💡 Negotiate a Private Office (Issue 608)
It's time to abandon the open office plan
Remember the good ol’ days when you had your own office with a window and door?
Sigh… We didn't realize how good we had it back then.
Who knew the first office I had during my tech career (at Apple) would be my last? It was all cubicles for me after that.
However, things improved for information workers during the pandemic. People were allowed to work from home, and employers promised it would be forever (lying liars 🙄). Unfortunately, many employers are now announcing RTO mandates (i.e., return to office), and many employees are very unhappy about that.
Here's an idea:
If employers want to drag people back into the office, how about creating a great workplace experience worth returning to?
Why would someone give up the comfort of working from home to return to a noisy, distracting, soul-crushing corporate workplace?
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 "high-tech and financial" firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. (source)
Up your game, employers!
I mean, we get what you’re doing. You’re not that clever. You know an RTO mandate will cause a percentage of your employees to quit. It’s a great way to reduce headcount costs and refresh your talent pool, right? And having people quit saves millions of dollars compared to the cost of layoffs.
However, it’s not working out so well if your best people are the ones leaving. Isn’t that the way it always is? Think about it. Talented people always have opportunities. It’s much easier for them to land new jobs quickly vs. your low performers.
Yeah, I also know you’re angry about your corporate campuses sitting vacant. Commercial real estate has been struggling since the pandemic. For example, San Francisco’s office vacancy rate rose to a new record high of 36.6% in the first quarter of 2024.
Do you want to solve this problem? Well, bring back private offices!
We no longer need to "maximize real estate" with nasty cube farms and horrible open office plans. If employers are going to force RTO, providing people with private offices might be something worth returning to a corporate workplace.
Having a private space to make your own.
Working in peace and quiet without distractions.
Yet, you can still gather with people in person to collaborate on something.
When I worked at Apple, we really had the best of both worlds. We all had nice private offices and common spaces for casual conversations and collaboration. But, the Dot Com Boom killed all that with hyper-growth and cube farms. Yuck!
As an employee, would you like to have a private office again — or for the first time?
Change starts with you. The next time you’re negotiating competing job offers from employers that want you to spend some or all of your time in the office (yes, you should always have competing offers), ask if you can have a private office on campus.
They may laugh, or they may get angry. Or, one employer might try to win you over with the perk you want. It never hurts to ask respectfully and plant the seed.
If enough of us demand private offices, maybe — just maybe — employers will start listening and start redesigning their soulless workplaces to bring back the magic of work-style choice.
I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with you to optimize your career, business, and life. My mission is to help you become a more "Invincible You" so you can live your life on your terms instead of being controlled by someone else's rules. I live in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with my wife and our Great Dane.
