That’s a big change from last year, when only 6% said they would start a company remote. In 2020, the Bay Area was still the big winner, with 41.6% of respondents saying they would headquarter a company there, while only 28.4% said the same in 2021.
More than 40 percent of founders surveyed by Initialized Capital said the best place to start a company will be in the cloud.
Initialized Capital
Initialized Capital partner Kim-Mai Cutler said this isn’t surprising since the number of companies they’ve invested in that are setting up in the Bay Area has been declining for seven years. 2014 had the strongest concentration of Bay Area headquartered companies for their portfolio, with three-quarters of the fund centralized there. “From a tax base and economic perspective, [I think San Francisco] would be concerned because in previous cycles people have talked about company flight and I do think it’s much more real than it was a few years ago since we can actually see it happening,” she said.
For companies grappling with these decisions, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll move their Bay Area headquarters, but instead, it could affect where their next hires will be based. Zumper, a rental marketplace company headquartered in San Francisco, plans to hire 100 people in 2021 and CEO Anthemos Georgiades said he is unsure of whether those hires will be made locally, at one of their other U.S. offices or at an entirely new office location altogether. When he heard Miami was heating up, he sent a tweet directed at the Mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, asking to learn more about his plans for transforming the city into a tech hub.
Suarez replied within a few hours and the duo have a meeting to discuss the prospect of opening a Miami office soon.
While Georgiades is not the only entrepreneur with an eye on Miami, Cutler thinks the enthusiasm and promises may be a bit overblown. They’re also not novel. The late San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee essentially did the same thing Suarez is attempting to do now, she notes, as Lee actively recruited companies to move north from Silicon Valley’s historical base on the peninsula ten years ago. “A lot of people are praising this mayor like, ‘Oh, he’s going out of his way to attract companies,’ but Ed Lee did that years ago. Ed Lee changed the whole business tax system of the city… specifically to attract more tech employees in San Francisco,” Cutler said.
Georgiades has also asked for a meeting with Mayor London Breed via Twitter, though he said he thinks he only got a response since he’s a tech CEO and many people were following his tweets. He said he’s looking forward to their scheduled meeting and mentioned several times he’s not trying to pit her against Suarez in a competition for who gets Zumper’s next 100 employees. Instead, he said over the last six months he’s had growing concerns from his employees about the safety of San Francisco, as more of his workers have had to deal with instances of crime in their neighborhoods. As a concerned resident himself, he said the death of the two women on New Years Day was a real tipping point for him and he’s increasingly concerned about the rate of crime in the city.
SF crew – once scheduled I’ll be asking @LondonBreed about her plans to tackle the increase in crime we’ve all felt in the past year. Going into it with no political agenda (as a Brit I can’t vote here anyway!), purely a concern for our collective well-being as residents
The amount of companies allowing their employees to work at least a few days from home is also projected to grow post-pandemic, with only 10% of companies that responded saying they’d require employees to come into the office five days a week. More than one-third of the companies surveyed will be moving to a fully remote or decentralized model in 2021. For companies with an office, a two to three day office work week was the most common answer, with 70% choosing that option.
For the two-thirds of companies that will continue to use office space, most will not be returning to the office five days a week.
Initialized Capital
While companies like Facebook and Slack have announced it will adjust compensation if employees opt to work elsewhere, 61.1% of the companies surveyed do not plan to make salary adjustments based on the local cost of living.
As the CEO of an apartment rental marketplace, Georgiades believes San Francisco will truly see what it’s new normal will be in the summer, when more people are widely vaccinated and people will come flooding back to San Francisco — or not.
“People really love San Francisco and they want to build there, but there’s a lot of competition of where to build now and this conversation reflects that,” he said.
Apartment rents rose across San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland in January, the first price growth since the coronavirus pandemic erupted last spring, according to a new report.
San Francisco’s one-bedroom median rent was up 0.8% to $2,680 per month from the prior month, the first increase since April 2020, according to real estate listings company Zumper. San Jose was up 1.9% to $2,130 per month, and Oakland spiked 2.6% to $2,000 per month, both compared with the prior month.
