In the back of Peggy Roswell’s 1992 Nissan Pathfinder sits a cardboard box full of family photos and other personal items that once decorated her office at Chiat/Day, the advertising agency that gave the world Apple’s legendary “1984” Macintosh commercial and the Energizer bunny.
Roswell, an executive in charge of the Home Savings of America account, is one of about 40 employees in the Venice, Calif., headquarters participating in an ambitious pilot program to adjust their patterns of work. The goal is to create a “virtual office” without walls: although these employees have free reign to drop in at the main office, they work mostly at home, in a client’s office, a hotel lobby, even an airport lounge, if they wish.
Jay Chiat, the agency’s chairman, hopes that working this way will prove inspiring-“empowering,” as he put it. But the virtual still seems slightly unreal to Roswell.
Once, the photos of her 7-year-old daughter, Caitlin, and her softball team hung on the walls of her cubicle. But now that she spends most of her time in the company’s conference rooms or on the phone in the front seat of her Pathfinder, there’s no natural place to put them. So they languish in a box.
Although it was only a plywood cubicle, in losing it she “lost a sense of security of an office with my name on it,” Roswell said. “But it’s something we have to let go of.”
The virtual office is not a place but a nonplace-an idea, a work style. For years now, office workers have been begging for flexible time and the right to work at home. Now, more and more employers are saying yes, but for their own reasons.
Companies committing themselves to the virtual office are practically pushing their employees out the door and into cars and spaces designed, like hotels, for drop-in work. The virtual office, or VO, as its proponents call it, comes with sometimes jolting side effects, like the proverbial answered prayer, and workers are learning to adapt with a mixture of enthusiasm and bafflement.
The design, social and business implications of the virtual office were the subject of a two-day conference called “Home, Sweet Office” at the International Design Center, New York in Long Island City, N.Y. The conference included the first public presentation of Chiat/Day’s renovations of its headquarters, completed only two years ago, quarters to make them “virtual.”
“With new technology the workplace can be anywhere,” said Michael Bell, the director of corporate real estate for Dun & Bradstreet who was a speaker at the “Home, Sweet Office” conference. But to its champions, the virtual office means more than issuing laptop computers and cellular phones. It also means whole new ways of working and thinking.
“There has been a shift in the nature of the workplace, from one defined by specific location to one that is mobile,” said Bell, who is working on a book about the virtual office. Bell’s own office recently moved to a new “satellite” office in Connecticut, from a traditional office on Park Avenue.
Learning to work in the virtual office is still a tentative process. For Roswell, hooking her Powerbook up to the agency’s central computer by modem to get her E-mail is difficult.
And she said, “I’ve been hesitant to set up an office in my home. I got into the agency business because I wanted to be part of an agency. I have a feeling now that it is no longer my life fitting into my work, but my work fitting into my life.”
One morning not long ago, Roswell’s daughter was going to sing with the school choir at 9 in the morning. “I didn’t plan to go,” Roswell recalled, “but I turned right instead of left. It would have been fine if I hadn’t gone, but it was nice to be there.”
The whole virtual office process is “about responsibility,” Roswell said. “It’s like going from high school to college, where no one is around to make sure you go to class.”
Roswell may feel even more strongly that she has gone to college now that Chiat/Day’s renovation is about finished and the rest of the 325 headquarter employees are shifting to the virtual office. The organizing model is that of the campus, with project rooms playing the part of classrooms, a media center figuring as the library and even a “student union.”
But this “college” is also a collage of oddly shaped spaces created by two architects, Paul Lubowicki and Susan Lanier, inside the 1991 building by Frank Gehry and featuring as its focal point a dramatic sculpture of giant binoculars by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
But at least Roswell will have a place to hang her pictures: in the lockers where employees will stop when entering the building. “We joke,” she said, “that we are going from cubes to cubbies.”
After stopping off at what the architects call “the company store” for a writing pad and Powerbook laptop, she may then do research in the media center lined with video equipment and CD-ROM-based computers. Then she will proceed to the second-floor “student union.” There, the concierge standing in front of a looming wall of video monitors will “register” her for a work space.
She can chose to plug in her Powerbook in the club room, which will have the feel of a high-tech college rathskeller. Or she can retreat to one of the eccentric spaces called the “crow’s nest” and the “conference womb” or take a break at the pool table.
She may even chose a “romper room” area, informally called the “flop room,” for working horizontally, lying on the floor or propped on pillows. For private conferences, “tilt a whirl” structures, leatherette-upholstered domed cars from vintage amusement park rides, will supplant rooms. “It’s not a place, it’s a process,” the proponents of the virtual office say. But the bottom line is that the barrier between home and office is being breached, perhaps irremediably.
