Are We Witnessing the Death of the Office?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Culture  

Virtual work and flexible work arrangements aren’t new. They have been a part of how work gets done for several decades, but over the last two years they have obviously become much more commonplace.

The pandemic forced a lot of organizations to fully embrace the concept, even if they were wary of it before. Certainly, those organizations—and individual employees—were fortunate that COVID-19 hit at a time when there were already a number of powerful collaborative work management tools available in the workplace. But the speed and relative ease with which adjustments happened surprised many.

Now that there appears to be a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and organizations are considering returning to a more traditional way of working (at least in part), there are a lot of decisions to make around how that working model might look going forward. There is evidence to suggest that many employees want to return to an office environment for some of the time, but a number of studies have also suggested that they aren’t keen on a return to five days a week in the office (this study, for example, says just 3% of white-collar workers want to return to the office full time).

That’s leading to discussions around what the new normal might look like, and I would suggest that for many organizations, the need for any kind of office environment is …

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