San Francisco’s rents have still plunged 23.9% from the previous year, while Oakland fell 19% and San Jose was down 12.7%, according to Zumper. The widespread embrace of remote work, particularly in the tech industry, has upended a housing market that appeared unstoppable, fueled by nearly a decade of record job growth and business expansion.
In contrast, more affordable cities such as Miami and Austin have seen a spike in renter interest, though rents have also fallen there, Zumper said.
A separate report by Apartment List found that San Francisco had a monthly median rent drop of 0.4%, a smaller decline compared to recent months. Apartment List’s methodology differs from Zumper and incorporates Census Bureau data.
San Jose is now the third-most-expensive U.S. market and Oakland is the fourth-most-expensive, while Boston dropped to fifth. San Francisco retained its top spot over New York.
January’s increase wasn’t entirely unexpected: In late December, Zumper published a report showing that renter interest in San Francisco and the Bay Area had rebounded somewhat after sagging at the beginning of the pandemic.
“It’s difficult to distinguish whether Bay Area gains are due to post-holiday seasonality or a trend reversal at this point, but there has been a significant increase in renters interested in moving to the Bay Area on our platform,” said Neil Gerstein, a Zumper analyst.
The national median rent was up 0.3% for one-bedrooms in January, while two-bedrooms were flat, compared with the prior month.
“It’s likely too early to determine if this is an inflection point for prices in the Bay Area, it certainly could be,” Zumper said.
To produce its rental reports, Zumper analyzes data from over 1 million active listings across the United States. Data is aggregated monthly to calculate median asking rents for the top 100 metro areas by population.
Roland Li and Susie Neilson are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com, susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf, @susieneilson
Upper Market Gallery has opened virtually, with a real grand opening still in the works, and with a view toward tearing down barriers in the local art world creating new spaces that invite conversation and community.
Upper Market Gallery, or UMG, is a multidisciplinary fine art and design space founded and directed by Olivia Robertson, in collaboration with her mother, Ann V Capitan, and co-director, Nora Boyd. UMG aims to break down the barriers of the art world by focusing on community and artists, and “to connect under-represented and emerging artists with collectors in the Bay Area and beyond,” per their website.
The gallery’s soon-to-open physical space at 4690 18th Street, uphill from the Castro
Robertson, with a background in real estate brokerage and development, was always fascinated with how and why people occupy physical spaces. Privy to the glut of high-end housing she witnessed in NYC, she was constantly questioning how vacant and underutilized real estate can be repositioned and made useful by creative communities in need. By partnering with Boyd and establishing UMG, the two hope to fill that void and give their shared love of art a bigger voice.
“We want to make art personal, make it less intimidating,” Boyd told SFist in a Zoom interview. “We want to make art a social activity and not an intellectual one.”
Boyd got her BA at NYU and MA at Hunter college in New York City and has worked as an art advisor and educator for 7 years, specializing in non traditional artists and non traditional audiences.
“I just think there’s so much to be said for that type of art education, getting rly deep into the theory intense rhetoric around art,” Boyd says. “But most people, even most creative people, have no idea how to get into that world because it’s prohibitive, and the barriers to entry are huge.”
Both natives of the Bay Area, they grew up inspired by and bound to the creative talent overflowing around them, and were determined to work strictly with Bay Area creatives, specifically under represented and emerging.
In addition to showing indigenous artists and artists of color, who are left out of the story all too often, the two directors plan to use the physical gallery space to feature another demographic of Bay Area artists who are repeatedly omitted: our seniors. “Western culture is very into young people,” Boyd explains. “It’s not as focused on artists of an older generation.”
While originally slated to open in late March with their inaugural exhibition featuring sculptures by Robertson’s mom, Ann V. Capitan, alongside paintings from SF artist vets Laurie and James Heron, the original shelter-in-place order forced the gallery to postpone and pivot.
One of Ms. Capitan’s works
Seeing an opportunity, Robertson and Boyd tapped their artist network to produce a curated online show and create limited-edition prints exclusively available through the gallery website, allowing young collectors to invest in a rare work at an affordable price and support the artist’s career long-term.
