer who is not just tolerant but supportive in this regard, and a decent work-from-home setup that has taken centre stage in more than one of my blog posts over the years. Yet even for me, my company’s city centre offices here in Cork are a highly attractive proposition and I’m definitely planning on using them more often oncer my last few lingering health issues have been sorted out.

While large open-plan cattle sheds are still depressingly common in the office world, increasingly, companies are moving over to smaller office zones like this one.

Breakout and break areas such as this are also becoming more prevalent. 

Especially in the IT sector, having a well-stocked canteen or kitchen is pretty much industry standard at this point.

And to be fair, many companies are taking note of this and setting up their offices accordingly. Rather than just trying to cram in as many desks into one open plan office as possible, more and more companies are trying to break up these large open areas into smaller zones, using meeting rooms as well as breakout zones as separators. Offices also appear to be getting more whimsical, with companies taking care that zones are easily distinguishable, whilst designing breakout areas, break rooms or kitchens to be more comfortable and less clinical. Now, this is by no means universal. There are still many companies that are sticking with the all-to-familiar “cattle shed” design, particularly those with high turnover that don’t care about their employees and are more than comfortable with burning out their staff and the resulting high turnover. However, the change in office fit-out quality over the last few years, even before the pandemic, has been pretty substantial.

Wether it's Penrose Dock, where my current employer has their offices,...

...next-door neighbours Horgan's Quay, which has recently begun hosting a significant Apple presence,...

...or Navigation Square, the new home of NetApp and Clearstream, all these office blocks are located in, or very close to, Cork city centre, rather than in some out-of-the-way commercial park.

Now, this doesn’t mean that every office will return to its glory days, far from it. Much of the office growth down here in Cork has been in the city centre or areas immediately adjacent to it, locales that are easy to reach and offer at least a modicum of infrastructure, amenities and services. There’s a reason that many of the most successful office developments in Cork in recent years have been in the Docklands, including my own workplace in Penrose Dock. The suburban office park, while not outright dying, seems to be losing a lot of its former lustre with companies and investors. Even in the middle of the pandemic, ClearStream moved into their new offices in Navigation Square, while Logitech moved into their new campus in Mahon. Whilst by no means a central location, Mahon Point is still far more centrally located than the company’s previous offices in the Airport Business Park, which is also where ClearStream had been based prior to their move. Closer to home here in Ballincollig, a new office building that was supposed to be the central point of a new office park is now being converted into a care facility run by the HSE, Ireland’s Health Service, after standing empty and failing to attract tenants during the pandemic. Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, Apple is continuing to expand their massive campus in the barren wastes of Knocknaheeny, but then again, they’ve always done their own thing.

As much as I’d like to make a big hullabaloo out of my current job title of “analyst”, the future remains annoyingly hard to predict. Between the ongoing Ukraine war, global socio-economic tensions in the wake of the pandemic and the advent of ever more disruptive technologies, the path forward is as murky and shrouded in uncertainty as it’s ever been. However, I feel it’s safe to say that, for the time being at least, reports of the death of the office have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, in the current situation, we could actually be heading towards a new golden age for the office, if companies play their cards right. And I’m here for it!