It’s always very nice to reverse defaults. Today we are reversing the office work.

It’s a default that people spend their working hours at the office or at some other workplace. This has been very valid in the history, because people were parts in a machine that worked in a certain location. Later, it has become a way to control that people are working a certain amount of time within given hours. And that’s the default. Things like remote work are still exceptions, because they break the default.

But what if we changed the default? What if the default was that people work from home, and there was no specific place of work available? The default communications would happen with various technology tools. The team would be online all day, 1-1 meetings are established when needed. Customer communication would work the same way.

What if there were no offices? If the teams get together, they could rent a meeting room, just for example for one day every month. And if there was a customer meetings, the room for that could be rented as well.

The consequences? We could skip maybe 80-90% of the office space, and change the rest of the space into cozy team spaces. The savings would be so big that companies would be able to compensate some money to employees for getting their own work environment.

This would also change dramatically the amount of commuting and public transport required, saving people lot of time and environmental effect would be visible immediately.

Sounds like a good idea? Stop making office as default and make staying away from work the default.

Ok? Who goes first?