Through offering prints, which are much less expensive than original works, they can help young artists pay their bills and at the same time give collectors access, allowing the artists as well as the gallery to open up to a larger market and expand.
“We’ve expanded to the print drops because we want to be a hub in the bay area but also want to be connected to the larger art world,” Boyd explains. “We want to combine our networks and work directly with artists on accessible topics and a format that people can engage with and enjoy.”
“We care about the art in this city and we wanna focus on it and support it,” Robertson shares. “Every charity we work with will be a bay area based org, whether it’s art or social activism or environmental activism, what’s important to us is pushing the envelope in the art world in a positive direction [and directly benefitting the people and the land that raised us.”
Boyd draws on her large artist network from places all over the globe, especially New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and China. Years of friendship with Robertson in NYC led to myriad discussions about art, in the presentation sense, how it’s accessed, what they would like to see in the art world going forward, and what barriers needed to be broken down. There was a shared vision of what an art gallery could be.
“There’s a ton of cool, super creative people here and for a lot of them, it’s really hard to know how to take part in the art world in the Bay Area because they don’t know where to look,” says Boyd. “We’re not making any assumptions about how an art space should be, what the art world is or is not, or how people want to engage it. We’re asking ourselves: What does it mean to provide space to artists? What does it mean to try and be a community hub? To engage young art collectors and enthusiasts? What it is they want to see and how do they want to engage with it?”
“Art doesn’t have to be this hoity-toity thing where you stand in front of each piece stroking your chin,” Boyd continues. “We would love to make UMG a place that hosts all sorts of creatives in the Bay Area — we know that these creatives exist here in so many different fields, and if we take away those boundaries between those spaces, there would be real conversations. If you bring everyone into the fold.”
With such a long history of art, activism, counterculture, and food and wine in this city, Robertson and Boyd feel like theirs should be a space where creativity and conversation are brought together to become something more interesting, all the while supporting the artists and their communities simultaneously.
At the moment, UMG is not yet taking any appointments in their physical space, and exists as an online-only platform, but plans to host virtual events in the near future.
Apartment rental prices in San Francisco – a city mocked for being so unaffordable that residents pay more than a grand each month to sleep in a bunk bed and share space with strangers – have plummeted during the coronavirus crisis, falling roughly 24% over the last year, according to new data.
It might seem like good news for a city long known for its dizzying rents. But the drop wasn’t enough to topple San Francisco from the top spot of the list of costliest cities compiled by the rental company Zumper. One-bedroom apartments on average still rent for a staggering $2,660 a month. Median single-family home prices in the city, meanwhile, have continued to rise, reaching an exorbitant $1.625m.
The numbers tell a troubling story about increasing inequality in the Bay Area, an issue compounded by Covid and the looming recession caused by the pandemic. Rents in the region are still too expensive for most residents, especially those who have lost income this year and were already clinging to the edge of a financial cliff. At the same time, tech workers and other high earners who easily adapted to work-from-home policies early in the pandemic while retaining big salaries have been able to lower their rental rates or cash in on new opportunities to purchase homes with extremely low interest rates.
Even amid an exodus from the city, San Francisco’s housing crisis may be getting worse. “Perspective is really important – and it is still ridiculously expensive,” said Matt Regan, the senior vice-president of public policy at the Bay Area Economic Institute. “The magnitude of the crisis before Covid and the mismatch between the number of people looking for housing and the number of people who could afford what was available was so enormous that – even with a phenomenal drop for a rental – we are still in a crisis”.
Last spring, the California Housing Partnership Corporation (CHPC), an agency created by the state legislature in 1988 to assist non-profits and local governments to create and preserve affordable housing, calculated California needed roughly 1.3m more affordable rentals to meet housing needs. Faced with a costly recovery from the pandemic, the state may fall even further behind.
Municipalities in the Bay Area alone need to build more than 441,100 units over the next decade to meet housing demands, according to an assessment released this year by the California department of housing and community development (HCD). The region is already far off pace. In the last cycle, the Bay Area issued permits for only 9% of the low-income housing the agency said was needed and roughly 71% of permits for market-rate housing.
