The office is dead (2): a postcard from the edge
By: Prof Martin Connor
Tags: Leadership, Office, Business, Startup, Marker

Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash

There are thousands of businesses like ours right now. In fact, we count ourselves amongst the lucky ones since we can see our way to definitely being here next year.

I was fascinated by Courtney Rubin’s piece of a few days ago…

… and thought it might be interesting or useful for others to describe our recent experience of this topic as a real-time working case study.

We’re a health tech start-up who’ve built an enterprise platform to help hospitals work better, co-designed with clinical teams. We’ve been going since late 2017 in Queensland, Australia and our early growth has felt very rapid. As the coronavirus hit, we were at 32 staff.

For office space, we worked in a more or less traditional model over two floors of the same commercial block — one larger space (227sq. m) that can have about 23 programming workstations operating at the same time and a smaller one (125 sq. m) that can have about 13. Each has a meeting room, kitchen space and small chill-out area.

Like almost every other business, COVID-19 hit us with massive and sudden turbulence to our revenue, and sadly we had to reduce our headcount by six. We read the scientific and government advice extensively in the early stages of the crisis and voluntarily moved ourselves to home working about two weeks ahead of our local lock-downs on March 16th.

Shortly after this, our very dynamic operations manager, Leigh, swung into action and created a long list of options for how we could respond both in the immediate throes of the crisis, as well as how we could change our shape in the future. This enabled us to take a paper with a spread of options in it and get support from our Board.

About three weeks ago, the topic of what the ‘new normal’ would look like for us came up with quite a lot of comments in our (virtual) all-hands and it was clear we needed to begin the process of deciding together what the best way forward was for us as a group.

So, we took Leigh’s analysis and focused it into four specific options to talk about as a group: have no office, keep both floors, only keep the bigger office or only keep the smaller office.

As a leadership team, we try and operate on the basis that nothing is off the table — let’s discuss it. After a round of small-group conversations involving every member of staff it was clear that we unanimously wanted to retain a central office in some form.

But there was an important spread of opinions and preferences about how much time we should either mandate or allow people to be in the office for. Some people said they preferred working in an office for some of the week, others that they wouldn’t mind if they never came in.

It didn’t take a logistical genius to figure out that the amount of space we need at a minimum is directly related to how many ‘people days’ we need to accommodate.

So, we sent out a survey to everyone with two simple but powerful questions:

Do you think there should be one or two mandatory days in the office? Considering your own personal working style how many days would you ideally choose to work in the office?

We got a 100% response rate in less than one day and the results were fascinating:

Healthcare Logic staff answer to question 1 (survey taken April 27, 2020)

Healthcare Logic staff answer to question 2 (survey taken April 27, 2020)

Key takeaway 1: over 75% of us thought there should be only one mandatory office-day or had no preference! This surprised us, since some of the anecdotal discussion in the small groups had initially led us to think the preference would be for a higher number of mandatory days.

Key takeaway 2: nobody wants to work even four days a week in an office, let alone five! Nearly half of us only want to office-work one day a week, a third two days a week and a quarter three days. This was another big surprise, and left us feeling as if some genie was out of a bottle.

As a group, we don’t want to go back to how it was.

For us — and we cannot be alone in this — when staff preferences are taken into account, there is no business case for anything other than a minimal office space.

There was one further factor that came from the discussions with our engineers (our biggest staff group, natch). This was the ability to arrange joint programming and get-together time that would acknowledge both our ‘craft groups’ (for us: R&D, data engineers, web developers and testers) and the ‘task groups’ that form our scrum teams delivering our version of agile.

To solve the problem of acknowledging the need for both craft group and task group time together, we came up with a ‘Week A’ and ‘Week B’ model that looks like this:

Healthcare Logic team rotation for minimum office space: developed April 29 2020

We think this could work better than before, since we can now envisage more specific education and development programs for both the scrum teams and craft groups, giving us potentially more useful time together . As a part of this change, we are also introducing the concept of ‘bookable workstations’ as a fully available schedule for any combination of staff to be able to book any combination of available space.

Our ‘anchor and mission’ team — Customer Success — are predominantly externally focused in any case, and were least concerned about dedicated time in the office since they already function well on a virtual and customer-facing basis.

This approach also means of course that we save a useful amount of money. We are lucky in that we have a great relationship with our landlords and are on a flexible lease that comes up at the end of May, so letting go of the bigger office with all its associated costs is a quickly realisable net saving in the region of $70k AUD each year, or nearly $3k per head.

We’ve decided to give nearly half of this straight back to our fantastic staff in the form of fully catered lunches for teams on mandatory days (in a ‘strategic partnership’ with one of our cool local cafes — shout out to https://www.facebook.com/simplecoffeehouse/), parking allowances meaning parking is free for when people are in work, new branded rucksacks to carry the noise-cancelling mics and headphones people have asked for and last but not least a fully catered once a month celebration and planning day that we will hold at a local venue where we can all get together.

Overall, the participative approach to decision making gave us some surprising data that helped clarify our final call — and hopefully will mean we can ‘own’ the decision as a coherent group when we hit the inevitable snags.

For us, the ‘office’ as a concept is not quite dead — but one of our office spaces is, and we can see a model enabling us to thrive on 35% of our previous space. And as leaders of a start-up with global ambitions in the near future, leaning in to these changes in this way enables us to develop our people, processes, culture and (internal) technology for the exciting challenges ahead.