Big ideas go hand in hand with the virtual office. The research firm Link Resources reports that some 25 million people now work at home, twice as many as a decade ago. But most of them are independent contractors, freelancers and entrepreneurs. They are home workers by choice. Now it is companies that are initiating the move out of traditional offices. The number of “telecommuters”-employed by corporations but working at home-has increased by 40 percent over the last five years, Link says.
“The virtual office idea gets oversimplified to telecommuting,” said Laurie Coots, Chiat/Day’s director of administration and business development and one of the executives in charge of implementing its virtual office program. “But it’s a much bigger idea than that.”
Rather than a suite in a skyscraper, a den at home or even the front seat of a car, proponents of the virtual office see it as a bubble of information created by new technologies: the cellular phone, the laptop computer, the modem, the new generation of smart beepers, the personal digital assistant like Apple’s Newton.
The advocates of the virtual office talk of sweeping changes that make it necessary: “the transition to knowledge-based global economy,” as Bell of Dun & Bradstreet put it. VO gurus tend to quote from George Gilder’s “Microcosm” (Simon & Schuster, 1989) and Robert Reich’s “The Work of Nations” (Knopf, 1991).
The virtual office rides the crest of a number of social and political trends. One is the business world’s emphasis on flexibility in the work force: more part-time and temporary workers and more consultants. “The office was invented as an analogue to the factory,” Bell said. “Now it needs to become, instead, a place of convening.” Instead of the factory, VO proponents look to other models:
– The hotel. Many companies like Dun & Bradstreet’s software unit now offer its sales staff and consultants part-time offices, also called “nonterritorial” offices. “It’s an office,” Bell said, “not the office.”
– The airport first-class lounge or railroad lounge car. Bell cited the experience of Mahlon (Sandy) Apgar IV, whose 12-member real estate investment firm has offices in Baltimore and New York. Apgar and his staff hold weekly meetings on a Metroliner traveling between the two cities.
– Campus and classroom. The campus concept Chait-Day decided on last May evolved in meetings of the company’s long-range planning group, code-named Crysalis, at which executives tried to define what the company did best.
“Conventional offices are archaic,” said Chiat, the chairman. “They tend to become repositories for old bowling trophies.” The company’s work is about projects and groups and ideas, he believes. Laurie Coots, who helped implement the Chiat/Day plan, said: “What we want is a way to create architecture and structure that can be so nimble and fast that we can stay ahead of change. Why did we come in at 9 and leave at 5? Did that have anything to do with what we really do, which is breakthrough ideas and execution?”
But even in the digital age, the digits that matter most are those on the bottom line. For many companies the appeal of the virtual office lies in cutting costs. Auditors in the Chicago office of Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, work on a “hotelling” system that has reduced office space by 15 to 18 percent.
Another motivation, said Robert Cook, senior vice president of Interior Architects Inc., an office design and planning firm with headquarters in San Francisco, and another participant in the “Home, Sweet Office” conference, is to force the sales staff to spend more time with clients-more “face time” in the current neologism.
Another consideration is the Clean Air Act. One of its provisions requires companies in major metropolitan areas with 200 or more employees to reduce automobile commuting mileage by 25 percent by 1996. Many companies are using “telecommuting,” and other strategies to reduce time on the road.
But practical considerations alone cannot justify the virtual office, only an idealistic ambition to change corporate cultures, said Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. “You have to make a great leap of faith,” he said.
That kind of leap is Chiat/Day’s strategy. But its virtual office plan also comes in the wake of losing the huge Reebok account, leading to layoffs at its New York offices, and a failed bid for IBM’s personal computer business. Those factors, together with Chiat’s well-known penchant for ambitious projects in design and architecture, has inspired a certain skepticism in the advertising community, a belief that the new office is a cover for, or at least diversion from, the agency’s business difficulties. Coots denied that there was any connection between the two.
The virtual office plan was begun well before the Reebok and IBM problems arose. Nor, in Chiat/Day’s case, Chiat said, are real estate cost reductions the goal, although the company is leasing out one of its buildings.
But fearful employees across the country, viewing trends toward “downsizing,” part-time work and greater use of freelancers, tend to connect the virtual office with the virtual work force.
The general reaction from employees to the virtual office has been mixed, said Cook, the office planner: “The mind-set of most people today is that they don’t have any choice. They’re frightened for their jobs.”
