The 24th floor of San Francisco's 100 First St. might be a window into the future of Bay Area office space. There, before shelter-in-place stopped construction a few weeks early, S.F.-based cloud software company Okta was already underway on a blueprint for much of its office footprint around the world, Global Workplace Services Vice President Armen Vartanian told Bisnow.
For Okta, features like the absence of dedicated desks and other characteristics of floor 24 were in the cards before the coronavirus abruptly introduced a new way of working for thousands of companies. Now, they are becoming more likely by the day, Vartanian said. "And when you think about it, people are not in the most ideal work-from-home situation," he said. "They’re dealing with the mental stresses of a pandemic, might have kids, are working from home with their spouses or have parents they may need to take care of.”
A Colliers International survey conducted in March found over 80% of employees surveyed around the globe prefer to work remotely at least one day a week; in the U.S., 45% of employees would like to work from home one or two days a week, the survey found. The Bay Area, in particular, has found parts of its economy reasonably suited to remote work. By March 17, the first day under the shelter-in-place order, a nine-county poll done by the Bay Area Council found 63% of respondents were working from home. To both Vartanian and Colliers Workplace Strategy Vice President Michelle Cleverdon, exactly what more remote work means for office markets like the Bay Area is a valid question, in terms of both space needs and design.
Cleverdon said Colliers has several Bay Area clients in various industries asking about "the elephant in the room of how many people even need to return to the office." "I think this global experiment is really starting to shatter a lot of the myths about distributed work," she said.
Vartanian said he expects companies to rethink the need for having large blocks of space in expensive downtown areas, instead of smaller spaces scattered across markets to accommodate a more distributed workforce. “Let’s say a company has got 100K SF of space. Three years from now, they may not need 100K SF anymore," he said. "They may need 20K SF of space, but that 20K SF of space definitely needs to be redesigned.”
In Okta's 24th floor, for instance, the company has eliminated dedicated desks, according to Vartanian. In their place are neighborhoods for various teams, with each team having its own "anchor point" to do things like stand-up meetings every morning.