The Office of the Future

Well just do the first half. See some empirical research on that. Yeah, you know. My theory hypothesis is that the person who introduces the podcast gets to choose whatever the heck he wants to introduce it. Okay, well, what

are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about offices, Joe, offices, where you go to work, where we go to work, Well, not specifically our office, although I'm sure that's going to come up in the conversation several times, hopefully as the least amount of snarkly is possible. We are we are about to full disclosure, full disclosure, We're about to to endure. Now we're about to have a transition, a transition experience in our office.

The house Stuff Works office, which is where we work, is relocating to a different floor on the in the building that we work in, and we're going to end up in a smaller office space with a new floor plan, and it is one of those things that we'll be talking about. I actually have some information about the type of floor plan that we will be in, not specific, so I'm not going to give you guys, like the square footage or whatever. Basically, this is just to say

that we're we're having feelings. So if they're sighing throughout this intellectual discussion about office environments, you'll know why. Yeah, exactly, because we have we have feelings and have an intrinsic bias and that's feels yes, okay, well, and it's not just us, by the way, this is something that's borne out through actual research. I have information about the I thought you were going to say, like, also, Robert Lamb

is really upset. Well, Robert Lamb is very upset. Robert Lamb actually is one of those stuff to blow your mind. And they did an episode called Cubicle Doom, a podcast episode called Cubicle doom, which is very good. You guys who are listeners afford thinking, who have not listened to stuff to blow your mind, you should check that out.

Cubical doom in particular, goes into some research about how you know, we talked about how Mars is trying to kill you, and they're talking about how your office is trying to kill you. So it's everything from psychological effects to actual medical effects of offices. Really well, let's talk about some of those effects. Okay, what happens to you when you work in an office five days a week for thirty years? Yeah, well, all depends a lot of that depends upon the office. But Lauren, I think you've

got some information about this, right all right? Okay, So, so, first of all, research suggests that indeed stress at work is associated with all kinds of things that are negative to not only your own health but in turn your your productivity and a need to do your job. Um. And furthermore, that physical characteristics of your work space, you know, the noise, the lighting, the ventilation, are all linked to

job stress. So compounded upon that, the way that we work in offices mostly these days is sitting down at a desk looking at a computer screen. Yeah, I mean, that's all we do it. I mean, I would imagine that in these are modern times. That is, I do not have a statistic about that specifically, I believe that one of you, too, find fellows is a little bit of information about that. Here's the deal. Going looking at

research about people in office spaces is difficult. You can find a lot about trends, but when you get to look when you're looking for hard numbers of how many people are actually working in offices, that's where it really gets kind of messy because a lot of the surveys are small sample size, and then you extrapolate out and as it turns out, there are very different trends across

different parts of the world and even across different nations. So, for example, in the United States, teleworking, which we will talk about later on in this episode, is something that you find that's very prevalent in places like the southeast, the Southwest, and the West, but not so much in other parts of the country. So it's really difficult to

actually say how many people are working in offices. However, it's a lot and I actually do have some information about the types of offices people are working in today compared to previous generations. Let's hear it. Oh well, okay, so like you know, we at how stuff works right now, we have cubicles, right, and they're a little different from the cubicles you might see in something like office space. They or one of my favorite movies, Joe Versus the Volcano,

where it's a soul crushing experience. It's like everything is done in this blue filter on the screen, so it looks like the artificial lighting is just draining the life out of everyone. It looks like the building that Joe works in and Joe Versus the Volcano was scientifically designed to crush a human spirit. Well, that's not the kind of cubicles we have here at how stuff works. It tends to be this sort of kind of weird angular cubicle where you've got your own little sense of space.

But it's it's but it's open to the to the to the environment, so that people walking by or you know, you can make eye contact with someone if you want to write. Yeah, it's it's not so much sequestered that you are in a cell, right, You're not in a little blocked off cell. It's open a little bit, but it also gives you some privacy, so it has sort of the best of both worlds approach. The ceiling is open.

I've heard that that's an important factor in that that that that if you you don't have a full wall to the ceiling, that that adds to your sense of space. And uh, and yeah, you're not. You don't feel like you're you don't feel like you're hemmed in right, that that you're being you're being contained, uh, because you could like potentially climb over the cubicle wall if you needed. Well, it just doesn't psychle Lauren, did you see this video psychologically,

it doesn't feel like you are contained. You know, for example, the same idea that you paint a wall of different shade, uh, two thirds of way up to accentuate height, or use of mirrors to expand a space, Well, that's not the way a lot of offices are moving these days. And that's not the way our office is moving. Pretty soon more, more and more offices these days are moving to what's

just called an open plan. So it's not open floor plans, not just cubicles necessarily, it may be workstations where you don't have all these divide dividers that that sequester people or give them the sense of privacy. In fact, seventy of unite US workers in offices today are working in open floor plans. Huge. Yeah, so that's that's become sort of the approach, which is kind of funny if you look back on the history, like the development of the

office space. If you look back in the early days, it was essentially kind of the same sort of thing. Like if you ever think of any newsroom type films about newsrooms where you just see lots of desks in a big open space. Yeah, the bullpen that that was a very typical kind of approach, and then we moved into this sort of cubicle approach, and then we're now

moving back into an open floor space. And the idea behind it is to, uh, to foster collaboration, right, but if you work in a field where you're not necessarily collaborating all the time. For example, what we do, we collaborate right now, but we do a lot of our research on our own. Will will meet occasionally to kind of compare notes, but then we go back in our own little world. We're not constantly collaborating. For people who do that sort of work or even more individualized work.

