‘THIS IS REALLY
THE TIME, AS
A SOCIETY, TO
THINK THROUGH
ALL OF THIS.’
—Gavin Thomas,
TGW co-founderproviding them with monitoring soft-
ware, a development that can seem
Big Brotherish, but that companies
say is useful in making sure people
spend their work hours on the right
tasks. “If you want to become more
productive, using your time correctly
and understanding what you’ve done
with an hour—that is the place you
should start,” says Mathias Mikkelsen,
the CEO of Memory, a Norwegian
company that makes an AI- powered
time-tracking app. Memory has seen
an 18% jump in paying customers
from the same time last year.
Other companies, including TGW,
are finding that cutting back on meet-
ings can help workers find more time
for deep work. “How many meetings
have we all sat in where everybody’s
laptop is open and they’re checking
their mail and you know only half lis-
tening?” says Kribs. There is tangi-
ble evidence that reducing meetings
works: Microsoft Japan increased
productivity 40% last year when it
moved to a four-day workweek and
cut its standard meeting length in
half, to 30 minutes.
Now that many workers have decamped to different time zones,
some companies are reconsidering the whole idea of live meetings.
Column Five started using software called Loom, which lets employ-
ees leave video messages in documents that walk colleagues through
directions or important context. Buffer, a social-media management
platform with 90 employees in 19 countries, no longer has mandatory
meetings and instead uses Threads, a platform that lets employees
weigh in on questions and decisions whenever is convenient to them.
(Threads is itself a child of the pandemic; it launched in stealth mode
in 2019 and decided to open up in March to help more customers
bring together remote workers.) “One of the problems with meetings
is that you often get the most outspoken, strongest opinions heard,”
says Hailley Griffis, the head of public relations at Buffer.
As employers adapt to remote work, the biggest question facing
them is what to do with their physical offices. Even before the pan-
demic, many employers had begun questioning the wisdom of open-
plan offices, which became popular in the past two decades. With
employees seated in close quarters side by side and sharing kitchens
and break areas, the offices enabled constant distractions. Once the
pandemic hit, they also proved potentially lethal.
Now, many companies are questioning the worth of offices at all.
Tech companies, including Twitter, Facebook and Shopify, have
said they will let many employees work from home permanently.
But going fully remote can deal a blow to employees’ mental health;
when Ctrip, a Chinese company, allowed more than 100 employ-
ees to work from home for four days a week starting in 2010, they
were happy for three months, but within nine months, about half
wanted to return to the office, according to research by Stanford
economics professor Nicholas Bloom.
That’s why some business owners
are still investing in offices; they’re
just building a different kind. John
Sweeden, who runs a small software
firm that works in the oil and gas in-
dustry, broke ground in August on
a new office building on a 25-acre
plot near Oklahoma City. Much of
the space will be “a place where zero
work gets done,” he says.
There will be a large salon for so-
cializing; employees will be encour-
aged to spend hours there, talking
about anything. Sweeden is building
a guest cottage that will house a rotat-
ing slate of visitors; in exchange for a
free place to stay, these visitors will be
asked to socialize with and give feed-
back to Sweeden’s company.
The complex will also feature indi-
vidual office chambers for employees
who struggle to focus at home—small
rooms without Internet access set
aside for people to get into flow. “Es-
sentially the office becomes a break
from working at home,” Sweeden
says. “You get to socialize with co-
workers, help people, get help, learn,
teach and discuss ideas.”
Sweeden’s future office is based
on a design concept called the Eudai-
monia machine, developed by archi-
tect David Dewane. Eudaimonia is a
Greek term that describes the state of
contentment humans achieve when
they’re flourishing in life or work.
Achieving a state of eudaimonia
“purely comes down to managing
distractions,” says Dewane, whose
ideal office has different zones, each
designed to put workers’ minds into
a progressively deeper focus.
Column Five, the Costa Mesa mar-
keting company, had built a new office
based on the Eudaimonia machine be-
fore the pandemic. Now, the company
hopes employees still use it, but not
for work. “We want to keep that space
for socializing—if you want to go in
and share a LaCroix with somebody
and have a conversation,” Hlava says.
“Going to the workspace and choos-
ing how you want to be that day leads
to the freedom and autonomy that
is good for a work culture.” —With
reporting by Julia Zorthian