“We have been digging the hole deeper every year for decades and it’s going to take more than one year of cost depreciation to get out of it,” Regan said. “We are going to emerge from Covid and still have a housing crisis.”
The drop in rental prices has done little to curb the blow for residents who suffered economically this year, many as a result of unemployment caused by Covid-19 restrictions. Half of Bay Area renters have lost income since last March and 11% haven’t been able to keep up their payments, according to data from the US Census Bureau.
“The pandemic has added new layers to our pre-existing housing crisis,” said Sarah Treuhaft, the vice-president of research at Policy Link, an institution that studies racial and economic equity. “It has been a very unequal pandemic.”
Low-wage workers have been the hardest hit, especially those in the retail, restaurantand hospitality industries. People of color, who were disproportionately put on the frontline in low-paying jobs have borne the brunt. “Black workers have been hit so much harder than all others,” Treuhaft said, adding that census data shows roughly 85% of Black workers in California filed for unemployment last year compared with 39% of white workers. Nearly all Black workers in the state without a college education have been affected financially: 99% have filed for financial help.
“From history we know that recessions tend to exacerbate inequality,” Treuhaft said. The impact is already being felt – and it’s likely to have a lasting effect.
After the Great Recession, it took more than a decade for middle-class workers to recover. This time, too, experts expect the virus to have long-lasting economic effects. “The people who lost their jobs are not going to be able to get back into the labor market any time soon,” said Karen Chapple, faculty director and professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “You end up having millions of folks who have diminished earnings. That is going to affect their ability to afford housing, or even just to stay in the middle class.”
Rent moratoriums were a Band-Aid solution unless paired with debt relief, Karen Chapple said. Photograph: Andia/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Chapple, who studies inequalities in the planning, development, and governance and oversees the Urban Displacement Project, a research initiative, expects that college grads will join low-income workers, people of color, and women – the people who have fallen in large numbers from the labor market this year – in seeing their long-term earning potential diminish. That means the pain could be felt for years to come, with lower wages affecting housing and displacement.
Rent moratoriums, Chapple said, were a Band-Aid solution unless they were paired with the debt relief renters would need when the legislation expires. Most would not be able to afford months’ worth of payments, especially after losing income. And it would not just affect the poor. “It is also now affecting the middle class and moderate income households,” she said.
The financial crunch brought on by the recovery and the recession will make it harder for states and local governments to invest in new housing. “You are going to have a lot of cities strapped in the next few years,” she said. “That is going to cause a lot of local disinvestment and a lot of displacement.”
The pandemic has already changed California’s approach to the housing crisis and hampered its efforts to increase the number of affordable units, according to a report from the state’s legislative analyst’s Office. The governor, Gavin Newsom, had to scrap a proposal to invest $750m into the California Access to Housing and Services (CAAHS) fund and lawmakers have shifted focus to short-term solutions needed to keep people off the streets. Newsom has signed more than a dozen new housing bills and California lawmakers have developed a legislative package aimed at keeping people housed and increasing housing supply, but it will still be a challenge to maintain momentum amid tight resources and waning construction incentives.
During a press conference on Friday, Newsom emphasized that housing production remained a top priority and outlined his new 2021 budget proposal. He has allocated an additional $500m in new low-income housing tax credits to encourage more production and announced the creation of a new accountability office within the state’s housing department to keep cities on track. It’s still unclear how exactly the new unit will enforce policies, but after years of missing targets, the state is ready to add teeth to its ambitious housing goals.
“People who were previously not in need of assistance are now going to need it,” Matt Schwartz, president and CEO of the California Housing Partnership, told KQED. “That’s something we’re all very concerned about. We had around 1.4 to 1.3 million households who were living without an affordable place in California. Now that number is going to grow.”
Anthemos Georgiades, Zumper’s CEO, thinks rental prices in the city will jump up again once the pandemic subsides. People will return and the city’s luxury market, its restaurants, yoga studios and smoothie shops will rebound with them.
“I think the test of time will be whether those renters who are clearly not renewing their leases in San Francisco now, whether they come back,” Georgiades said.
“Once the market does reset and people come back, we are right back to the same problem,” he added. “It is a bit like Groundhog Day – we are never going to build enough housing if San Francisco encounters its next boom.”