This can actually be really distracting, and in fact, there have been some studies that suggest that this kind of open floor approach increases things like dissatisfaction and aggression in the workplace. And you guys have so much to look forward. I know, we can't wait to find out if this is going to be the king No, but we also all love each other. So also it says that according to surveys, people whose work is interrupted make fifty more mistakes and take twice as long to finish tasks as

people who can actually concentrate on their work. So again, if if you need that sense of privacy to concentrate, then you're going to find that your your work style is going to be impacted quite a bit through this move to an open floor plan. But there must be some perceived advantages to an open floor plan as well. There is a trend, not just a perceived advantage. There is an advantage. It's cheaper. Open floor plans take up

less space. Office space is expensive. It's not just expensive to have the real estate, it's expensive to maintain it. It's expensive to provide power, it's expensive to provide all the ventilation that you need. So you know, your your rental space. All of these things factor into the bottom line. If you can cut that, if you can reduce the space you need, then you end up saving lots of money. So one way to do that is to move to this open floor plan where you eliminate things like offices.

You can use that space just as one unit. So, uh, that is a demonstrable improvement from the corporate side. I bet there are also plenty of workers though, who enjoy this well, you know, I you know, this is certainly not scientific, but within our own offices are our audio and video department is within an open floor office kind of space. And and they granted, many of them, I think we're friends before they came to the office, so they all have a good interpersonal relationship to start with,

but they seem to not hate it. Well. In nine of the research that was done on this, like an of the research that's been published, So you're talking about like a meta study. Yes, the research of the outcome of working in an open environment was negative, with increases and anxiety, aggression, and employee turnover. So nine times out

of ten, in other words, we're talking about a negative outcome. Okay, so we're saying that my plan of going and getting those those grade school science report folders and or, as Rob Lamb said, dungeons and Dragons portfolios. Yeah yeah, and setting those up is actually a very good idea. It's uh, it is not a bad idea because it turns out all right. So there's this great article. It's fantastic. I

recommend people check this out. Uh. It's a New York Times article called the Rise of the New group Think, and it's by Susan Kane. Uh. There's there's a great section in this. I'll just go ahead and quote it. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption, and the most spectacular

liarly creative people in many fields are often introverted. So that's a generalization there, but they are often introverted, and they are they're extroverted enough to exchange and advanced ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They are not joiners by nature. So in other words, they do their best work when they can kind of focus and and and be on their own. There they can collaborate and they can move things forward. But when they're doing those

big leaps that's when they're on their own. Obviously, not everyone's like this, but there are lots of some somewhat anecdotal reports that, and some are actual studies where they found that people in various fields who were were moving into these open floor plants, like game developers, for example, we're finding it much more difficult to work in open floor environments than they were when they had their own spaces.

So it's, uh, you know, it's it's interesting because according to at least the studies that I've seen, the demonstrative effect is that productivity goes down, efficiency goes down employees as faction goes down, but your costs also go down. So you have to weigh the two against each other. And it may be that perhaps the open floor plan approach is still young enough that a lot of companies haven't started to really factor in what the impact is

to their business. And maybe it's one of those things that it's really just a social change. It could be that we eventually adapt to this open floor plan and gradually don't hate it with all our heart and souls. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you've seen um all of the comic strips and and little jokey essays and everything from the eighties and nineties about how much everybody hates cubicles and it's like your amount all that stuff. Uh, you know, rat in a maze. Uh. I don't know.

I like my cubicle, but at some point apparently people found this just awful. Well, you know a lot of those cubicles also were very much designed to be it was all looking like everything was the same, right, it was all you know, this this idea of almost like an institutionalized approach where all individuality was stripped away and you were just another cog in the massive machine that was your company. Um I I do have to say that that what I enjoy most about my cubicles having

wall space to put up a really ridiculous posters. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to say goodbye to that, not if I bring in those giant poster boards. UM. So that's the psychological side of that. I I had a little bit of research about the physical side of what happens to us when we sit around in offices all day. And um, I mean, because we've all heard the big headlines lightly sitting is killing you. Um And that's that's

that's a wee bit debatable. There is a study from two thousand nine that found that people who sat most of the day were more likely to have a heart attack than people who sat very little, independent of how much they weighed or how often they exercised otherwise, which

seems disturbing. UM. I mean, but a that is studying heart effects only, so you know, there there are a lot of other UH commorbidities involved in UH in in exercise and weight that I have not seen research on, and I hope that someone is working on that right now. But there are definitely other factors. You know. It's basically, when you're not using your muscles, they get less good at being musci e um. That is the highly scientific

