Seth Godin declares that the office as a workspace is on the way out. He creates a list of potential objections to this idea and then answers them.

150 years later, why go to work in an office/plant/factory?

1) That’s where the machines are.
2) That’s where the items I need to work on are.
3) The boss needs to keep tabs on my productivity.
4) There are important meetings to go to.
5) It’s a source of energy.
6) The people I collaborate with all day are there.
7) I need someplace to go.
But…

1) If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
2) If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
3) The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
4) How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
5) You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
6) Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
7) So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.

I’ve commented in the past about the fact that Starbucks seems to be turning into a modern office for many people. However, I’m not as optimistic as Godin that the office can be replaced.

Particularly, I’m troubled with his third point. The truth is, bosses have a hard time keeping track of productivity in the office, and it’s close to impossible virtually. You can certainly make the argument that what’s important is whether the necessary work gets done, and that’s irrelevant to whether took a person two hours or seven hours to do it. And I’ve always cringed at pointless “busywork” which only has the goal of fooling the boss. Nonetheless, if you want to maximize efficiency and productivity from employees, I just can’t see how you do it without a substantial amount of face time.

I have a similar issue with point 4. It’s quite true that 50% of the meetings I’ve been to in my life did not really require my presence. But a certain percentage, maybe 20, really required my presence. The problem is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know ahead of time whether your presence will be needed.

The office also offers some protection to the worker. The rule used to be that once you left the office, you were incommunicado. Nowadays, with our physical/virtual office hybrid, fellow workers can phone/text/e-mail you whenever they have a problem and it’s hard not to feel an obligation to answer as soon as possible.

The office has numerous deficiencies — the drive time to get there is often insane, and it puts you right smack in the middle of office politics — but I’m not sure it can be written off so easily.

I’m positive the best way to close this out is with a link to my classic acidlogic article, “Telecommuting on the Road to Nowhere.”

Recently, something of a backlash has been appearing against the practice of telecommuting, the concept by which workers are supposed to do a large amount of their job in a home office and synch up to their company’s network in order to share files or have work approved. Initially, telecommuting held a lot of promise for American society, and even more primitive cultures such as France.