I’m the experienced guy in this scenario in real life right now. If the organization has a solid training plan, it can adapt, and if it doesn’t have a solid training plan, it deserves to die.
My job has some unique requirements, and essentially no one comes into the job knowing anything about what they need to do the job. When we really started expanding the number of people doing my job about 20 years ago, we designed a training program for new hires. They get 3 months of in-class basic training, and then the remainder of their first two years of work are on-the-job training, with each of them assigned an individual instructor. I’ve done both the in-class teaching, and the on-the-job teaching. We switched to doing this all remotely about two years ago, and so far, I can’t see any major differences in how well my current trainee is doing. They’re coming up to their one year anniversary date soon, and are well ahead of the quality and production goals set for this phase of training.
This is another “problem” that gets blown out of proportion by people who, it feels like, don’t want to solve problems. They want excuses to go back to the office.
I know it’s already happening to a few buildings around here. Hell, there was a period about 15 years ago where a bunch of old schools around here were converted to condos, and I suspect they had similar challenges. Now they’re some of the nicest places to live, from what I’ve seen of real estate listings.
Schools usually have a lot of windows, and are much easier to convert to housing than office space is. Every classroom i ever had prior to college had an exterior wall with windows.
Perhaps this speaks to how inhumane large office buildings can be.
I recall Sears/Willis was considered a tough rental because of the size of each floor, such that a great portion of the interior was at a distance from a window. There MIGHT be some ambient light if it was all cubicles/open space, but any walls would result in a dark interior requiring artificial light.
Our 3-story office building has continuous windows along all 4 walls. Maybe 1/2 of the exterior walls are taken up by private offices, but the rest provide light to the cubicles area. The building is not overlarge, but I’ve been trying to figure out how it could be carved into apartments, such that the space furthest from the windows received natural light. Would require either long narrow rooms, or a loft-type of design with half-walls.
Schools, by contrast, tend to be only 1 classroom deep off of each window.
Realistically, i think a lot of office buildings would require light wells cut into them, or waiving the rules about passive access to light and air in dwellings. The latter would make for pretty unpleasant apartments.
Or maybe apartments could be cut into the exterior, and the interior rented as low-quality office space.
Offices have plenty of light but that’s usually because they are big open spaces. I think that becomes a challenge if you try to partition that big space off into usable apartments.
There’s also a lot of plumbing and duct work that will have to be run on each floor. Office spaces are designed around a central core that contains the plumbing, bathrooms, electrical, utilities, etc. So that now needs to spread out to reach all the units and each unit will need to be able to control their own heat and whatnot.
But they do it from time to time. I had a friend who lived in an old building that used to be an investment bank. I feel like half the buildings in my town used to be something else (factory, school, church, etc) before they converted it to condos.
But that’s NYC / Hudson County NJ. You have actual mixed-use neighborhoods so it doesn’t matter what the building used to be. I don’t know if anyone would want to live in a converted office park out in the suburbs.
Yes, or make the interior space storage units, a gym/workout room/yoga studio, or community/meeting rooms for residents. I suspect convertion offices requires time and effort by the city to rezone commercial space to residential. I am not sure of what it takes for that, but would it be more profitable for a building owner to convert to residential rather than leave a building empty?
I think you’d have to market that interior space to people who don’t live there. There’s more of it in most large office buildings than the people who lived along the edges would want to use. And that leads to security issues.
I’m slightly cranky because my employer plans to reduce our office footprint (which makes sense) but they are moving all of us to the building with the least window space, and the largest expanses of soulless cubicals without any real natural light. I suppose they believe the older building that has more crenellations and more natural light can be rented for more money.
Or turn the interior into a common area for each floor.
I’m of the opinion that we should fundamentally re-think our designs for apartment buildings, and this is the philosophy I’d bring to office building conversions.
