Modern offices are terrible places to get anything done

I have worked blissfully alone for 25 years. But this winter my small tumbledown work flat in Paris – my safe space away from the wife and kids – finally had to be renovated. Since January I’ve been paying €358.80 a month to rent a desk in a WeWork co-working space. It has been a one-man experiment to settle one of the debates of our time: remote work versus the shared office. My conclusion: modern offices are terrible places to get anything done.

I resigned from the FT’s staff in 1998, mostly because I detested the office. The Financial Times at the time was headquartered in a large, horrible, cuboid building on Southwark Bridge in London, an overlit glass box where the windows didn’t open. I’d sit there in my monkey suit and tie, spasmodically working, but interrupted every few minutes by colleagues stopping by to moan about the boss or Chelsea FC.

Right now I may be one of the final people ever to work in a WeWork. The company, cofounded by disastrously charismatic wannabe guru Adam Neumann, appears to be nearing the end of its long, strange trip. Its valuation has dropped by almost 99 per cent in four years, from $47 billion (€42.7bn) to $503 million (€457 million), and it’s busy restructuring its debts.

However, WeWork did start from a genuine insight into how to improve offices: model them on coffee shops. The ur-version of WeWork, Green Desk, sprang up in 2008 in trendsetting Brooklyn, which at the time was filling with coffee shops bathed in natural light, inhabited by people wearing whatever they liked.

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My life mantra is that the solution to most human problems is earplugs

The WeWorks I use in Paris are in that tradition. In fact, here the coffee is free (possibly one reason why WeWork lost nearly $2.3 billion last year). Almost everybody except the cleaners is white and expensive-looking, and you hear as much English as French being spoken. In one location where I’ve worked some people bring their dogs. I’m usually the oldest co-worker in the room by about 20 years.

Then there’s the space, which is so crammed that it’s hard to get any work done. As part of the modernisation of offices since 1998, space per office worker in some US cities has nearly halved in 20 years, report property companies CoStar and Cushman & Wakefield. In the UK average density rose from 14.8 square metres per desk in 2001 to 9.6 square metres in 2018, says the British Council for Offices.

Admittedly the post-Covid boom in working from home has created a glut of global office space, but that won’t last: capitalism abhors a vacuum, and empty offices will find other uses.

WeWork is particularly dense: there are often about a dozen people sitting within 10 metres of me. It’s exhausting to be ceaselessly seen, and to have your concentration broken every time someone near you starts to chat. On days alone in my work flat, I’d feel so relaxed I’d often think, “Is it 7pm already? I really should go home.” At WeWork my productive workday is shorter: by 6pm I feel cooked. When I complained about this to my daughter, she replied, “Try high school. At least nobody at WeWork cares what you look like.”

It’s true: I’ve hardly even spoken to anybody there. My life mantra is that the solution to most human problems is earplugs, and nothing could induce me to attend the “happy hours” in the canteen.

No doubt I am unusually misanthropic, but it turns out that few people meet anybody at a WeWork. In 2017, the company produced an internal report titled, Are Our Members Friends? It concluded, forlornly, that they weren’t: “There is less of a community at WeWork than we imagined...The average WeWork member isn’t socially connected with others in their building... This result was incredibly surprising since it contradicts a lot of our rhetoric about the strength of our community.”

In my experience the only people who chat at WeWork are colleagues from the same company, probably wasting each other’s time.

Happily, my work flat is now ready – thank the builders and the Lord. My recommendation for office workers: if your employer leaves you any choice in the matter, and you have a workspace at home that’s larger and quieter than the typical spot in a modern office, just stay in your dressing gown and ditch the commute.

No wonder that the 35 per cent of American workers who can work from home now do so all the time, while many more would like to, according to Pew Research.

A shared office is unsuitable for any work that requires concentration. If you find the occasional conversation with colleagues absolutely necessary, then come in only when you must, avoid the office, and meet in an actual coffee shop. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023