3

Redesigning Your Offices for New Ways of Work

On a cold evening in December, I was sitting at a restaurant in Berlin after speaking at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt Conference. I was deep in the details of the financial plan for Topia’s next year when Daniel, a fellow American with a laptop, sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. I learned that Daniel was a consultant who lived in LA, traveled frequently, and worked from pretty much anywhere he was—hotels, planes, coworking spaces, client offices, or his own company offices. Today, he was working at a restaurant in Berlin, just like me.

In the Talent Mobility Revolution with increasing location movement, companies are reinventing the role of an office and resetting expectations about where and how employees work. Like Daniel, employees today work from everywhere, valuing the flexibility, autonomy, and work-life integration that comes from blending work at offices, public spaces, and in the home. This, coupled with the growth of long-distance commuting and frequent travel, has changed the way companies design their offices and given birth to coworking spaces like WeWork (now valued at more than $20 billion). In this new era of jobs, people can now work from bustling urban hubs, small rural districts, or planned suburbs—in all parts of the world.

In 2017, Topia acquired Teleport, a start-up based in Tallinn, Estonia, with a distributed team working remotely throughout the world. Teleport was founded by Sten Tamkivi (who became Topia’s Chief Product Officer) and Silver Keskkula (who became Topia’s VP Data Science and Research). Tamkivi and Keskkula were veterans of Skype, and they founded Teleport to help individuals “find their best place to live and work” by leveraging a complex set of data and algorithms about cost and quality of life. At Topia, we always had a lot of geographic movement—frequent travel and some relocations—from our global operations. But acquiring Teleport was our first foray into the location movement of the Talent Mobility Revolution. Teleport had team members working all over the world—from a user experience designer in Germany to a data scientist in Canada to global nomads that literally worked everywhere (I even saw a picture of Keskkula working from a laptop on a beach in the Galapagos Islands). Their remote work culture was an important part of their DNA, talent strategy, and operating norms. They had even produced a manifesto detailing the principals of running a distributed organization with lots of remote work.

As we brought our two companies together, we combined Topia’s principally office-based culture and Teleport’s distributed culture. We had urban office hubs and embraced geographic and location movement for our employees. If our team members needed to work from home sometimes, they did. If they needed to work from coffee shops or restaurants while traveling (like I was in Berlin), they did. And, when they needed to collaborate, they came together in one of our offices that we redesigned over time to inspire creation and connection. Topia, like many F3 Companies, operated like a rubber band—team members could disperse to work remotely and then come together in our office spaces to collaborate and connect.

Over my nine years at Topia, I have seen companies built like Teleport with a distributed work culture, and companies built like Lehman Brothers with an office work culture. In recent years, I have seen increasing numbers of traditional companies embrace location movement and transform their policies and physical spaces for greater remote work—benefiting from lower real estate costs, reduced carbon footprints, expanded talent pools, and higher staff engagement and retention, particularly for women balancing family and career needs, and millennials valuing autonomy and flexibility. These companies know that today’s talent works differently. They work from home, work from holidays, work from planes, work from cafés, and work from coworking spaces. And they do this from everywhere in the world.

To succeed amid the Talent Mobility Revolution—and find, attract, and engage today’s workers—companies must dispense with the notion that work is done only in an office with employees punching in at 9 a.m., five days per week. Instead, they must embrace distributed and remote work as a key part of their business and talent strategy.

Companies and business leaders that are stuck in the past with a traditional view of office work will fail to attract and engage the talent they need for success in the twenty-first century. F3 Companies rethink the purpose, design, and location of their offices, welcoming location movement as a core part of their operations. Today’s talent works differently. Companies that don’t transform their operations and offices for it will be left behind by those that do. This chapter looks at how to redesign your physical office spaces for talent mobility and remote work.

The Traditional Office

In the medieval era, itinerant tradesmen carried their wares into a town, set up shop in the village square, and sold what they could before moving on. “Chapmen,” for example, sold books, paper, pens, and ink. In a typical town, the market for writing supplies would quickly be exhausted—few could read or write—at which point it would be time to pack up and move on.