breakdown of that thing. And and so you know it's there's there's connective tissue that covers your muscles called fascia and it's flexible that can set in the position that you stay in the most, which causes muscle stiffness, poor balance, lack of stability, and mobility. Um. You know, sitting will weaken your your glutes, your butt, which is a major muscle group. And the more that you exercise, more that you develop any given muscle group the more energy it

will burn. In general, So if you're letting this major muscle group go to waste, then in general you will you will burn fewer calories, which is bad times. Um. You know. Skeletally speaking, sitting puts the absolute most pressure on your spine. It's terrible for for your back and for your neck, and over time, all of these problems just compound each other, you know. Weakening muscles and tendons

makes all of these problems harder for you to correct. Yeah, this very thing actually makes me wonder if so, on one hand, you've got a trend towards open floor plans. But on the other hand, I wonder if there might be a trend away from the standard sitting desk toward maybe standing desks or even this is such a there's such a thing as this, the treadmill desk. And I'm not entirely it doesn't seem crazy to me, like I can kind of see it. I actually have a friend

who has a treadmill desk. Worked at a treadmill desk and she loved it. She she liked the idea that it allowed her to to walk at a very very slow pace. You know, we're talking like a mile per hour. It's really, you know, a very gradual thing, and it was really just meant to keep the muscles moving. It wasn't meant as you know, not not like an aerobic exercise and filling out that Excel sheet while jogging at twelve miles per hour. Yeah, obviously that would be kind

of silly. But um, but I can see that, I I can. I think I'd probably really prefer if I had such equipment. We also had a coworker, a former coworker of ours, who would regularly work standing up. He would spend about probably about two thirds of his day standing and only about a third on fuller who used to used to stand up and work at his desk.

And he even had a little a little platform you have for him to put his laptop on, so that would be tall enough where he wouldn't have to know, lunch over in tight because obviously that wouldn't necessarily help you help past Um, I do wonder if open floor plans might help aid, you know, getting up, standing up, getting your muscles moving, walking around the office to go away from the person who's all yappity yappity. That one because out of the three of us. I don't know.

I don't know how you both tested, if you've taken like Myers Briggs tests or whatever I test out, here's a shock alarmingly extroverted. That's so so I I am one of those people who I really do get energized and jazz by having quick conversations with people, and then I can quickly I can go right back into focusing. But that means that if everyone else is introverted, I'm actually hurting them at least as far as their ability to do work. They I am distracting them. I interrupt

their their processes. They get their energy by really sitting down and focusing and being apart from everything. So it's it's difficult because I don't want to impact their work experience. I don't want to be irresponsible in that way. But at the same time, if I don't say anything and I just sit there by myself, my own work productivity starts to decline because I haven't had the chance to

actually energize myself by chatting with someone. So occasionally I'll go and have a quick chat, trying my best to keep it as as short as possible, which is difficult with me as the length of these podcasts can attest, but uh, you know, in these open floor plans, that becomes even more difficult because I can't just kind of have a quick conversation with another extra sing and then

walk away. Though this also makes me wonder if, um, you know, the sort of like really cutting edge off as to the future might have floor plans grouped by personality type or you know, I think, well, does that make sense You can take your take your test when you come into the office and maybe have a group of extroverts in a small open floor area and then maybe have people like me who just want to live

in a hobbit hole, you know, kind of cornered off. Well, it's also a question of I mean, the collaboration aspect is something that a lot of companies are still saying this is the main reason they want to move to this open floor plan. They want to have a collaborative environment for their employees. And in some applications that makes

perfect sense. You might have a team of six or eight people who are working on a specific project, and so having them close together makes it much easier for them to touch base and really understand what's going on and move forward. So that and and in some of these places, we're talking about floor plants where you don't

even have an assigned desk all the time. Because if you work in a place where you're going to be on multiple teams throughout your career, then it makes sense for you to be able to move to different locations and so the group of people you work with one

month might be different from the next month. UH. That moves us into an area where we're talking about places where you you type in on a computer when you get to work, and it assigns you a desk for the day, which makes it even less personal for you because you can't set up your space, you can't define your space because you're sharing, you can't bring all your wacky action figures and and unless you carry them desk

to desk with. Yeah, but as we've established, that might be ideal for some types of workers and especially some types of work well. And it also again is ideal for companies that maybe they have a teleworking policy where they have UH only a certain percentage of employees are in the office on any given day, they can reduce down to a minimum or maybe just over minimum number

of desks they need on a per day basis. And that way, even though they might have two hundred employees, if only fifty of them are showing up on any given day, they only have fifty desks, so they don't have to have the space for all two hundred in their office because of that teleworking uh schedule. Okay, sorry, Well, I have one other thing to say about health, which is that offices are germ bombs, y'all. I'm talking they

are uh sinks. The handles on sinks, like if you have a kitchen in your office, that that sinks a death trap just waiting to kill you. Not all of us spend like an hour a day licking the sink, do uh. No one spends an hour a day licking the sink like I do. I got my own sweet style, all right. But also things like the microwave handle is pretty growdy, you know. There's there are parts of the of your typical office that are And that's another thing is that let's say that you have one sick person

