Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook emailed staff to tell them they’re expected back at the office in September. Apple employs 6,000 people in Ireland, the majority of which work in its Cork buildings.
wo days before that, Google applied for planning permission to expand its office footprint in Dublin. Google employs 8,000 people here.
Both of these developments follow similar plans by Microsoft to get more office space in Dublin.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s giant new office headquarters in Donnybrook is taking shape to help accommodate something in the order of 5,000 people.
Anyone seeing a pattern here?
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It’s becoming clearer and clearer that big tech loves physical offices.
“For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other,” Tim Cook wrote to staff in the email.
“Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply cannot replicate.”
Is Cook right? It seems an impertinent question: Apple is one of the most consistently productive, successful companies in the world over his 10-year reign.
But his call to staff to return to the office is the latest episode in a long-running debate: are offices still a core part of our working lives in future?
This question continues to divide opinion.
Some yearn for more time in their suburban gardens. Others are desperate to escape their flatmates for a few hours.
Companies’ PR executives talk warmly, if vaguely, about a potential ‘hybrid model’ of work.
But the data so far points to little actual appetite for ‘work from home’ as a permanent underlying shift.
Of 38,876 jobs currently advertised on the giant jobs site Indeed, only 1,037 are permanent positions from home. Look for a salary of at least €45,000 and that figure shrinks again to 546.
So only 1.5pc of available, fulltime white-collar jobs in Ireland are actually offered to a home-working specification.
Obviously, that’s not the full picture.
Microsoft Ireland, which employs over 3,000 people, now has a rule saying everyone can work up to half the time out of the office without approval from a manager. That’s quite a lot and appears to be a shift in work culture. But it shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a move away from offices. The tech giant recently announced another 200 jobs for its Irish operations. Pointedly, none of them are remote positions.
Google Ireland recently announced that 20pc of its 4,000 staff (its other 4,000 Irish workers are agency-employed and contractors) can apply to permanently work from home. This is a solid, specific figure. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon how many of its workers here are taking that option up.
But it still emphasises the point that Google requires four out of five of its staff to turn up to an office.
Is it possible that our current ‘work from home’ status – a situation forced on us in a global pandemic – may not actually be the template for our future working lives after all?
Maybe it’s useful to disentangle the context, motives and noise of those making arguments either way to figure out what will actually happen.
For example, the strongest work-from-home advocates remain older people with settled relationships and comfortable houses. This is also the cohort most likely, it seems, to argue that a hybrid model of two or three days in the office is ‘inevitable’.
By contrast, graduates, young workers and those who live in tighter accommodation, for whom an office is a merciful change of scene and a place of social and professional opportunity, take a very different view.
Somewhere in the middle are employers, who are motivated by three things: day-to-day productivity, future product development and maintaining the highest possible calibre of employee.
As I’m writing a column about this, it’s a fair question to ask: where am I coming from on work-from-home?
As a forty-something married person in a house with a garden, my own situation suits a work-from-home setup reasonably neatly. I’ve a spare room for an office and nice neighbourhood places to stroll around at lunch. I save about an hour and a half each day in commuting times.
On the other hand, I’m now spending all of my life working and living in two or three rooms in a single building.
So I’m personally fine with things either way.
But I know of many people who genuinely need a space outside their abode for their mental health and wellbeing. This ranges from younger colleagues who are sharing modest apartments with flatmates to married friends who need a quiet place away from kids.
I’m cognisant that seeing someone in the flesh is often more productive than a Zoom call. And there’s a long line of research that suggests there’s something healthy about having a psychological separation between your work and home life.
Insofar as the State takes a position on these things, it’s clearly preparing for multiple outcomes. On one hand, it’s introducing new laws around the right to switch off work devices at home. But it’s also investing in regional office hubs for workers as a strategy to increase the attractiveness of rural towns for modern workers.
Tim Cook clearly believes that maintaining Apple’s current standard can only be achieved by a majority physical presence.
Google mostly believes the same. And even though Microsoft currently has the most liberal work-from-home policy of the big tech companies in Ireland it still bases its core work expectations around the office.
What will the rest of the market conclude?