As university towns sprang up during the early Renaissance, some clever chapmen realized that steady business from professors and students made it feasible to stay in one place. No more trudging through the countryside with a cart full of valuable goods. A fixed place of business would be easier, safer, and more profitable. These stationary sellers—“stationers,” hence “stationery”—adapted to the new environment and thrived. This model of fixed physical offices endured for centuries, even as technology made it possible to work from all over the world and stay connected.

The Purpose of the Traditional Office

The purpose of the traditional office was daily work. Like at school, it was expected that employees come to work at the office each day and stay for a fixed number of hours—usually 9 to 5 with an hour lunch break. Work included daily tasks, as well as meetings—often in conference rooms—and conference calls. Contribution at work was measured to an extent by output, but largely by the concept of “face time”: how long and often an employee was seen at the office. The reward for coming to work each day and clocking regular hours was a steady promotion ladder within a given department or team.

If employees couldn’t make it to work one day—say, due to illness or childcare challenges—they “called in” to their manager and stayed home, generally forgoing any work and meetings that day. If this happened too frequently, they could be overlooked for promotions or receive negative performance reviews. With this traditional expectation of office attendance and hours, the workforce naturally developed with one spouse working in the office and one spouse caring for the home and children, popularized by the many sitcoms about the company man and his family—without location movement and work flexibility, it was difficult to balance the needs of work and family. The workforce also developed with the notion that work was local. Communities developed around companies and manufacturing plants, sometimes relying on a single employer to provide jobs. If business tides changed, communities and families were exposed.

Lehman Brothers was set up as a traditional office environment. Work was from the office, and we all moved to the cities nearest to where the office was. We were expected to be in the office, not anywhere else, when working. And everyone was. I arrived each morning by 9 a.m., worked from my cubicle, and stayed in the office until my boss left. If I finished my work early, I stayed until the end of the day and pretended to still be working. If I had a doctor’s appointment or home delivery or family issue, I asked my boss for time off and logged it in our internal system. If I didn’t put in the “face time” expected, my annual performance review and bonus showed it. If anyone on our team left early, colleagues whispered about it.

To accomplish this, Lehman Brothers made it next to impossible to get work done from anywhere but the office. BlackBerrys were only given to staff at a particular level. E-mail was blocked on personal smartphones. If you needed to access files from outside the physical office building, you had to use a virtual private network (VPN) that took minutes to connect—if it ever did. Virtual collaboration tools were nonexistent. No video conferencing, messaging, or network connection outside the physical office building. There was literally no concept of location movement or remote working. Everyone worked the same hours in the same way in the same place.

Krish Ramakrishnan founded the videoconferencing platform BlueJeans to enable a different way of working than at Lehman Brothers. Through the course of growing BlueJeans, he has seen an evolution in the role of the office for work.

“In prior decades, people went to work to do work,” says Ramakrishnan. “Companies wanted to get things done so they forced people to colocate in the office during the workday. The office was for working with colleagues. If you needed to get work done outside of office hours, however, there was a significant time lag. With growing virtual work now—and the changing purpose of an office—work now comes to you. And it can be done anytime and from anywhere.”

The Design of the Traditional Office

Traditional offices were often sterile and large, designed with the assumption that 100 percent of the employees would be in the office 100 percent of the time. Generally junior-level staff worked from cubicles while managers had offices, a manifestation of the hierarchy at the core of a traditional company. Offices generally increased in size with manager seniority—and almost always they had imposing desks, physical walls, and doors that could be shut when needed. For the most part, employees worked with desktop computers and landline phones.

Offices had conference rooms for meetings and a small kitchenette area—much like you would find in a hotel suite—with a basic coffee machine and empty refrigerators where employees could store a lunch they may have brought to work that day. Save for conference rooms and a basic table that may be in the kitchenette area, offices rarely had any sort of spaces for collaboration (today, often called “breakout areas”)—no couches, armchairs, or communal tables for connection and collaboration. I’ve seen countless traditional offices designed like this—and often felt energy ooze from my body as I entered them. Lehman Brothers was set up like this—as are many of the traditional relocation, tax, and immigration firms that Topia works with (although in recent years, many have started to also transform their physical spaces). As recently as 2015, I visited one of these companies and learned that not only was their office designed with traditional cubicles, but the height of their cubicles and length of their lunch breaks grew with seniority—a perk of tenure!