This. My wife works in finance and I work for a management consulting firm for banks and financial services companies. All the New York banks are pushing to have their people come back to the office. My wife has to go in 3 days a week. But it’s fucking stupid because she can just be like “I need to leave at 3 to pick up my kids”. And it’s not like she really interacts with people face to face anyway.
My firm is similarly encouraging people to return to the office out of some vague notion of “team building” and “new hire experience”. But mostly because our financial clients are pushing for that.
It’s mostly total bullshit. Yes, there are times where it would be useful for my team to be co-located so we can collaborate on something. But even when I go to the office just for a chance of scenery, it’s not like they are there. I’m in Manhattan. The rest of the team is scattered around Connecticut, North Carolina, and DC. My manager is in Chicago. My client is in Florida.
In consulting, I’ve been working hybrid for like ten years before COVID. Mostly because clients are moving away from wanting to pay us to fly out to their location 4 days a week.
Ironically, our leadership is also talking about how we are having trouble retaining people.
The place we are trying to sublet is almost 80,000 square feet on one floor. There are parts of the building which are over 100 feet from a window. It’s also surrounded by over 10 acres of parking/roadway. Most suburban office parks would need to be torn down to be converted into housing. And you’d need to do the whole office park. People aren’t going to live in a building surrounded by acres of buildings and parking that are deserted from 7pm to 7am.
More vertical standalone office buildings adjacent to existing housing and retail might be a better candidate. But those are the most attractive (high rent) office spaces as well.
I did a little research on the Chicago area. Central business district and suburb vacancies are over 20%, tho much of the high rate reflects new properties on the market, and new space available to sublease. Articles consistently say the spaces faring best are the newest, most prime space - which bodes poorly for a lot of middle-grade office space.
It will truly be curious to see what happens with office space - as with malls - in the next decade or 2. Funny how you can think of things like buildings as so “permanent.” When they may only have a lifespan of a few decades. Near me in Oak Brook IL, they tore down the McDonalds’ HQ building which seemed like a permanent fixture, but had only been built in 71. They are replacing it with https://www.chicagoconstructionnews.com/hines-demolishes-former-mcdonalds-headquarters-to-start-500-million-oak-brook-development/]some new combination of buildings… To my ignorant eye as I speed past, the new building they have put up so far looks pretty much like an updated version of the old building…
Agree. The area I am thinking of in a nearby town has 2-story offive buldings intermixed with retail and housing and is alos close to transit, so I think it could work there. But you are right, not every building would be a good fit for this.
Man - they tried to do this in my previous job (and I believe they did do it after I left.) Our government office rented space on the top floor of an office building. All of us but the newest hires had exterior offices with an entire wall of windows. Mine faced east, and I had between-building views of Lake Michigan.
The building they eventually moved to (SSA’s Region 5 HQ - the “Batcolumn” building) typifies the worst of 70s brutalist architecture. It may not look all that bad from pictures, but the south wall of glass is all given to a towering atrium - separated from all of the work areas. There are tiny bands of windows along the east side - which opens onto the elevators. That leaves the nearly all glass north side to light the floors of cubicles. They actually sold the space as being reworked for us into private offices with “windows” next to the doors that opened onto the hallways!
Since I was a TA in college, I’ve never has an office/workspace that did not have a window. I would greatly dislike that.
I think more workers will be expected to return to the office than people expect, for a variety of reasons. Government employees in NYC are fighting “return to the office” in part because they believe that in many cases the return is being mandated because of the coffee shops and stores in certain areas that survive on office workers being in the office. Then their are jobs that can’t be done at home - for example, a number of the jobs at my last employer could not be done at home, even though those people spend about half (or more) of their working hours outside of the office. And the reason is the paper records - they can arrange access to the computerized records on a laptop but it’s a government agency with a computer system that dates back to the 80s, with green type on a black background. And you cannot just scan documents into these records- if an email needs to be kept as part of a particular person’s record, it must be printed and filed and the computer record will contain minimal information about that email. So when a report needs to be written that involves reviewing paper records that go as far back as the 70s, that review must be done in the office. So those people must spend time in the office, and it amounts to about half their work time. And then, because even if the people writing the reports also type them, hard copies must be made for the files - a “local” file and an office at the headquarters which is supposed to get a copy of any documents and maintains duplicate files. And those copies must be mailed. * So now the people writing the reports must be in the office , the people making copies and maintaining the records must be in the office. I could have done 98% of my job from home - I didn’t have to review the paper records often and could have probably gone in once every two weeks and been fine. Problem was, I was a manager, and you can’t let the managers work from home when others have to come into the office - it’s bad for morale.
