When the
Workplace
Doubles
as a Space
to Unwind
WHEN YAHOO CEO MARISSA MAYER issued her ban last
month on employees working remotely, she cast herself as both
enemy and savior of the modern working class. Critics bemoaned
Mayer’s brave new world, with no place for the single working
mother, while supporters noted Yahoo’s dismal finances, and the
value of collaborating face-to-face.
But the riddle at the heart of the debate was seemingly solved
more than a decade ago, at Mayer’s old stomping grounds,
Google. How might a boss compel us to trek in when the world is
wired so we don’t have to? Simple: bring the world into the office.
Of course, the solution isn’t nearly as easy to put in place as it
is to outline, especially without money and vision, two assets it
often seems the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin holds
in excess of its peers. But the Google office model is still replicating in a fundamental way. Today, cafes, lounges and pubs
exist inside companies large and small. The design industry
knows these outposts as “third spaces,” a term that once stood
for settings where work could be done outside a person’s office
or home — such as a coffee shop or a public library. The concept
has since inversed to mean in-office refuges, an effect of what