coming into an open floor planned office. Then you've suddenly got this one sick person who's who's coughing, sneezing, breathing in the same general area as everybody else. It's just like any other enclosed space. It means that the disease hasn't a the chance the opportunity to spread to other people, and thus you can have something that would have been HAPs more controllable in a different environment become kind of a rampant disease within the enclosed space of an open

floor plan. Okay, So is the coming future solution to this problem that everybody's going to wear those surgical masks. Well, that only works if you are sick and you're trying

to prevent other people from getting sick. It keeps germs in your face, but it doesn't it doesn't really filter germs out due to the fact that you're you're touching things you might I mean in any orifice on your body, including your skin, which isn't an orifice okay, but you know, but it does have pores um, you know, your eyes,

your ears, unless you are covered in like Sam Punk styled. Well, the whole reason, the whole reason doctors wear them is because they don't want to pass on any infection to the patient. It's not for them to prevent illness getting to them, it's to prevent them from infecting a patient. So it's it's not like wearing a mask may make you feel like you're being safe, but really what you're doing is you're saving other people. And I hate other people,

so I just go and breathe on them all the time. Okay, uh, well, all right, one one more one more note on health and then we can totally move on. I did want to mention that although there's all of this doom and gloom about office spaces in general and open offices in particular. Um, I did want to mention that we still, in fact have it better than people who are doing manual labor. Um. Uh,

you know. It's you know, although because I've seen it mentioned in kind of a lay person sort of way that like, oh man, it would be so much better if we were all doing manual labor, because that would mean that we would be getting in that exercise exercise, right. Um but uh, you know, the studies have shown that people who do manual labor during their jobs do get exercise, but their health deteriorates more rapidly over the span of

a lifetime than non manual workers. Um. There was a big study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research in two thousand three using data from the National Health Interview Survey, and uh, they basically I mean, you know, they are economists at heart, and so what they were really concentrating on was the fact that that this might be um due to economic indicators of manual work, including poorer health at the onset of life, less education about health,

and less access to appropriate healthcare. But but that nonetheless, you know, I just wanted to put in there that it's pretty cushy getting to go to an air conditioned environment. Yeah, yeah, I would imagine just things like especially if you have a job where you're you know, yeah, you've got manual labor, but if you have a very specific sort of series of motions that you tend to do, I can imagine repetitive stress injuries would be a big problem. I mean, yeah, there,

it's it's no, it's not rosy. I mean. The the one last statistic I have for since we were talking about office spaces and are moved to the open floor plan and the reduction of office size, this this kind of illustrates it. So in the nineteen seventies, the average office had about five square feet per every employee that worked in that office. All right, so five do you think like, I've lived in places smaller than five square feet. So in two ten seventies, didn't computers each take up

five square feet? Yeah? Well, in two it was two five square feet. In two thousand twelve it was one seventy. So in other words, the amount of space per employee is decreasing in the United States year over year. Uh So that just as another indication that the Office of the future may not have people in it. Well, and that may just in one way, reflect an overall growing trend towards density and urban environments where lots of these

offices are located. But okay, so if we say, maybe there's a trend towards uh more sort of population density within the office, and there may be a trend we hope to help solve the sitting crisis in one way or another. So maybe standing or treadmill desks, or maybe just getting up and moving around more. What about these crazy the offices? What about like I've seen pictures, can't remember where of offices that have tube slides for adults

and petting zoos in them and stuff like that. Where we going that way as a society or or nix on that? I think it all depends upon the nature of the business. Certainly, startups tend to go into this kind of really funky, bizarre, I mean, at least bizarre from the standpoint of this is not what you would consider a normal office environment, the average nine kind of kind of button down office. Yeah, I mean I worked in a place where we could bring our dogs into

the office if if we wanted to. That sounds amazing. It was actually really cool. Yeah, there's a Microsoft those But Microsoft was one of those companies that also kind of kind of pioneered this in the sense that at Microsoft, when they were first ramping up and starting to hire people right out of college in California and uh and Washington and and the essentially the West Coast was really

where they were farming their their talent. They would put in things like arcade machines and pinball machines in the office because it gave the the people working there an opportunity to blow off some steam and have fun. They also realized that the more amenities like that that they included,

the more time their employees were spending in the office. Willingly, they were happy to stay in the office as opposed to going home to I don't know family, so, uh so that kind of started a trend, and so we see that today with other companies like Google is famous. The Googleplex is infamous really for some of its amenities, including things like a you know, for a while, if you worked at Google, you did not have to pay to eat really because you could come there and have

a fully you know cooked. Yes, it was part of your compensation, was the fact that you had access to this food. Um, and it was you know, from a chef who actually was a known name, and so it wasn't like, you know, just just cafeteria food. This was

like really high end stuff. And then on top of that you had things like no giant bends of snack foods and candies everywhere and this but I can attest to because I've seen them been through one of Google's offices, although it was a sales office, it wasn't their main campus in Mountain View anyway. They also have things like bicycles where you could ride across campus and inside the

buildings themselves because they were so gargantuan. Uh. Not to mention, they had like an infinite swimming lane, So it's a swimming lane that has a current so that you just you can you keep swimming, but you stay in the same position that you are in and within the lane, so you could get your swimming exercise in while you're doing spreadsheet. It was one you couldn't necessarily work that way, but it was one life tablet staffed to your arm.

