Remote work is progress, but offices are still innovation drivers.
It is a constant echo that we hear throughout this pandemic – the future of work will be hybrid and companies find they can be as productive when their workers work remotely.
Much of the confidence in this vision can be attributed to advances in technology. You can now have daily meetings with your colleagues and clients, and attend classes or seminars remotely. It saves the worker’s or student’s commuting time that can be spent on family or personal interests.
If you live in the Klang Valley, you may know many people who have been working from home with varying levels of productivity. Many friends love it, and they assure me they have been as productive as they have working from their offices.
But in America, something counterintuitive has been happening. At the end of April, Apple announced plans to open a new campus in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The company will spend over US$1 billion on the campus and it will employ 3,000 people working on technology, including software engineering and machine learning. This is on the back of another new billion-dollar Apple campus in Austin, Texas, which is expected to open next year.
Apple is far from alone in expanding outside the San Francisco Bay Area in search of engineering talent and lower cost of living for employees.
Google is looking to welcome back workers to its own new billion-dollar campus in New York City and is redeveloping a former shopping mall in Los Angeles.
Not to be left behind, Facebook has signed a lease in New York City for more than 1.5 million square feet of office space and plans to move in next year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia – designed to house 25,000 workers – is being constructed.
So, why are these tech giants continuing to build mega offices, seemingly running against the workplace trend they have helped to drive so successfully during the pandemic?
In innovative industries, the ecosystem is everything, because ideation and creation can happen more rapidly in an environment where enablers, serendipity and creativity are at close hand.
It is no coincidence that the old and planned tech campuses are located around academic and industry research centres or old semiconductor hubs.
In New York, tech workers not only have a high chance of meeting other techies, but also designers, marketing experts, capitalists and other culture and economic influencers who can help them innovate further.
This mixing and interaction of talent from similar and different industries is the essence of innovation and creativity. Online meetings, though productive in many instances, cannot adequately capture the dynamics and interaction between talents and ideas.
The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, famous for his unorthodox and original thinking, among others, was about to leave the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for another institution, when he ran into scientists in other fields, walking to office.
The story is told in the book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. The chance meetings with those Caltech scientists, who had just made discoveries in astronomy and biology, made him realise that “this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting.”
Obviously, Feynman could still have been updated about those discoveries once the scientific papers were published. But it is not the same as having direct interaction with those scientists.
The same principle is at work in innovative industries. Talents are like atoms that move freely in random directions. The more densely packed these atoms are confined to, the more collisions and sparks they will create.
There is no rolling back the inroads made by remote work in our working culture during this pandemic. It has been largely a good thing for many people.
However, instead of accepting it as just an inevitability of our times, we should pause to think about the type of productivity we seek to achieve by coming to the office or working from home.
In industries where we want to encourage innovation, face to face interaction is still the way. Just ask the people who enabled the remote work revolution.
This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Twentytwo13.