The virtual meetings I sat in on were charged with a sense of high purpose, as designers on the front lines used their skills to potentially save lives. Signage was key; 2020 proved to be a golden age for graphic designers. Proposed safety signage in white-collar workplaces was greatly expanded to convey information about keeping social distance, hand washing, mask wearing, and one-way flow in “curated” elevators, lobbies, and hallways. Some signs used humor and whimsy: “Hug That Sneeze,” “Wash Your Paws.” Others sought to elicit empathy for colleagues.
But, in spite of all the research and recommended interventions, the majority of offices remained almost empty; many of the signs were never deployed. By the end of November, according to the Partnership for New York City, only ten per cent of white-collar workers in Manhattan had returned to their offices, and even as people get vaccinated it seems unlikely that many employers will be bringing staffs back before the summer of 2021; Google recently pushed its return date to September, 2021.
Some enhanced hygiene and cleaning procedures may outlive the pandemic, but they are likely to be absorbed into the voluntary rating system for “healthy buildings” administered by Fitwel, the real-estate industry’s certification board, and operated by the Center for Active Design. Fitwel awards ratings to both buildings and individual workplaces based on things like access to natural light and the promotion of physical activity. Many COVID-related best practices have already been incorporated into Fitwel’s downloadable Viral Response Module.
Studio O+A assembled its own COVID tool kit for office safety. Then Orpilla asked the staff to develop a new set of COVID-related typologies—activity-based spaces that might become standard features of a post-pandemic workplace. The Donning/Doffing Room was the top typology that emerged from a meeting I attended, in which the staff presented about a dozen ideas. This space, some version of which many other workplace firms were also proposing, would include a temperature-check station, an isolation room for people who tested hot, a place for mandatory hand washing, and lockers to store outside gear and shoes, in addition to personal items. (Thermal temperature checks are now common in those workplaces which have reopened, even as it’s become clear that they aren’t very useful at stopping the spread of COVID, because so many people with the disease are asymptomatic.) Other typologies that seemed like potential keepers included the Radio Station, a room with enhanced A/V capabilities to connect with remote workers; the Boot Camp, an area for new hires; and the Rickshaw, a small, enclosed private workspace.
Orpilla sent R/GA the tool kit and the new typologies, and Corns came up with a design brief. O+A followed up with a questionnaire and a “visioning” session that added detail to the ideas outlined in the brief.
Meanwhile, in New York, Lyons and his team had decided to sublet the lower floor of R/GA’s HQ. The news was reported in The Real Deal, a real-estate magazine, in early September. The article noted that available sublet space in New York had spiked dramatically since the pandemic. The only businesses that seemed to be expanding their real-estate footprint in the city were Big Tech companies, which were also setting the standard for working from home. Amazon completed its lease agreement for the former Lord Taylor department store, at Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Facebook leased 1.5 million square feet in Hudson Yards. However, as Dror Poleg, the author of “Rethinking Real Estate” (2020) and a co-chair of the Urban Land Institute’s Technology and Innovation Council in New York, noted to me, both deals had been in process before the pandemic hit.
R/GA’s remaining floor at 450 West Thirty-third Street would become a hybrid workspace, where some employees would be physically present some of the time, working at reservable desks, but on any given day the bulk of employees would be remote. Sean Lyons, the C.E.O., envisaged people being in the office for three days a week and home for two, on average. “In the Singapore office, they want people in the office Monday and Friday, so they can begin and end the week together,” he said.
One of the pain points that the final round of R/GA surveys turned up was the fear that remote workers will lose out on opportunities that in-person workers get by virtue of proximity. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents thought that the stigma of working remotely would linger after the pandemic. “When working from home people felt others saw them as unproductive, difficult to reach, and taking an unofficial day off,” a summary found. “There is a lot of concern that when some return to the office, expectations and processes will shift back to favoring those who are physically present.”
