Pat Stuart

I’ve “worked from home” for a lot of years now. Except for me it’s called retirement.

At the ripe old age of 54, I had a choice: stay in government employment and keep an office or retire and work from home. Not having a real clue what I was doing and not having much of an office, either, I chose retirement.

Changing work habits wasn’t that hard for me since, like with a lot of people, my work office had been more of a staging area than a place I spent a lot of time. That had to do with the nature of the job plus an employer who provided little more than tools, goals and incentives. With those in hand, we were expected to get out and get on with it. 

I certainly wasn’t in the only profession free of management apron strings. What I’m saying is that this current workplace revolution isn’t really so revolutionary. Salespeople, truckers, ag workers, writers, farriers, carpenters, chefs and many others are all like me to one degree or another, having a desk somewhere but spending their time away from it; probably a majority of us would rather not work at a desk.

Even so, a lot of people were stuck in office buildings pre-COVID. Thanks to that virus, though, the kitchen table has replaced the office cubicle for a high percentage of us. Compliments of the internet and the digital revolution, supervisors now are only a click away from the home computer while colleagues grouped around a table appear daily as faces in small boxes filling our screens. It all works.

What hasn’t been replicated is the office water cooler — a symbol of informal and group interaction between colleagues. The water cooler, it seems, is the primary argument that business should get workers back to their cubicles, even though informal chats take place as easily with a computer as over a partition. The big difference may be that, instead of taking a break and strolling down to a water cooler, we stay at our kitchen tables sending email queries or text messages.

The people analyzing this trend focus on the synergy of a group — of people meeting face-to-face — whether in a formal or informal setting. They believe that, when you put a group of like-minded people with common goals and interests together, they will engender better ideas than people working by themselves.

But is that anything more than an academic premise? The jury is still out.

In fact, the whole water cooler concept is under scrutiny. Social experiments, so far, tend to support the view that groups tamp down rather than stimulate creativity. Most people really don’t want to get too far out in front.

As a result, even with the best of intentions and guidance, meetings (again, informal or formal) tend to result in watered-down, consensual decisions based on “tried and true” experience. In some instances, of course, those outcomes could be the best possible ones. If so, though, you don’t need to be pulling down an executive salary to figure out that it’s cheaper to simply use old experiences to guide new actions.

My own experience with office meetings isn’t entirely negative when the benefits of creativity are weighed against those of boredom. Just 99.9% so. I can make two positive observations. First, if I have to be in an office environment, I’d rather be bored in a meeting than sitting at a desk making paper clip chains and shuffling paper. Second, meetings can be guaranteed to provide time for creative doodling.

As for my opinion of office environments in general, they’re not all bad. They gave me many friends — ones who began as colleagues and ones who made my life happier and more fulfilling. Without an office to visit, I most probably would not have met them nor had the blessing of their friendships. 

That’s all still true.

The kitchen table or the water cooler: It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out, to watch how many office buildings find new lives as apartment blocks or hotels.

I’m betting on the kitchen table, myself.