In 2018, Topia acquired a company that had built software and expertise for managing the complex tax, compliance, and financial requirements of expatriates, an important part of the talent mobility systems roadmap (see Chapter 9 for more details). Like Teleport, its culture was different than Topia—it had a more traditional office design with cubicles for most team members and offices located in a separate part of the building, often with closed doors. As we combined the two companies, we redesigned the office for collaboration and connection, removing cubicles and walled offices and introducing communal tables, breakout spaces, and glass meeting rooms and phone booths.

“The traditional office was where all work was done,” says Sten Tamkivi. “But the irony is, you could actually go into the office, work alone in a cubicle all day, and never talk to anyone else. There wasn’t a concept of the office being about collaboration, connection, or inspiration. Rather, it was just the place you went to do your work, access your files, and use your desktop computer. The irony is that with this setup, it is actually more efficient to work alone from home and not have to commute into an office.”

The Location of the Traditional Office

As traditional companies developed with the expectation that all staff would be in the office all the time, their office footprints grew. Due to space and cost constraints, traditional offices started to move outside of cities and set up in suburban office parks. These office parks were often large and characterless, proximate to but outside of cities, and often requiring a commute from employees. This image of the “commuting office man” was popularized by the British sitcom The Office, where employees work in a corporate office park in Slough, England, outside of London. (After living in London, I can personally attest to the fact that Slough is very much a traditional office park!)

In 2004, I interned at Mellon Bank. Thrilled to have my first company job and envisioning a summer working in New York, I was surprised to later learn that my internship would actually be in suburban New Jersey. Each morning, I got on a company minibus that took me and others from downtown Manhattan to a generic office park next to the New Jersey Turnpike. I worked 9 to 5 in my cubicle, ate lunch at the corporate cafeteria, and had meetings in walled-off conference rooms with doors shut. While I liked the work, at the end of that summer, I vowed that my next job would be in a different location that didn’t require a commute to an office park!

The New Talent Mobility Office

As location movement and remote work grows amid the Talent Mobility Revolution, companies are rethinking the purpose, design, and location of their offices. As workforce demographics shift, companies must take a different approach to their office footprint and workplace environments to attract and engage today’s workers, especially millennials. Seventy-eight percent of millennials see workplace quality as important when choosing an employer, and 69 percent will trade other benefits for better workspace.^*

The Purpose of Today’s Offices

Today’s workforce operates like a rubber band—people work from distributed locations and come together in office spaces to collaborate, connect, and create. Companies today do not expect employees to be in the office every day for a set number of hours, like they did in prior years. The purpose of offices today is not attendance, but community. Offices function as a hub for workers to come together, and where energy, ideas, and personal relationships are cultivated. These personal relationships are important for building the trust required for effective work in distributed teams. Some employees come into the office every day—welcoming the community and routine—but for many, office attendance is not a daily activity. Rather, they see office attendance as a set of dynamic interactions that form a part of their work-life integration—a new way of working that allows them to balance families, location preferences (for example living in a rural community), and other interests (for example working on projects as a part of the gig economy).

Manon DeFelice is an expert on location movement. She founded Inkwell to match people to jobs with flexible work and locations. As she built Inkwell, she has seen escalating demand for remote work and the role of offices changing.

“I saw a huge brain drain of talent demanding different ways of working and leaving companies when they didn’t get them. People just didn’t want to be in the office every day 9 to 5,” said DeFelice. “I also saw huge numbers of people flocking to cities and suburbs without any options to work flexibly from rural locations and commute to offices as and when they needed,” she continues.

“My husband is from West Virginia, and then moved to New York to work in finance. If he could have worked in West Virginia without the expectation of being in the office every day, then he probably would have stayed there and also contributed to the microeconomy there.”

“Many traditional companies still need to rethink their offices to be about collaboration and community, not attendance,” emphasizes DeFelice. “Location movement and flexible work is in demand for all of today’s workforce—and must be a key part of company strategy.” DeFelice says that transformation of office purpose starts with designing a culture where people know that “if you’re not around you can still be working.”

“Traditional managers sometimes struggle without seeing their people every day,” says Tamkivi. “They need to move to measuring objectives and output, instead of face time. Their philosophy must become—where you do work doesn’t matter, as long as you get the results. Put simply, there must be a total cultural transformation starting at the very top of a team or company.”