It was one one lane of of swimming pool with a lifeguard tower next to it, which I thought was because by law they had to, but it was. It was hilarious. But yes, that's just one example. There actually tons of offices that have really amazing amenities, and even Discovery like Discovery Communications. When we went there, we saw they had like a yoga room and exercise room and they had like all these things that you know, house to works. We've got we've gotta we gotta fridge, we

do get free soda, we do that. Yeah, which, by the way, the people that Discovery Communications are really jealous of Yeah. Yeah, like like like they have like a t Rex in their lobby. Not a real t rex. I mean it's a scale. It might not be a t rex. Okay, Okay, it is is you know, reproduce bones.

But nonetheless they're like, but you guys have soda. Yeah, they also have a crazy kinetic sculpture in their lobby that I don't know how the people who work near there get any work done because it's it's quite loud, but yeah, it was. It was pretty funky. But if you want to see some really cool office designs, I don't know that they're effective as far as getting employees to be efficient and productive. But if you want to see some crazy awesome designs, UH, there is a great

UH site. You should go to Office design Gallery dot com. I've been looking at these and some of these I shared a couple of pictures earlier with Joe and Lauren and I'll see we'll probably link to this in our blog posts and stuff. But the pictures here are pretty phenomenal. There's some places you look at and you think, I wish I worked in this office, just because it's such an interesting approach. But there are other ones that I look at and I think, I don't know that I

could get any work done in this particular environment. I mean, it looks really cool. I would love to tour it. I just don't know that I would be able to work their day to day. What was the one that was just like a glass tube in the middle of the woods. I'd have to I'd have to open that up again. It wasn't It was a company name that I didn't recognize, but it was a It was actually

not a tube, but it was. It was a building that had been set into the ground so that that the windows looked out like it looked like it was a dome, half dome. Yeah, so you could look out onto the trees. There was actually another wall there, like the windows ended at a wall, so it wasn't like it went all the way from ceiling to floor. But yeah, it was in this very uh, woodsy setting, so it looked like you were working as a hobbit, a corporate hobbit.

So do you get the feeling that these kind of like wonderful, whimsical, Willy Wonka kinds of workplaces are on the up or on the down or are they sort of just a niche that's always going to be there for those small, kind of really weird creative startup I think I think it's a niche in the sense that

what these offices do. I think they're great for attracting new talent because the person fresh out of school takes a look and sees this incredible Willy Wonka esque land where they think, wow, you know, golden tickets every day, I can't wait, and and that becomes a selling point, that becomes something that attracts them to go and work at this place, because I mean that that's a big commodity. Are the fresh people out the college who have the ideas in the drive exactly, you know, they and and

only that, But they're cheaper to hire. So there are a lot of a lot of different reasons. But these these sort of things make those companies very much attractive now once you get there, whether or not it actually helps you do what you were hired to do, that's a totally different question. So it may come up time where these companies start looking at this design and say, you know, we're getting the people we want, but we're not getting the results we want, so maybe we need

to rethink this. I don't know that that's a fact. I mean, there's some companies that are doing quite well. Google is doing really really well. There are other companies like Yahoo that, while it has a super funky office space, was going through some real problems. Speaking of Yahoo, um, I've got a question, Okay, what do you all think is the future outlook for teleworking. Well, of course, what is that by teleworking? I mean um working remotely via

the internet. Basically anybody who does entire like coffee shop. If you use a computer to do all of your work, this is probably an option for you. Uh. I would say good too. Amazing would be the outlook for teleworking. The reason why I say that as the US Census Bureau did a study about teleworking working from home, they also talked about mixed workers. Mixed working would be when it's where mixed workers and we get to come into the office some days, we get to work from home

some days, so it's a mix for us. There are some people who just work from home, and then there's some people who can only work in the office, and then there's the rest of us. Well, according to the Census, this trend is growing. Uh. They employees of private companies saw a sixty seven percent increase in people working from home between two thousand to two thousand ten. Now, there this is not true across all industries. There are some industries that had a decrease in the number of people

who work from home. Uh. Specifically people who worked in agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining saw a decrease. The fact that there were people working from home in the first place is something of a surprise. Well, in in any in any manufacturing or labor industry, there's always going to be office financial workers. For example, administratives right, well, they make spreadsheets. They saw a twenty four point one percent decrease from

two thousand to two thousand ten. But most industries saw their percentages increase. Some went from um some had an incredible amount of growth. For example, state government employees saw a hundred thirty two point five percent increase from two

thousand to two thousand ten. However, when you look at the actual numbers, you realize that while the growth was enormous, we're still talking about a very small number of jobs, because it was only from one percent of all state government jobs going to two point four percent of all state government jobs. So the growth was huge, but the actual numbers were very small. It's only because the numbers were so loo to begin with, exactly. So, uh, that's

just one of the trends. But there's there's a lot of other statistics I could cite. For example, again, according to the Census, ten percent of all American workers spend at least one day working remotely, which is up from seven percent back in. This census was conducted in so people who work from home exclusively made up six point six percent of all workers. Those working from home and quote other locations end quote made up two point eight

