Naked truth about working from home: is the office doomed?

Most of us have adapted to working from home and employers may realise they can save millions from making this permanent.

Office life is a grind if you can’t share a laugh with your colleagues. As one of the millions of office grunts now forced to work from home in the age of coronavirus, I miss these moments of silliness. So, like many others, I’m grateful for the rise of the Zoom conference-gone-wrong video clip. These two gems were doing the rounds in New York this week.

A blonde woman is walking around her apartment, laptop in hand, as if giving a virtual tour. Then she puts the laptop down, drops her trousers and lowers herself on to the toilet. One of her colleagues, who was discussing a problem client, starts to stumble over her words. Others – there are ten of them – put their hands over their eyes and begin to giggle. The realisation then hits the blonde woman: her webcam is switched on. Her video feed cuts out amid a flurry of panicked laptop-grabbing. “I saw nothing,” one of her colleagues lies.

A bearded man, naked from the waist up, steps back from his computer to reveal that he is also naked from the waist down. “Aaaaaargh!” his colleagues scream as they look away in horror. One of them, probably the boss, then says: “Let’s make sure everybody has clothes.” The bearded man disappears from the screen, only to reappear later, still naked, with what appears to be his breakfast.

Boris Johnson held his cabinet meeting by Zoom as he is still under quarantine. Picture: Downing St.

After three weeks of lockdown, most office workers have adapted better than these two to home working, even if some of us are guilty of wearing the same jogging bottoms all week. With careful webcam placement, we can appear as though we’re fully engaged in a video conference, whereas we’re actually getting on with more pressing matters, like ordering wine online. Those with acute attention deficits probably know that Apple has developed an “attention correction” feature for Facetime, its video calling app, which makes you appear as though you’re looking directly at your webcam even if you’re not.

We will have plenty more time to practise, with most of Australia forced to work from home for up to six months. In the US, President Trump just extended a nationwide stay-at-home order by a month, to the end of April. In New York, the centre of the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo, the state governor, has spoken of many more months of lockdown to come.

Those of us in New York City, the midpoint of the centre of the pandemic, were supposed to be heartened by the arrival this week of USNS Comfort, a navy hospital ship. It is here to take some pressure off a hospital system unable to cope with a rapid influx of coronavirus patients. This was sold to us as good news. Cynics saw a military vessel used to treating war wounds being stationed in the Hudson River and began to wonder how bad it was going to get.

On her way to the Hudson, the Comfort was paraded down the East River past the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building and dozens of other skyscrapers lining mid-town and downtown Manhattan. Billions of dollars’ worth of prime office space and most of it emptied of people. Which made me wonder: if the coronavirus crisis proves that home working really does work, is the “traditional” office doomed?

In mid-town Manhattan a 15,000 sq ft office, about the right size for a company of 100 people, costs $1.1 million a year to rent, Squarefoot, a property consultancy, estimates. Electricity, gas, water, internet and telephone bills add dollars 6 per sq ft, or $90,000 a year. Cleaning would cost $20,000 a year, a local contractor quotes. So the bare bones cost of running a city centre office in New York is about $1.2 million a year.

Let us assume that the annual cost of running the office computer network at our hypothetical company is the same as providing our 100 employees with home-working equipment such as laptops and mobile phones (which, in many cases, are already provided in addition to desktop PCs and landlines in the office) and covering their home broadband bills for good measure.

Across 100 home offices, rent, cleaning and utilities cost the employer nothing. An arsenal of internet technology exists to pull workers together for communal working. Video conferencing programs such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Cisco Webex and Zoom help to recreate the office meeting. Indeed, Zoom charges nothing for a limited version of its video conferencing service for up to 100 participants.

The savings are adding up fast but there are more to be made. If nobody has to commute to work, everyone can work longer hours. Say each of our 100 staff no longer has to spend an hour travelling to the office and back. Almost out of thin air, we have the equivalent of an extra 12.5 employees working eight-hour days.

There could even be more obscure savings to be made. KPMG apparently gives each of its 16,000 employees a £3.50-a-day (AUD$7) lunch allowance, which is automatically loaded on to their staff passes. If they all lunch at home, the professional services firm saves £56,000 per weekday, or £13.2 million a year.

Doubtless this analysis will win a Nobel prize in fag packet mathematics. Still, offices, particularly in places such as New York, are incredibly expensive and the internet has created all the tools we need to do away with them, at least in theory. These tools haven’t been properly tested until now but they seem to be holding up.

None of this is to say that working from home, without ever having real contact with one’s colleagues, is in any way desirable. Studies show that social isolation shrinks the part of the brain that controls memory and learning and raises the risk of early death. But if it comes down to a cold calculation of cost savings by an employer struggling to pull away from the coronavirus crisis, we may well be spending more time on video conferences – preferably fully clothed – and less time gossiping by the water cooler.

The Times