How Offices Should Be Designed Today

Today’s offices generally have smaller physical footprints than the large corporate spaces of yesteryear. They are designed to stimulate energy and inspiration. They get rid of cubicles and walled-offices—removing physical barriers to collaboration and connection—and instead create open plan space with desks side by side, managers seated near their employees, and conference rooms easily accessible and often visible through glass walls.

With a focus on collaboration and creativity, today’s offices generally have many breakout areas: corners filled with couches, armchairs, and inspiring art pieces or plants where employees can come together to brainstorm and ideate without the formality of a conference room or the distraction of being in the middle of other colleagues. With an open plan and desks adjacent to one another, you’ll also often find phone booths for taking confidential calls. Kitchens stocked with food and treats are de rigueur—as are large communal tables for sharing meals, happy hour drinks, or work discussions. The purpose of these spaces is to inspire cross-functional innovation, creativity, and relationship building among staff.

Offices may be designed with assigned desks, where each employee has a specific desk even if he may not be physically in the office each day, or with hot desks, where employees do not have an assigned desk but rather pick an open one when they are in the office. Hot desking fully embraces location movement and allows companies to significantly reduce their physical footprint and real estate costs on the assumption that all employees are not in the office at the same time. Some companies even adopt fixed schedules for hot desking where certain employees come into the office on certain days, while others work from anywhere, and then swap. According to CBRE’s 2018 America’s Occupier Survey, 75 percent of companies today have assigned desks, but just 48 percent of them expect to operate an assigned desk office environment within three years.^*

Skype was founded in 2003 in Estonia. Sten Tamkivi was an early employee, working at the company for eight years and growing to lead various business areas as a General Manager. Skype always operated on F3 principles, expecting workers to work flexibly, be autonomous, and live and travel around the world from their Estonian hub. Tamkivi recalls that when they moved to their first full office building, they designed it intentionally to inspire collaboration and connection—not face time. They put desks on all four floors, and all of the meeting rooms on the second and fourth floors and the cafeteria on the third floor. The idea was that no matter where your desks were, you might run into someone you didn’t normally see when going to lunch or to a meeting. Their belief was that if people came into the office to sit in a cubicle or closed office alone all day, then they could be doing that anywhere. In fact, it probably made more sense for them to stay home to work alone, rather than taking time for a commute. Rather, they designed the office to expose people to one another and spur random moments of collaboration.

According to global real estate consultancy CBRE, 25 percent of companies anticipate migrating toward activity-based, unassigned workplace strategies (or hot desking) “to meet the evolving needs of talent and workstyles.” Forty-five percent of landlords say flexibility of use was the most important occupier trend for real estate in 2018.^*

“Unlike generations of white-collar workers before them, modern employees want—and often demand—flexible spaces that are conducive to thinking and that help them perform the tasks required of them,” says Adam Jezard in the World Economic Forum article “The Traditional Office is Dead. Here’s Why.” “Additionally, many companies are complaining of difficulty hiring and retaining millennials, and a barnlike office with little daylight and row upon row of desks is unlikely to help.”^†

Where to Locate Offices Today

With frequent location mobility and physical spaces designed for collaboration and inspiration, companies are increasingly setting up offices in urban, city center locations. These office locations incorporate the dynamism of the city—and often become a part of urban regeneration projects. With city center locations, employees can get a coffee at local cafés, lunch at a nearby restaurants, and have one-on-one meetings while walking through the urban downtown. This connection with the city inspires further creativity and easier connectivity with other professionals and creatives, contributing to both the work and society experience. Many millennial workers increasingly prefer to live in cities.

In Silicon Valley—a place filled with F3 Companies—this “flight to the city” is well underway. In a drive to attract top talent and inspire creativity, many of today’s high-flying technology companies have opened offices in downtown San Francisco instead of suburban Silicon Valley (Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Palo Alto) where software companies were historically based. Companies such as Stripe, Uber, Pinterest, Square, Slack, and Lyft have all made this choice. Companies like LinkedIn, Workday, and Upwork, which were historically based outside of San Francisco, have opened offices in the city. Many venture capital funds have added smaller, high-energy city locations to their suburban Silicon Valley footprints as their employee demographics have shifted.