percent of the total. And of the people who work from home, about ten percent of them were over the age of sixty five and about a quarter of them worked in management, business and financial occupations. About half of all people who work from home report as being self employed. So this is you know that, it's not a huge surprise if you're self employed. You could have an office space that you could go to, and lots of people do, but working out of your home means the you can

often end up incurring fewer costs on the business end. Okay, Well, so to bring it back to Yahoo, if this teleworking trend is is so much on the upswing, why did I hear that, um that there was this big deal where Yahoo said everybody you should come back to the office. Well, Marissa Meyer took over Yahoo. She was a former Google employee, one of the first women to work for Google. In fact, I think the first female engineer at Google, and then

she came over to become the CEO of Yahoo. And in fact, that was one of those things that a lot of industry analysts viewed as an incredibly positive mood move because Yahoo had been sort of struggling for several years. In fact, they went through five CEOs in four years. Yeah, that's that's not not sign of a healthy company in general.

So the official line from Yahoo is that the change in policy was meant to increase collaboration, uh, saying that a lot of great ideas come when people are interacting within an office environment and not and that that's just not as easy to do when you are working remotely, which is surely to some extent true. Yeah, But there were also other issues with Yahoo about whether or not employees were working very efficiently, whether they were doing their best.

If you look at revenue generation on a per employee basis, UH, Yahoo was making about a third of what Google was per employee. So, in other words, if you look at Google and you counted every employee, every employee accounted for something like nine hundred thousand dollars in revenue. For every person who works at Google, that's nine thousand dollars in

revenue at Yahoo it was more like three thousand. So that's you know, that's also saying that things are not as efficient as they need to be in order for us to compete at a level that goes, uh, that's that's comparable to our our arrivals, you know, are you know? So those are sort of the reasons that have been cited. Um so do you think that that kind of decision signals that there could be uh, some counterbalancing to this trend towards telework. I think I don't think that it's

necessarily counterbalancing. I think this is a one example where a CEO comes into a troubled company and tries to really get a handle on exactly what are the contributors to the company's I guess lack of success, you could say, or at least uh problems with direction. And maybe it's even just to assess who is a good contributor to the company and who Isn't it maybe in preparation for

things like reorganization or putting people on different teams. And I would imagine that the teleworking policy will eventually make its way back to Yahoo. The benefits of teleworking are numerous. One thing it does seem to have a very positive effect on employee morale when it also seems to help with employee productivity because people who work from home tend to be able to work at the times when they are the most productive, and they take breaks during the

times when they're the least productive. They're not. They're they're putting in the same amount of time as workers who are going into the office for a nine to five type of job, so it's not like they're shirking from that. In that respect, it means that you have lower overhead for your company because you for not having to I mean,

you know, way cheaper than an open office. Oh sure, Yeah, even even an open office would be more expensive than having no centralized office at all, or a very small centralized office where only a few necessary employees would go in, or meeting rooms, yeah, for those few collaboration sessions it takes.

It means that there's a lower impact on local traffic because people don't have to drive into work, which in turn means that you have a greater sense of satisfaction, you have a better work life balance since what we get to talk about all the time over in meetings. But it also means that you are helping the environment. You know, again, energy consumption for an office building is

way higher than it is for a typical house. So even if you're working out of your home and you've got your own home office and you've got lots of equipment, you're not going to be generating the same amount of energy as you would need to for an office building. So accumulatively, it decreases our energy consumption. Also, because we're not driving as much, it decreases our fuel consumption. So these are things that end up having kind of a

domino effect that are positive effects. Um and on top of it, you you create flexibility among your employees, uh, and you remove that that illness spreading mechanism. You know, they don't have that. If you're not in constant contact with tons of other people, you are also not in

danger of spreading an illness or catching an illness. Or if you really have an option to work from home while you're a little bit under the weather and perhaps contagious, but feeling well enough to do your work then or if you can work from home while Sally is undergoing the Mongolian death flu, then you don't have to worry about contracting it yourself. Yeah, I think working from home is probably a big advantage for parents, especially parents with

younger children. Yeah, but at any rate, I mean, teleworking on its on its face, I think will continue to, uh to grow year over year. I think that we're

going to see it grow in almost every industry. Uh. Sorry for those of you who work in agriculture and forestry and mining, you probably aren't going to be teleworks, although you might be replaced by robots, so you know, maybe it's time to although speaking of robots and also speaking of teleworking, so so as the number of teleworkers in our in our workforce grows, telepresence I think is

going to become more major than it already is. I mean, I'm sure that that a lot of you have have sat in on some kind of vaguely weird webcam meeting in which no one is entirely sure how to interact with each other. Um. Yeah, well there's lots of awkward pauses while you're waiting for someone else to pick up the conversation or or like this podcast. Thanks thanks for

admonstrating that, guys. That's great. Yeah, telepresence uh so, in some ways, advanced telepresence is still kind of a baby, but it's sort of the solution to this teleworking problem we were talking about, and especially what's suggested by like at least the official line on on the Yahoo decision right, um, which is collaboration is important. Yeah. Is that what you were totally about to say? Yeah, I'll let you know. Yeah.

