Out of the Office, Back in the House

I am starting to wonder what is going to happen to office rental prices in certain areas of the country which are dominated by what we politely call "professional services."

I say that after a discussion yesterday, in regard to the physical locations of professionals who work in areas such as information technology support, or people whose work is primarily writing or developing content, people whose lifeline to their colleagues is not so much the coffee pot or the water cooler but the wireless network and the Internet.

Back around 2005 or so, when I was a corporate employee and not yet a private consultant, I started to be asked, and to see others being asked, if we wanted to take "a couple days a week" and work from home.  The company would reimburse the Internet service we would need to be able to work remotely.

I was perfectly happy not to commute, and worked from home a couple days a week.  For myself, well, I found it to be perfectly reasonable not to have to be in the office all day; to be fair, I worked with a fairly scattered force throughout the country whom I didn't meet with "live", all that often.

Although I can't say for sure that it was the company "trying out" teleworking in some way, it turned out to be the case.  Over time, the number of commuting employees dropped, but the work still got done as the number of teleworkers rose.

Now, I don't want to debate the value of telework or telecommuting (I still don't know the difference, or care).  I simply wanted to comment on the curious implications, and there are several.

Obviously, for me the first thing was that I looked in the mirror and asked myself what the heck I was doing living in northern Virginia, a hugely expensive place to be, when I rarely went to see anyone locally anyway and lived on conference calls and online work.  As a consultant with multiple clients, I could literally live anywhere there was wireless Internet, and it wouldn't change my ability to be hired or my effectiveness for my clients.

So I'm now a 100% teleworking consultant, in a different and less-expensive part of the country.  But it's not about me.

One of my major clients had a headquarters facility ten years ago, including three fairly large towers in the complex, and hundreds and hundreds of employees worked there.  Today, although they are every bit as successful as they were back then, they occupy only one tower in that facility.  It is still their corporate headquarters, but obviously the need for sit-in-the-office types has shrunk massively.

The rest of their employees are, to put it bluntly, elsewhere.  And most of those are at home, still working for the same company, a firm whose rent bill has shrunk dramatically.  Since their expenses have dropped, and since they are a primarily Federal contractor (a very low-margin business), those lowered costs have made them cheaper -- and the government needs to spend fewer taxpayer dollars to get the same services it got before.

It's a win-win; the company is more competitive and the customer (the government) is paying less, so in turn it reduces the rapid increase in the national debt.  OK, I know the government will keep on spending, but you get the idea.

Aside ... In fact, and this is absolutely true, but last night one of the VPs at a client of mine asked me to a meeting next Wednesday in northern Virginia.  I wrote back and reminded him that I no longer lived in the area and could easily dial in to the meeting.  A man I work with daily had completely forgotten that I was living in another state.

There is, of course, a loser in all this.  That would be the owners of the buildings in congested metropolitan, urban and close-suburban areas that are being vacated at a high rate.  Northern Virginia real estate, like the real estate in other places where there are office buildings but fewer companies needing them, is becoming a luxury for companies, not a necessity as it was.  I would not have wanted to have invested in such a building a few years ago without an airtight tenant and a 20-year lease already signed.

The Internet, the promulgation of wireless availability and the success of telework has engendered a number of real changes to the work paradigm.  None is as dramatic as the financial risk to office building owners.  We, the professional employees, simply no longer need the physical presence we one had; dramatically fewer of us need to be in the office that often, and many of those need never be there.


It's neither a good nor a bad net "thing", but it is certainly worth noting that there are substantive impacts on our daily lives and on the costs of certain services formerly dependent on big staffs in big offices.

Sometimes, apparently, the more things change, the more they change.  There's probably a French phrase for that.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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