Dating apps but for office sharing?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

On a video call this week, the other person told me their “monologue detector” had gone off. In this case I really wanted them to continue — but the idea of an AI-powered prompt that tells us we are droning on is . . . brilliant. We all know that the people who most need this tool probably won’t take any notice 👀, but every nudge helps.

Do let me know the unexpected joys of workplace AI (go on, you know they exist): [email protected].

Read on for an innovative take on the future of the workplace — “swipe right” for an office-sharing partner — and in Office Therapy I advise a frustrated worker who is floundering while everyone else is OOO 🤬.

Office sharing may be the future of work (and your new social life 👯‍♂️)

Traditional co-working involves renting a table or room in a space, and sitting hunched over your laptop while drinking free coffee. WeWork, in its pomp, had bigger ideas, and its founder Adam Neumann wanted the hubs to be social spaces, too. A community.

It didn’t work. And Rafi Sands, a Stanford University MBA graduate with a future-of-work-focused newsletter, thinks he knows why: “I’ve been to over 100 WeWorks and worked out of them, testing them.” His conclusion? “You are reserving a seat in a coffee shop.” Because those people aren’t connected in any way, they don’t talk. “It’s not surprising. How often do you really meet someone at the gym? People are there for a reason and there are too many strangers.” (Please don’t all @me with stories of meeting your spouse in a gym 🙄.)

Rafi was hanging out in co-working spaces to research an idea for a different kind of working arrangement: shared space, but where a host with spare capacity agrees to bring in one or two other organisations who are matched because they have similar business aims, investors, or overlapping professional networks. The result is Tandem (tagline: “office space worth leaving home for”). It’s a start-up already operating in San Francisco and New York, initially mainly with creatives such as media, arts, design and architecture firms.

Tandem grew out of Rafi and others’ research at Stanford with Nick Bloom, an economics professor and (THE) work from home expert. The team realised that work was never going to be the same again: “We are never going to be back in the office full time but we are never going to be locked in our rooms 100 per cent of the time like we were in 2020.”

The first driver for office sharing is often financial: host company CFOs like the idea of earning extra cash. But once a match is made — by humans at Tandem, who also use publicly available data to spot network connections and common interests — then it becomes a lot more than that, Rafi says. “When companies get to know each other on a tour, this isn’t a real estate conversation, it is really about how can we make this space alive again?” Successfully matched companies are already having social events and doing business together.

I asked Brian Elliott, a West-Coast based future of work expert, what he makes of the trend for rethinking how we use space. There’s a lot going on: he directed me to Radious, essentially “Airbnb for work”, which rents residential accommodation for meetings, awaydays, retreats and so on. I got quite lost down a rabbit hole of plumped cushions and luxury yurts ⛺️.

More broadly, these new companies are sidestepping the existential crisis in corporate real estate. That sector’s basic purpose used to be clear. It was “to deliver facilities based on projected headcount on time, and on budget”. Post-pandemic, Brian says, “the changes demanded of workplace professionals at companies of all sizes are seismic: how do we move from facilities, to facilitation specialists? On top of that, why place large bets on the long term, when we know the needs of the organisation are likely to change?

“There is a host of start-ups out there building new ways to break the traditional trade offs: they give people access to great spaces without making a long-term commitment. Larger companies are starting to test them out: new models like Tandem and Radious, flexible space marketplaces and technology companies like Kadence, Desana, Gable and Liquidspace.”

It’s a huge issue and too much for one newsletter: we will return to the great office space reimagining. In the meantime, here’s Rafi’s key to getting your team to go into work: “What gets people in the office is social. It’s not free kombucha, it’s not the amazing views. You love the views the second or third time, but you are not going to keep showing up day after day for that. There is a social pull — people want that, and they are missing it right now.”

I would love free kombucha, but I take his point. Any other office space innovations? Email me: [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

The podcast is taking a break this week so we’ve teamed up with Harvard Business Review (aka the management experts since 1922) to introduce you to Coaching Real Leaders, hosted by CEO adviser and leadership coach Muriel Wilkins. I’ve been enjoying listening in on Muriel’s real-life coaching sessions with people facing challenges at work, and I think you’ll find it valuable. The episode we’ve chosen for Working It listeners is about setting boundaries in a new job to prevent burnout ✋🏽.

Get a glimpse into what my FT colleagues are reading by signing up to the Long Story Short newsletter, where each week one journalist picks their favourite pieces from the FT and beyond. Register here.