A 2018 paper published in the journal Regional Studies by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn of Rutgers University and Rubia Valente of Baruch College investigates the happiness of different generations. The study shows that millennials are happiest in larger, more urban environments.^* In order to attract, retain, and engage the largest cohort of the workforce, today’s companies move their office locations back to urban centers and enable flexible work and commuting around them.

Swapping Offices for Fully Remote Work

In the talent mobility era, certain companies are taking location movement a step further and championing fully remote teams—both as work-from-home and work-from-anywhere models. These innovative companies entirely reject the concept of an office, and instead hire staff to work in a virtual setting—over videoconferences, messaging applications, and other software that fosters virtual collaboration.

Working from the Home Office

All F3 Companies embrace remote work as part of their employment models, offering the flexibility and work-life integration that is important to today’s top talent. Cutting-edge companies take this a step further, however, and hire employees to almost exclusively work virtually, from their own homes. They do not have physical offices (or may just have a couple of small ones) but rather operate virtual teams where employees collaborate digitally, using modern technology systems like videoconferencing, file sharing, and messaging applications to complete work (see Chapter 9 for further details on collaboration systems).

Typically, work-from-home companies bring their employees together in one or multiple annual all-company meetings, hosted in a given location (often a hotel), often over a week. They generally also hold team meetings in a similar fashion, bringing together specific teams for a period of time to plan, collaborate, and build relationships. What these companies save on the overhead of physical office spaces, they often invest in systems for virtual work and travel budgets for employees to come together for these meetings. A significant amount of investment typically goes into these all-company and team meetings to ensure the time together is maximized and strong personal relationships are built that can support virtual working thereafter. Often these meetings involve business activities, such as planning and goal setting, annual and quarterly reviews, and strategy working sessions, as well as team social and team-building activities, generally based on collaborative problem solving (at Topia, we once did the “spaghetti challenge”—take pieces of dry spaghetti and marshmallows and see which team can build the coolest contraption!).

Work-from-home companies also recognize that an office can be an important form of social engagement and community for some employees. They balance their work-from-home culture with unique benefits that offer office work to employees who want it (see Chapter 8 for a full discussion on benefits)—expanding their notion of flexibility for employees. These companies offer an office stipend that employees can spend on a membership at a local coworking space, like WeWork, or on frequent coffees while working from a local café, offering the opportunity for the community and energy that working from home can lack for some employees.

Making Everywhere Your Office

Some companies expand their work-from-home definition to be work-from-everywhere. In work-from-everywhere models, companies recognize that distributed employees may not only be working from a home office, but may literally be working from anywhere—a café in California, airport in Alabama, train in Europe, or even a beach in the Galapagos Islands. The policies and norms of these companies are similar to work-from-home companies, but they tend to attract a growing class of travelers and digital nomads, like my friend Daniel from Berlin. Work-from-anywhere companies tend to have few, if any, physical offices, instead investing in virtual tools to keep employees connected and collaborating while remote.

Silver Keskkula, Co-Founder of Teleport (the company Topia acquired) is a data scientist and global nomad—a large part of the reason why Teleport developed with a work-from-everywhere culture. Like many top millennial and Gen Z creative and engineering professionals, Silver values location movement and the inspiration that comes with it. Silver decided, while living in Palo Alto and working at Skype, that he wanted to see the world. When building Teleport, he lived in Airbnbs around the world—literally working from all places in all corners of the world and gathering inspiration into the global products he was building.

At Automattic, which owns popular content management software WordPress.com, the center of gravity is virtual. Chief Business Officer Catherine Stewart says that with this model, “work happens all the time.”

“We’ve designed our organization to be distributed, and our employees live and work all over the world,” says Stewart. “Having a distributed organization helps us recruit top talent, and to better design and create products for a global audience.”

Automattic has designed its company operations and systems to enable this virtual culture. Employees rely heavily on videoconferencing via Zoom, a messaging platform, Slack, and a proprietary internal system that teams use to communicate, log notes, and post updates. This is supported by a culture of sharing and transparency, where people regularly document notes from meetings they have, and tag others who may need to read them and comment.

“We record all of our videoconferences and put things in writing that a lot of other companies may not,” says Stewart. “We save and share everything that might need to be referenced by someone working from a remote location alone in some part of the world. It provides a really good record for people to read and digest, and helps with alignment across our distributed model.”