The hybrid office sounds like a logical post-pandemic approach, and many companies are trying it, but mixing in-person and remote workers presents new challenges for managers. Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the workplace, told me that a hybrid setup is very hard to get right, and that he advises businesses to avoid it: “I’d say stay all virtual—hybrid is likely to deliver the worst of both worlds.” A hybrid company still has substantial real-estate costs, and it also has to contend with the potentially serious threat to company culture posed by resentful remote workers who feel that they’ve been unfairly denied plum assignments and promotions. And what about all the people who return to work to discover that they no longer have a desk, and that the sweaters and photographs and other personal items they left behind have been packed up or, worse, placed on a table of shame? As Bernstein put it, “People generally prefer a ‘home’ to a ‘hotel’—in life and at work.”
R/GA’s young and tech-savvy workers have been using tools like Zoom for years, Lyons told me, so he was not too worried about going hybrid: “We’ve always had to manage a hybrid workforce before that term was even out there. This creates an opportunity to take that a little bit further.” However, he added, “you do have to continually be open to looking for those potential divisions in the culture. We’re going to have to navigate that.”
By the time the pandemic hit, open-plan offices had become even more hated than cube farms. Well-heeled companies might be willing to spend money on activity-based typologies that offer respite from open-plan distractions, but, when times are hard and office budgets are cut, the yurt and the extra huddle space are often the first things to go. After the financial crisis of 2008, open-plan fell victim to some of the same sinister forces that cubed Propst’s workplace dreams. An open-plan layout was even easier to densify than a cubicle farm. In 2010, the average North American employer allocated two hundred square feet to each worker; by 2017, that number had shrunk to about a hundred and thirty square feet.
Workers have responded to this steady erosion of personal space by building cubicles of sound with headphones. Bound in a sonic nutshell, you can feel like a king of infinite office space, as long as you don’t look up from your screen. Since most office work takes place on virtual desktops anyway, it was easy, pre-pandemic, to perform what was essentially remote work while occupying your employer’s expensive real estate.
In “The Truth About Open Offices,” an article published in the Harvard Business Review in December, 2019, Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber, the president of Humanyze, a workplace-analytics firm, used smartphones and sensors to track face-to-face and digital interactions at two Fortune 500 companies before and after the companies moved from cubicles to open offices. The authors wrote, “We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.” The virtual workplace, instead of complementing the physical one, had become a refuge from it.
The technology industry gave birth to the modern office, and then created the tools to do without it. This paradox helps explain tech’s tortured history with remote work. By 2009, forty per cent of I.B.M.’s workforce was remote. The I.B.M. Smarter Workforce Institute promoted “telework” to clients as the future, claiming that remote workers “were highly engaged, more likely to consider their workplaces as innovative, happier about their job prospects and less stressed than their more traditional, office-bound colleagues.”
But in 2017, with profits falling, the company delivered an ultimatum: everyone must return to the office or leave the company. Likewise, Marissa Mayer, shortly after becoming the C.E.O. of Yahoo, in 2012, issued an edict to its twelve thousand employees banning W.F.H. Both companies cited diminished collaboration as a reason. (Mayer, a new mom at the time, built a “mother’s room” next to her office so that she could take the baby to work.) By 2016, about a third of Yahoo’s workforce had left. In 2017, Mayer herself departed the company, with two hundred and sixty million dollars.
With the onset of the pandemic, technology companies have once again become champions of remote work, while also expanding their real-estate portfolios. Facebook has said that it expects half its workforce to be remote by 2030. Twitter told its employees that they never have to return to the office. Microsoft plans to keep all but essential workers remote until this summer, but it is also proceeding with a multibillion-dollar renovation of its five-hundred-acre Redmond, Washington, campus. In August, R.E.I., the outdoor-equipment-and-clothing retailer, announced that it would not move into its four-hundred-thousand-square-foot headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Facebook bought the complex in September for three hundred and sixty-eight million dollars. For Facebook, which has fifty-six thousand employees—more than four thousand of which were added during 2020—in eighty offices around the world, the former R.E.I. site represents a fraction of its future space needs, even if half its workers are remote in ten years.
Microsoft has traditionally had more of a wall-and-cubicle culture than younger tech businesses. The renovated Redmond digs will have fewer private offices and more team-based space. The company plans to start moving in by 2023.
