Tight budgets and crowded offices aren’t new, of course. Century-old photos show workers sitting cheek-by-jowl at tables not that different from the ones at Automattic. But these weren’t “knowledge workers,” paid to solve difficult problems and come up with new ideas. They were on a white-collar assembly line, doing routine, repetitive, and well-defined tasks: issuing invoices, recording payments, typing standardized letters, sending out orders. The office environment wasn’t distracting because everybody had their heads down. Chatting was for breaks.
If you need employees to talk to each other and to do difficult brain work, however, maximizing togetherness isn’t such a good idea. There’s no single good answer to the remote-versus-office choice, only tradeoffs. Listening to why dedicated employees want to escape the office suggests one way to make the tradeoffs less extreme: If you want knowledge workers to report to the office, balance sociability and quiet.
Make it easy for them talk to each other — without interrupting their next door neighbor’s train of thought. And give them a place where they can hear themselves think.
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