So that obviously, teleworking has all these advantages. It's cheaper, it's better for the environment, it's better for employee morale and all that, um, but it also creates the problem that you know, if you've ever called into a house stuff works meeting on the telephone, First of all, what are you doing? Yeah, that's for us. Why would you be doing that? No, I don't know anybody coworkers listen to us when we do that. It's uh, it can be hard to hear what's going on. Yes, it can

be kind of confusing because you don't know who's speaking. Yes, Um, it can be there can be you know, yeah, crack holes, and you miss things, and you miss a lot just by missing gestures and body language. In fact, I think there are some people who say that more than nine of communication really is physical. Well, and on top of that, if if the speaker phone happens to be closer to certain people within the office. You're going to hear lots

of snarky comments, but not what they're commenting on. Yeah, um and so. But obviously this is not a problem unique to us. It's a problem with how telephones work, and so when we're talking one on one. There's an interesting thing to notice though, when you just use one telephone with a good connection to call your friend. I think most of the time most people can experience a

kind of seamless simulation of a real conversation. In other words, like you don't have this feeling of I'm sitting here using a device, but you actually have a feeling of I'm talking to my friend. Right. You still end up missing certain things, but you can pick up stuff like from tone, but not necessarily you know, a physical response, right. But I think that you that you get a better experience the when if you're say, using a video skypeline

or something to talk with someone. Yeah, and just like the phone. What I was going to say about the phone is I think a lot of this depends on the quality of the just the signal and stuff, right, Like, the more you're losing calls and hearing crackles and stuff like that. The more, yeah, the more your your simulation of the interaction degrades and you get the feeling that you're using a device. Same thing is true with say,

video conferencing. Now, video conferencing is a thing that it's actually been around for decades, but it's just basically been getting better and better over time. Um, as we can use higher quality video, higher quality audio, and just better hardware integration. Also instant I mean instant feedback. You know, these days we can have a simultaneous instant connection with someone else with a webcam. Whereas in the eighties, where I think video conferencing enjoyed a very short lived and

uh and pretty weak sauce reception within the business environment. Um, it was kind of uh, it was kind of fashionable. Um,

but it wasn't there yet. We're we're getting closer and closer all the time, and stuff like Skype today is pretty commonplace and lots of office Yeah no, I was just gonna say, ironically skypes office open floor plan, they don't skype in that's funny, yeah, okay, Um, but so obviously adding a visual element, and like I was talking about with the phone's adding a more and more seamless visual element that UM takes away the aspects of looking at a screen that remind you you're using a device,

and instead UM offers this more unnoticeable sim elation of face to face interaction that really can add to a lot of business, you know, interactions. So if you're doing a negotiation on some kind of sales deal, people are real particular about how they carry themselves in these situations, Like body language can make a lot of difference. If you're able to gesture and make eye contact, you can

probably get a better price. Right. That's just people are human when you're making right and so the better your video interaction hardware gets, probably the better job you can do, uh,

simulating the experience of actually being there. So now what they're talking about these days is not just like a screen like a computer screen and you're looking into it, but these we'll say, one idea would be UM goggles, like interactive goggles, so that when you turn your head, what's the video game controller that's like that, oh, the oculus rift, the oculus rift at the head tracking software, head tracking software, It would be exactly what you're talking about.

So imagine you're in a room that's uh, you know, it's a meeting taking place somewhere where you can't be, or at least it would be cheaper for you not to be. But you can simulate being in the room by wearing some kind of hardware that allows you to turn your head throughout the room and track eye movements so you can look where you want to look, interact with who you want to interact with. You can you know, make eyes at somebody across the table if you want to,

can make robot eyes and yeah. Um. Now the other idea would be a more immersive room environment, so you can go into a room, would say like a wrap around visual display. Um and and so these are some ideas, but the problem with all of these is their stationary. They are you going to robots, I'm going to robots. People are into these two a segue with an iPad attached to baby. That's exactly what I'm talking about. No,

actually it's not a segue. So I want to talk about a few robots, um that are actually kind of in vogue these days. Um. Yeah, these are things that exist that are in use. Yeah, they're they're picking up steam. One that's a kind of really basic model, but pretty clever. I think it's it's from Double Robotics and it's called the Double. It's it offers an iPad based platform. Essentially, it's a motorized scooter with a big stick on it and you put an iPad on top of that. I

would call it the robots. Yeah, and so it it rolls around within the office. And now it's very cheap and stripped down. Um, because it leaves all of the video part up to you. It's the software you have on your iPad that that does the video. It's connected through the WiFi of whatever the space is, so essentially using face time and so you can see through the camera view of the iPad and then anyone who looks at the robots seas your face yeah. Um. And so

this allows for sort of mobile video interaction. It's like the video conferencing idea, except now you're not stuck in the meeting room. You can follow people around have a conversation with them. And this actually might be more useful than you would first think, especially say in an environment where you want to tour facilities or say go around like a lobby, meeting people at a meet and greet

or something like that. Um. I'm just trying to figure out what my own personal reaction would be to encounter this. I mean it sounds very very Douglas Atoms or doctor. You know. I'm a I'm a science fiction fan, I'm a robot fan. I'm a forward thinking kind of guy. But uh, I honestly don't know how I would react. I think I think I would be intrigued and very much interested in the technology. I think you would put a kick me sign on the back of the robot.