Automattic also recognizes the importance of face-to-face time for teams to ensure that relationships are built across the company. The company hosts an annual gathering, called the Grand Meet-up, in which employees convene in a single location. Individual teams also meet in person one or two times a year, for five to seven days at a time. Teams use this time for different reasons, but common ones include goal setting, weeklong hacks, and cross-functional projects.

The executive team also gets together regularly for important decisions, such as companywide OKRs and product roadmaps. Leaders are also expected to attend partner team meet-ups, meet with coworkers as needed, and host their various team meetings. This can mean significant travel for company leaders—up to 50 percent, says Stewart.

Finally, like many work-from-home and work-from-anywhere companies, Automattic recognizes that an office can be an important daily social venue for many people, particularly those who are extroverted, or a place to escape when home has distractions (or slow Wi-Fi). Automattic provides what they call a “coworking stipend” to employees that can be used to pay for space at a coworking space where a given employee may be based.

“Some people want to sit in an office every day. Others want to work from home,” says Stewart.

One of the most difficult things about making this work-from-everywhere model work is time zones, says Stewart—something that we have also found challenging at Topia with a nine-hour time difference between our product and engineering centers in Tallinn, Estonia, and Bellevue, Washington.

“Time zones can be a significant constraint,” says Stewart. “On my teams, I require that individuals have at least two hours of overlap in working time, twice per week. This means that if you decide to work from Asia, and the team you’re considering joining is mostly based out of the United States and Europe, you will be committing to having calls at odd hours.”

“For teams with structured work—e.g., customer support—teams take shifts relevant to their assigned time zone, ensuring no gaps in the global day for customers,” continues Stewart.

Automattic has found its work-from-anywhere model to be a critical differentiator in attracting, retaining, and engaging top talent. It also allows the company to recruit from a global talent pool, hire from urban and rural locations, and welcome a breadth of perspectives and ideas that accelerates innovation and company growth. With this model, Automattic has truly harnessed the Talent Mobility Revolution.

Upwork follows a similar model of work-from-anywhere. “Our philosophy is to hire the best people, no matter where they are,” says Kasriel. “This gives us the opportunity to access better, more affordable talent, and retain this talent through greater flexibility.”

This Talent Mobility Revolution is what I saw starting more than a decade ago as I worked from airports, cafés, and client offices. It’s what led me to found and build Topia, unlocking greater employee movement for companies around the world. What I saw was employees demanding more flexibility in where they work and seeking more inspiration and community from their company offices. As the demographics of the workforce continue to shift, the successful companies of the future will make location mobility a key part of their business, talent, and real estate strategies, transforming traditional office spaces into creative, agile spaces where employees come together to collaborate. In doing so, they also tap into a larger talent pool and extend job opportunities to communities farther afield.

Redesigning offices for talent mobility is the third step to succeeding in the Talent Mobility Revolution. Companies that embrace location movement and make the shift to flexible work models will attract, retain, and engage the world’s top talent. Those that do not make this shift will lose the global talent war to the their more innovative competitors and not be ready to respond to disruptions and opportunities from globalization, automation, and demographic change.

Redesigning your offices for talent mobility is necessary to succeed in the Talent Mobility Revolution. Today’s workers work differently. Companies that enable remote and flexible work—location movement—will attract and enable the workers they need to achieve their business goals. Those that don’t will lose out.

In this section, we looked at how to set up an F3 Company and covered the first three steps to talent mobility transformation: (1) rethinking your definition of talent mobility, (2) restructuring for talent mobility and (3) redesigning your offices for new ways of work. With this foundation in place, we now turn to look at how to redesign work for an F3 Company. In Section 2, we look at how to rearchitect roles, evolve teams and managers, and redefine career paths.

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^* CBRE, “Millennial Myths and Realities,” 2016.

^* The CBRE Institute, “Solving for the Future with the Agility, America’s Occupier Survey Report 2018.”

^* The CBRE Institute, “Solving for the Future with the Agility, America’s Occupier Survey Report 2018.”

^† Adam Jezard, “The Traditional Office is Dead. Here’s Why,” World Economic Forum, November 1, 2017.

^* Richard Florida, “Millennials are Happiest in Cities,” CityLab, June 29, 2018.