Still, the pandemic has greatly accelerated Microsoft’s efforts to create a virtual office for the future. Jared Spataro, the company’s Vice-President for Modern Work, talked me through its plans, which will be designed around Teams, its conferencing software.
The PC revolution “digitized paperwork,” Spataro said. Instead of physical pages and folders sitting on a desk, office workers had digital documents and files sitting on a virtual desktop inside a computer. But these digital desktops didn’t sit inside a virtual office, one in which you easily could move around among other desktops and meet in conference rooms or common areas. There was no virtual water cooler to facilitate serendipitous encounters.
The pandemic, Spataro went on, is accelerating a “second digital transformation”: the creation of a virtual cloud-based office that connects the desktops, where employees will go to work, whether they’re present in the physical office or working remotely. It sounds like the digital version of the open-plan-office revolution—the walls around the individual’s virtual desktop are coming down. And, once again, software engineers are leading the way.
“We think every company is going to need to invest in a digital workspace for each employee,” Spataro said. He added that he was already hearing from companies that want to use the money saved by reducing their physical footprint to build a custom office in the cloud, loaded with proprietary digital whiteboarding and visual-conferencing tools, which will transcend space and time. If you want to know what happened in the virtual office last Tuesday, you can go back and replay the meetings.
Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz
“Those spaces will very quickly become the center of gravity for work,” he went on. “We’ll use them in the kitchen, we’ll use them in transit to our jobs. Even when we move back into real estate, we won’t be back to one hundred per cent. You will come into the office, do your work, and then roll up your workspace and take it with you.”
The privacy implications of the virtual office make the lack of personal space in the open-plan office seem quaint. Each keystroke in a virtual office is trackable. In the mid-nineties, workers started to be issued key cards, which meant the company could know when you were in the building and when you weren’t. In a virtual workspace, it would know almost everything you do at work.
Spataro agreed that we will need some kind of worker bill of rights, detailing what personal information your employer owns. But, he added, that’s not Microsoft’s job: “That’s the domain of government.”
Toward the end of October, Orpilla and his staff convened a Zoom meeting with Corns and his colleagues to present O+A’s plan for R/GA’s San Francisco office. Everyone was working from home, except David Boehm, who was logging in from 450 West Thirty-third Street, where he was overseeing the remodelling of the downsized headquarters.
Dani Gelfand, a senior designer at O+A, led the group on a virtual tour of the proposed plan, beginning with the reception area. This space should “signal a feeling of safety,” she said. It featured touchless entry doors, sanitizing stations, an infrared temperature checkpoint, and an isolation room for people who register a fever. (At least in there they’ll get some privacy.)
Using her cursor, Gelfand directed us through the Donning/Doffing Room, noting the lockers for personal items. She continued through a communal pantry “employing touchless equipment where possible”—a contactless coffee machine, a touchless utensils dispenser, a pedal-operated water cooler—to a general-wellness room, which, she said, would be mainly for mothers but also for “prayer and decompression.” We followed Gelfand into the main communal workspace, which featured twenty-four-person workstations, with unassigned but reservable individual desks arranged in a pinwheel formation, and barriers between the desk surfaces that offered a modicum of visual privacy.
This part of the post-pandemic office looked much like the pre-pandemic open-plan layout, only more so. Corns, picking up on the similarity, said, “Nothing needs to look like an office before. So these workstations don’t need to be desks, per se.”
“Maybe we just have lounge furniture and a place to plug in,” Gelfand suggested.
The virtual tour then proceeded through an area with several “focus pods” that resembled three-sided restaurant booths. “The pods could be made higher, so they are more like an enclosed-booth experience,” Gelfand noted. That sounded like a cubicle, the typology that dare not speak its name.
The rest of the office was taken up with a studio for photography and digital art work, and a number of semi-enclosed conference rooms with large video screens and better sound for connecting with staff working remotely. Gelfand likened this aspect of the plan to a “communications field office.”
Boehm said that it looked like there would be a lot of traffic through the focus areas to get to the pantry and the studio. Compounding these potential distractions would be the sound of people conducting virtual meetings in the A/V areas. “Managing the sound in the office is going to be critical as we move forward,” he said.