* At the very beginning of COVID, these people were sent home - and while they were at home they did no work because their jobs could not be done at home. This lasted for months - there is no way that a large number of people were being paid to do no work for months if they could have worked from home. For the first time in my life, I had to learn to operate a postage meter.
I do think that WFH in some ways benefits from coasting on the momentum of the full office prior to lockdown. It may work well for a while, and the shut-ins seem to love it, but we don’t really know how long-term sustainable it is. Mentorship and collaboration suffer, which can take many years to manifest. It’s been pretty well documented that remote learning has significantly worse results for school kids, and while that’s not necessarily directly applicable to adult professionals, it doesn’t bode well either.
In my particular case, architecture and interior design, we made it through lockdown ok, but it was a struggle. We handle large drawings, lots of material samples, sketches that need quick reviews, and we bounce questions and ideas off each other all the time. That’s much harder to do virtually. It’s not impossible, but after a while it gets tedious and inefficient, especially if you don’t have room at home to lay out large drawings to review and mark up, or a large-format plotter to be able to even print those drawings at a readable scale. The time it takes to turn around and ask “what do you think of this detail” is much faster than having to scan it, send it to the other person, set up a time to talk, then call and discuss, or zoom or whatever. A five minute conversation turns into a half hour ordeal. We also need to see and touch samples, as do our clients. Photos just don’t cut it, nor does hauling around heavy boxes of tile to client’s homes on a weekly basis.
Also, not everyone who might be able to work from home wants to either. We don’t all have home offices that we can leave at the end of the day. For some people that’s not a problem, they can just switch from work mode to home mode in their brain. However, I and many others have found it difficult to get into work mode in the morning, and equally difficult to turn off and decompress at the end of the day. That can get very draining after a while.
Point being there’s no one size fits all solution. Our office policy is basically to be in-office unless you have a reason not to, such as appointments, family stuff, or if there’s a snowstorm coming. That really only works when done no more than one or two days in a row.
Same here. My WFH office was my relatively dark basement and I hated it (I find WFH depressing for other reasons). I was glad to return to my well lit, comfortable office. I still can WFH and choose to do so one day every couple weeks, but my mental state has improved since returning. I also have a 15 minute bike commute which is very nice (it takes longer for me to drive so I never drive).
My workplace has mostly returned with a lot of hybrid work schedules. Our buildings are now not ghost towns as they were, and you have plenty of interaction with folks.
Whereas in my case, actuarial work, it went great. We mostly look at each other’s spreadsheets and computer programs and word documents. Even when i worked in the office, and was collaborating with the guy who sat next to me, i sometimes had him share his screen and i sat at my desk instead of hovering over him to view his screen. (We talked across the partition wall, not on the phone, of course. But the phone worked fine from home.)
Whereas when i go to the office i sit at an exposed cube in the middle of a large floor full of cubes, and have to keep my voice down when I’m working with someone else so as not to bother everyone near me. And it’s not even my own space. I have to book a cube through an app, and I’m not supposed to leave anything there at the end of the day. In contrast, at home, i have my own desk in a room with a door, and i can look out the window. There’s more light, more privacy, and i can talk to coworkers without bothering anyone else. I have hated the office since we moved to hot-desking, and that’s when i started investing in my WFH space, adding good monitors and stuff to make it easy to work there.