Office Therapy

The problem: My organisation has let far too many people go away at the same time. I am still working — and on my knees. I am tempted to stage a go-slow. How can we prevent this happening in future? Every department has its own holiday rotas but the effect is . . . empty office, nothing being actioned, people like me overloaded. Any ideas?

Isabel’s advice: On the surface this sounds like a failure of planning, perhaps because your organisation has “siloed” teams doing their own thing. That’s extremely common.

But this is really (like most issues in the workplace, sometimes I feel like a broken record 😟) a failure of communication, both inside and outside teams. Leaving line managers in charge of these approvals always risks — as you have discovered — exposing the whole organisation during peak summer vacation time. Managers are as self-interested as the next person.

The solution? Someone has to take charge of making things work better across the organisation. Is there anyone working on improving process and efficiency? Can you offer to do this yourself, given the bonus angle that it will increase your visibility?

Once you have alerted senior figures to what’s happened (data on cross-departmental absence will help, rather than moaning about your workload), it might need the chief executive or senior figure to make a company-wide statement to make clear minimum staffing levels that need to be maintained.

The radical alternative is for organisations to take a European view, and shut down for a week or two, or intentionally reduce staffing for a fixed period, and explicitly manage expectations for clients and stakeholders. And if we all did that, wouldn’t it make for better workplaces?

Working It readers’ ideas on making summer holiday absences fairer are very welcome. Have you cracked this problem? We will share best practice.

Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Email: [email protected]. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Why office pods are everywhere: We’ve all noticed the rise of those claustrophobic little booths, and they are in high demand as office etiquette has shifted to make phone or video calls a no-no in open-plan spaces. Bethan Staton investigates the story so far (it’s evolving).

2. The CEO: Luis Gallego of IAG Philip Georgiadis has an interesting — and inspiring — conversation with Gallego on how he turned round the Spanish carrier Iberia, and his plans for BA. (FT readers commenting beneath the story have *strong* opinions on the latter’s customer service.)

3. Team GB’s 51-year-old rad dad: A rare bit of uplifting journalism in a grim news week, Josh Noble talks to skateboarding legend and Olympic contender Andy Macdonald, as he competes alongside teenagers in the Paris games. And he’s having a lot of fun.

4. Helen Toner on the OpenAI coup: Want to find out more about the events that led up to Sam Altman being sacked from OpenAI? He was reinstated within days but this insight into the hidden world of Silicon Valley from Madhumita Murgia’s interview with the board member who ousted him, is illuminating.

5. The evolution of well being: James Riley’s book Well Beings covers the 1970s history of experiments with wellness, meditation, flotation — and simply understanding ourselves better. I reviewed it — and discovered that much of what we think of as “new insights” into human flourishing were around half a century ago.

One more thing . . . 

Strangest photo of the week: two children brought up in Slovenia with parents who were apparently from Argentina, getting off an aircraft in Moscow to greet President Putin. They had just discovered that they are, in fact, Russians. Their parents, released in the wider prisoner swap that also freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, worked as Russian sleeper agents, so-called “illegals”, under cover and with ordinary jobs, in this case as a gallerist and an IT business owner. It was a plot straight out of The Americans, one of my all-time favourite series: you can stream it all on Channel 4 in the UK.

A word from the Working It community

A note this week from Professor Chris Rowley of Kellogg College, University of Oxford and Bayes Business School, City, University of London (we have very distinguished readers). Chris responded to last week’s newsletter about how to deal with uncertainty, and politely took issue with the way many of us use the u-word. Here’s Chris:

We should acknowledge difficulties with using “uncertainty” overly simplistically:

1. It means very different things to different people given it varies by: scale (small to large); speed/velocity (low/high); fluctuations (unclear patterns of evolution).

2. Another example is Donald Rumsfeld’s famous typology of not only “known-knowns” and “known-unknowns” but “unknown unknowns”.

3. People’s “comfortableness” with uncertainty varies by culture internationally: see [Geert] Hofstede’s famous “uncertainty avoidance” dimension of culture.

4. There can be more than uncertainty — see Bob Johansen’s famous “Vuca”.

I was familiar with Vuca — it stands for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity”. But Hofstede’s “uncertainty avoidance” was new to me: a good chart here.

More definitions and thoughts about leading through uncertainty are most welcome: [email protected]