A friend asks me how my workday went. “Well,” I begin, “I was working at McDonald’s this morning….” My friend’s expression turns to utter horror. “D.F., I’m sorry, I’m sure things will pick up.”
No, dufus! Not working for McDonald’s! (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The friendly young man who went so far as to bus my tray after I’d been there three hours seems to have a very bright future.) No, I was doing my company’s work at McDonald’s. At least on Monday. Tuesday found me at a local bagel and coffee establishment.
I love business today. This won’t come as good news for commercial real estate brokers, but there’s scarcely a need for any professional person to have an office ever again. The whole world is virtual. God bless it.
Consider, for a moment, why you need the office that costs you anywhere from $500 to $70,000 a month:
A desk and phone? Ever heard of the chaise lounge in your garage? And phones go with you now and are smaller than your business card. You don’t need a place to keep it. You can surgically graft it to your forearm and go about your day.
A computer? Yeah, you need one of those. They’re a foot wide, a foot-and-a-half long and about half an inch thick. Some people have even smaller ones that double as phones. Those are a little hard to type with, but lug around whatever you want. I actually know someone who just purchased a computer with a giant hard-drive casing, a separate keyboard and—get this (so cute)—a monitor!
“But it’s a thin monitor!” he argued.
Not as thin as mine!
No one needs a desktop computer. Thus, no one needs a desk.
You think you need an office for camaraderie? That’s what Internet forums are for. In-office camaraderie is nothing more than standing around and wasting time. Meetings? Refer to last month’s column. The more meetings you attend, the stupider you get. I attended so many meetings in my career before seeing the light, that I had to attend three weeks of intensive destupification before I could be allowed to continue working.
The business world is quickly becoming 100 percent virtual, and it’s grand. You can work in a coffee shop. You can work in a park. On a street corner. At your mother-in-law’s (which can sometimes be a life-saver; you never know where the conversation will turn if you can’t claim concern about your “deadlines”).
There are limits to this trend, yes. If your business is the delivery of goods, you have to get the goods to market. Of course, if you’re the CEO, all you do is tell your truck drivers where to pick up the stuff and where to take the stuff. You can certainly do that from Vito’s Pizza. If you make the goods, that’s a little tougher. The last time I checked, you couldn’t take the shop floor with you to Starbucks, although I’d love to see someone try.
But just because we’ll always need machines to make things, and we’ll always need places to keep the machines and work the machines, that doesn’t mean we’ll always need workplaces for the kinds of work that can be done in any place. A lot of those places we pay for and drive off to every day are entirely unnecessary.
There are a few reasons left to have an office. None of them are good reasons, of course, but at least they exist. What are they?
To impress people. I said it was a reason. I didn’t say it would work. But a lot of companies spend a lot of money on office décor, entryway design, colors, patterns and carpet with the company logo stitched into it.
Before I had my own business, I worked for a guy who bought a gong for his office. Why? Well, because it would be good for office morale. What’s wrong with you? The gong cost him $3,000, which definitely took the sting out of his most recent round of layoffs and earned him great understanding in advance of the next round.
I don’t know about you, but your company’s logo in six-foot foam letters does not impress me. It doesn’t establish in my mind that you have strength, credibility or standing. It just shows me you know how to be gaudy. I’m not sure how that relates to your ability to do anything I would actually pay you to do.
I guess I’m supposed to think you’re so good at doing that thing, and that people have paid you so much money to do it, that you had money to burn and you could spend a bunch of it on foam letters or gongs without missing it. Because you’re that good!
I guess that’s what I’m supposed to think. But I don’t.
To promote a team atmosphere. Now this is just silly. Is baseball played in an office? Do you invade another country in an office? What about Starsky and Hutch? Did they bust bad guys in an office? No way, man. You want a team atmosphere? Get a Torino with a hockey stick on the side and start cruising!
Teams consist of people who share a purpose and work together to achieve it. You have to be in physical proximity to your teammates if you’re working construction, to be sure. But if you’re doing accounting? Are you serious? Isn’t it boring enough being an accountant? Why would you want to make it worse by hanging around with other accountants?
To supervise people. In my experience, this backfires. What you need from people is productivity. If they give it to you, you’ll know it. How they go about giving it to you? What do you care? But if you see them every day, you’ll observe their work habits, and if those habits don’t strike you as what you’re looking for, you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to get them to do it your way.
“Skivvers! Why are you typing with your butt?”
“I always do it this way, boss?”
“Well stop it! That’s ridiculous!”
Good job, boss. Now Skivvers is upset, his typing starts to suffer and he’s spending time in the hallway complaining about you. If you never saw him, you’d never know.
See how much trouble an office causes? If you don’t learn these lessons, pretty soon you’ll be working at McDonald’s. And not like me! But thanks for busing my tray.
