Betteridge’s law of headlines declares that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”. And so I simultaneously ask and answer the question of whether the coronavirus pandemic will really lead to the death of the office. So it goes. Of course, I’m not the first person to raise the question over the last few weeks as the world adapts to the threat of the pandemic. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that the demise of the office has been predicted for at least a quarter of a century, although never in such circumstances.

You can see it asked here and here. Meanwhile, we are told that other things that may be dying include the handshake and, inevitably, the open plan which always has to find its way into any workplace conversation in the mainstream media and how predictable for us to see the Wall Street Journal lazily retaking the tedious, old, well-travelled road.

Whatever the context, the question posed about the end of offices is inherently stupid. It is based on a faulty premise which sees the time and location of work as a zero-sum game. So, the answer to the various miseries (and currently risks) of commuting and office life is – we are told – to work from home. And if we can’t do that, maybe we should walk around in the cocoons developed by architect Sun Dayong (main image).

Working from home may be a temporary answer to a very specific and serious problem, but ultimately things are inevitably a bit more complex than everybody working all day at the kitchen table after downloading a Zoom app on their desktop and imposing new rules on themselves and a noisy household.

As this piece in the FT argues, heaven cannot be found by working in the home. Or at least not for a lot of people. For them, that merely means swapping out one routine and one set of distractions for another. A fact that is inspiring a tsunami of articles offering advice to people who suddenly find themselves cocooned in a way they may once have though would solve the problems of their daily grind.

Away from the practicalities of working from home, there is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are not ready for a new era of home working, either culturally or in terms of infrastructure.

The shock to the system

So the long term effects of the shock of the pandemic are likely to involve the continuation of an existing trend towards more agile forms of work that involve both traditional offices and other times and places, but one accelerated by the realities of our current situation. Andrew Mawson explores the long history of this trend here and you can see my own thoughts about the shift from survival to enquiry and ultimately sophistication here. Don’t panic.