Last week, a colleague shared a New York Times article with me featuring the headline, “The Envy Office: Can Instagrammable Design Lure Young Workers Back?”
By all means, read the article yourselves (subscription required. It is The New York Times, after all). However, I will summarize it briefly. Offices are using “compelling” (air quotes mine) design to draw fussy GenZ workers back to the office.
Given that I occasionally like to write about remote work, the future of work, and so on, I was naturally interested in the concept of the “Envy Office”. Here is an excerpt from the article, which peers into the offices of cereal maker and ubiquitous podcast advertiser Magic Spoon. Just to give you a taste.
Their space also reflects what designers, executives and workers describe as a trend that’s not entirely new, but is now becoming the go-to among certain start-ups, tech companies and other moneyed employers vying for young talent. It’s what might be called the Envy Office — what happens when companies try to combine the comforts of a living room and the glamour of a vacation. These spaces — often characterized by colorful walls, upholstered furniture and carefully curated coffee table books — lure workers in with plenty of opportunities to fill their social feeds with photos taken at the workplace.
The first thought that came to mind as I read this article, beyond relief that I am not required at any meetings in the “blueberry muffin” conference room today, was “ping pong table.”
This effort to use office design and features to attract talent (or just to get them to come into work) reminds me of when every business that needed young talent had an office with exposed brick interior walls, oversized bean bag chairs, and a ping pong table.
For me at least, the ping pong table became a symbol of efforts to create work environments that younger professionals would clamor to be included in, even sleeping at the office to demonstrate their commitment (see “bean bag chairs”).
Trading Paddle for Brush
Today, as the New York Times piece suggests, the ping pong paddle has been traded in for a brush and a can of blueberry paint.
And while no one likes ping pong (I never did anyway), everyone loves taking selfies in front of cool backgrounds. If the backgrounds can’t be Dubai or Machu Picchu, then the blueberry muffin conference room will simply have to do.
So what does the “envy office” say about what we have loosely dubbed the RTO (return to office) Wars?
The envy office resides on the continuum of carrots and sticks that bosses have deployed to get employees to RTO. At least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
We’ve written quite a bit about the sticks that have been deployed. For example, Meta, led by erstwhile remote work champion Mark Zuckerberg, issued an edict that workers RTO 3X per week. And security key card swipes would be the mechanism for monitoring compliance.
As we have written, the key card as a compliance mechanism is a common theme in the RTO Wars.
Carrots and Sticks
The envy office sits at the “carrot” end of this spectrum. For most of us, anyway. For me, it would be a giant stick with protruding nails.
In general, I am pro carrot and anti-stick. And let’s face it, Magic Spoon is probably in no great hurry to see the likes of me in the blueberry muffin conference room.
So you do you, Magic Spoon. I will keep listening to the podcasts you sponsor and not eating your delicious, keto-friendly cereal.
