The Keys to the Kingdom
New Workspace for the New Employer-Employee Contract
Space is honest. If you really want to get to know someone, check out their home or office. Those spaces will quickly tell you how they decide to spend their time and money. The same holds true for companies. Workspace artifacts what they can collectively agree on, what is important to them, and where their priorities lie.
Historically, workspace has been the purview of the employer, and has been a tool provided to employees to lower transaction costs and amplify the company’s productivity. As a result, its shape has been largely informed by the employer’s concerns. In my lifetime, it has been generally understood that workspace was something the employer controlled and the employee was permitted to use. Employee engagement was important, but so long as workers didn’t reject it en masse, workspace firmly remained a company asset.
Now as we are about to enter 2022, we find ourselves in the midst of the Great Resignation. The employer-employee contract is being rewritten. Increasingly, employers will need to provide not only what is most beneficial to them, but also what is most important to the employee. The magnitude of this shift is hard to overstate: “anywhere from 40% to 75% of the workforce are actively planning to leave their current jobs for a better fit elsewhere.”[2] Trust and flexibility will be the hallmarks of the 2022 employer-employee contract, and the employee will be looking for a workspace that honestly communicates that trust.
Many forward-thinking companies are ahead of this curve, providing up to $1,000 allowances per month [1] for remote workers. However, this level of per-employee investment is insignificant in comparison with what employers have traditionally spent on the workspace that they control. It is similar to your kid’s allowance — enough to keep them from complaining but not enough to impact your personal finances. In my world as an architect of workspace in the Bay Area, development costs for new office space typically range anywhere from $50,000 — $150,000 per employee. Despite this price tag, Bay Area employers have continued to invest in constructing new workspaces because it has reliably increased productivity and fostered corporate growth.
That is why we were surprised last year by the nature of the push back that we received when we published our studio’s concept for a mobile work unit. Members of our community felt that the idea was “elitist” and only available to the very richest. From their point of view, it was not something that could scale or be widely adopted as a workspace solution. With slightly blushed cheeks, we admitted that we had estimated the MWU would cost somewhere between $100,000 to $150,000 per employee, a dollar amount that was unremarkable expense to us when designing a traditional, employer-chosen corporate campus, but previously outside the realm of possibility for the amount of money that an employee could be trusted with when making decisions about their own workspace.
Fortunately, this year when Nest Vans entered the mobile workspace market with their “Series 1” mobile office van they understood the employer / employee power paradox. To circumvent it, they have been marketing their product to “companies-of-one.” Within these companies, there is no difference between CEO and laborer, between head of facilities and software engineer — the user is the final decision maker. These companies might be a software engineer, a management consultant or, ironically, a real estate developer. Companies-of-one are empowered to invest wisely in their workspace, to maximize the value for the employee as well as the employer, since they are one and the same. Clocking in at $99,750 or an estimated $1,300/month, Nest Vans sit right in the middle of a traditional Bay Area workspace and at the lower end of what we estimated a mobile work unit could cost.
As pressure increases on employers to offer workspace solutions that reflect real trust, flexibility, and a willingness to invest in their employees, I anticipate the technological adoption of a variety of solutions like Nest Vans’ mobile office will be on the rise. What was shocking in 2020 will become increasingly common in 2022. (As an indicator of this increased pressure, LinkedIn has tracked an 8.5x increase in the number of remote jobs posted on its platform from March 2020 to August 2021.)[3] To attract the best talent for these positions, I think it is time for employers to move beyond their comfort zone of allowances and move into a more genuine relationship of trust with their employees and their shared decisions about workspace. It is time for employers to trust their employees with the keys to their workspace.
