Organizations spent decades building, maintaining, and defending the office as the primary site of professional activity. Workers spent at least as long complaining about it. Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, both parties discovered that professional work could happen without it — and many concluded that the office had always been somewhat unnecessary. But the experience of long-term remote work is now revealing something more nuanced: offices were doing things that nobody fully recognized while they were doing them.
Remote work became mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained so. Its widespread adoption was accompanied by a widespread reassessment of the office’s purpose and value. The case against the office — its cost, its inefficiency, its rigid scheduling, its commute burden — seemed to have been settled by the pandemic’s demonstration that work could happen without it. The case for the office has been rebuilt, more slowly and more honestly, by the experience of working without it.
What offices were really for, the remote work era is revealing, is psychological as much as logistical. Offices provide the environmental cues that help brains regulate between work and rest modes. They provide the social context that motivates, engages, and sustains professional effort. They provide the temporal structure that makes the management of cognitive and emotional energy across the workday possible. And they provide the community that gives professional activity its broader meaning and social significance.
None of these functions were designed into offices deliberately. They emerged organically from the practice of gathering professional workers in shared spaces. And because they emerged organically rather than by design, their importance was invisible while they were operating. It took their removal — through the mass experiment in remote work — to make their function apparent.
The recognition of what offices were really for does not imply that everyone should return to them full time. But it does imply that the functions offices served cannot simply be abandoned when workers go remote. Those functions must be consciously reconstructed, through deliberate environmental design, social strategy, and organizational culture. The office taught us what professional environments need to provide. Remote work is the test of whether we can provide it differently.