John Well, you know, unplugged me sign. I want to talk about some more robots. Okay, Okay, they're Um. There's so Scott Hassan's Suitable Technologies. That's a group that has created a it's called the Beam Remote Presence Device, and there was an interesting little Forbes article about it. Apparently it weighs ninety five pounds and it's a motorized stand. It's got a seventeen inch flat screen that displays your face. Um,

and it's about sixty two inches tall. Okay, um, which is interesting because that's sort of like considered in the middle between standing and sitting, so I can kind of interact with either one that's that's the the I'm continually forgetting the name of the Honda Robot. The Asmo. Yeah, that's that's about the height of the that's what about five ft? Yeah, and uh, there was a funny quote in the article I read. It said basically that some people have already bought these and they're using them in

their offices for people who work remotely. And the main problem I heard reported is that it doesn't have arms, so when it needs to like come into your office to talk to you, you just ram it against the door a few times and then you can come open the door. To be fair, that's exactly how Connell knocks on bars to It just just keeps walking into a door until you open it. Um. There was like, comas are big, big boss, y'all, He's never rammed into my door.

Well that's because we don't have doors in our cubicauts. So there's another one. I Robot and Cisco two big companies. Actually when you think about I Robot is big and consumer robotics, and Cisco is big and uh telepresence and enterprise stuff. Yeah. So I Robot that's the company that does rumba right. Yeah, so they came together to create the AVA five hundred. Um Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.

It offers bigger screen, so it's a one point five inch hteve video presence and when you when you talk to people who have used these and tested them out, they really do talk about how the video quality and the size of the screen is important simulating presence because the closer you can get to actual sale of human head. Yeah um, with good video resolution, it even though you're talking to a robot, it does help that simulation kick in.

It feels more like you're interacting straight on with the person. Um. One thing that makes a five hundred interesting is that it's easier to get around. So the the beam that I talked about earlier, you gotta steer it, so it's like driving a remote control car. Basically you're steering it with your computer keys and you can That's how you ram it into the door if you need to, or run it into your co workers. The A of five uses some of the same kind of technology as a roomba.

It's massive its environment, and it it has automatic navigation within its environment. So what it has a prime sense three D sensor and when you put it in a new new environment. It learns where the rooms are and you tell it where to go, and it drives itself there. So all you have to do is map it against where you know. It has the geography of the space. You just have to tell it which region's map to

which offices. For example, saying this this space here that you have already mapped out that relates back to Connell's office. You'll know from the banging noise where you're trying to get out. The cool thing about these is that they're actually apparently coming way down in price. Like the earlier models were super expensive if you wanted something that was at all decent um the AVA I read they're planning on selling it according to this article, Uh at about

two thousand. That's not that expensive when you're talking about, you know, robots, it really is not that expensive. Yeah, especially a robot that large, that has that kind of learning capacity. Um So, And I've heard that some of these I think, specifically the AVA, have been tested in medical environments. Oh, I'd have to check, but I think the AVA was actually derived from an earlier robot that

has been used in medical and vironments. This this is some stuff that I've that I've heard has been a really effective use of this. This telepresence kind of thing is is doctor patient interaction when, for example, a specialist cannot come fast enough to an emergency situation, being able to interact with a patient and furthermore interact with the

rest of the hospital staff to help save lives. I see, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because you might have someone who is a specialist in a particular disease or condition or whatever who doesn't work that the hospital that the patient has arrived at might work around the world. Yeah, it would be like an instantaneous tele consultation, which is kind of cool. Yeah, so I think, I think really to wrap this all up, the office of the future. First,

there will be robots. Second, uh, there might not be many other people. Um, I think, I think again, I think telepresence is going to be a growing trend. I'm curious to see if the open office plan stays around, if it ends up proving that, you know, we're an adaptive creatures, and it may very well be like I said that after this initial reaction to yeah, of of dealing with us, that maybe we adapt our working styles

so that the open office environment makes perfect sense. And maybe even you know, five years down the line, we might say, gosh, can you can you imagine if you were in a cubicle and you couldn't see anybody, That might be what we talk about. Then Uh, it's you know, just like you were saying. You know, in the eighties, the cubicle became like a symbol of being yeah, under the corporate thumb, So it'll be you know, change is scary. Change does not always meet with enthusiasm, but often change

can ultimately be a good thing. So while we have been snarky, especially since we're personally about to experience this for ourselves, I'd still like to maintain optimism and say, let's give it a really good try and and see what works for us. Yeah, maybe it maybe like I said that we're probably we might be overreacting, and that the initial findings of the open office plan are just an implication of the fact that changes is happening. That's it.

So maybe maybe five years from now we'll be like, well, this is this is ideal for working. Plus we'll be working from home a lot, all right, So that wraps up this discussion about the Office of the future. Guys, if you want to join the conversation. Go to f W Thinking dot com. That's the website where we have all the blog posts, the articles, the videos, podcasts, UH and trump is ALIGNE on social because we are on Twitter,

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