The Grounding of Life

Stowe Boyd | Minimum Viable Office | Factoids | Elsewhere

Quote of the Moment

The grounding of life is those we love, more so than work we love, no matter how much we love our work.

| Stowe Boyd

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Minimum Viable Office

Nick Bloom of Stanford, shares new data showing that firms with more working from home grow faster:

Data on 3,600 US firms finds those requiring 0 days in the office see 5.6% growth. Those requiring all 5-days see only 2.6% growth.

My take-away is WFH increases recruitment and retention, which fuels company growth.

https://flex.scoopforwork.com/reports/job-growth

The final page of that Flex report is this [emphasis mine]:

In Closing

It is clear that companies that offer work location flexibility are growing headcount faster than companies that require Full Time In Office. Over the last three months, companies that are Fully Flexible or Structured Hybrid are adding employees at twice the rate of their Full Time In Office peers.

For companies that require a minimum number of days per week in the office, executives should look closely at the data on growth rate by number of days required. Companies requiring three days per week in office added 4.4% to their headcount over the last 12 months. That drops to 3.8% for companies requiring four days per week and 2.6% for companies requiring five days per week. It appears that four days per week in office is crossing the line for many potential job seekers.

Headcount growth is not a perfect proxy for economic growth, but it is likely that the companies that are adding headcount are also the ones that are growing sales. Put simply, the growth in the economy -- at least for corporate employees -- appears to be with the companies that are offering flexibility. If that continues, we expect to see the percentage of companies requiring Full Time In Office continue to drop in favor of hybrid models that better reflect the needs of the workforce.

In August, we'll release our next major quarterly report tracking workplace flexibility trends across industries, geographies, and company sizes. Please contribute to the breadth and quality of the Flex Index by adding your company information here.

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Factoids

Over 70 million square feet of direct office space was available for lease in Manhattan in the second quarter of 2023, a record high, compared with about 40 million square feet before the pandemic began.

| Stefanos Chen

The commercial real estate doom spiral continues, and I don’t see a good way out. Real estate firms are walking away from massive buildings, defaulting on loans to their lenders.

Here’s an observation — again from Nick Bloom — poking fun at the positioning of commercial real estate bad news:

Kastle office-use data is great, and the text sometimes makes me chuckle. Rises in office-use are part of normal activity, but falls are just some extraordinary event. Like company jargon - good news is normal, bad news is some extreme one-off excuse...

Yeah, probably vacations. Sure.

And this, just in, from Steven Rattner:

For the first time ever recorded, there is more office space in the US being demolished than being built.

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Elsewhere

| Josh Razin via Soren Iverson

I bet there’s a market for that feature.

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More of my writing at Sunsama:

Decision-Making: Autonomy versus Speed | Stowe Boyd

Deciding how to make decisions may be the most important decision of all. And remember, fast decisions are more likely to be catastrophic. Here’s how to slow down to go fast safely.

Getting Strategic About Decision-Making | Stowe Boyd

We have to back up far enough to gain a perspective on how cognitive biases impede good decision-making, without well-designed processes to counter them

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I wrote about the woes of middle management at Reworked:

Middle Management Is Stuck. Time for a Reset.

Middle managers are caught in the middle between senior management and their team members. The stresses on these ‘stuckees’ have only become more problematic in recent years, with tectonic forces like the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and waves of layoffs all converging to batter those filling the role.

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Hail, Humania!

I am aware of Stewart Brand’s warning:

All utopias are dystopias.

But I am still hoping for a way out of the compounding disasters we find ourselves in.

I was interviewed for a new magazine, and the editor was interested in this article I wrote for Wired back in 2015: What Will a Corporation Look Like in 2050?

Their subtitle — A futurist imagines how companies will react to inequality, climate change and artificial intelligence — is not perfect. I concocted three scenarios — Humania, Neo-feudelistan, and Collapseland — based on hypothetical actions that might be taken to respond to climate change, inequality, and artificials (AI and robots).

Considering the rising temperature, the explosion in the use of tools like ChatGPT, and continued political pressure arising from inequality, Humania — and the ‘Human Spring’ that spawned it — is looking better every day: