Turning your work colleagues into friends

Seth Godin’s Blog reckons it’s time to say Goodbye to the office. Of all the reasons to have an office which he can think of, only “I need someplace to go” seems to be still relevant in many industries, and therefore “once someone figures that part out, the office is dead.”

Thinking back to office jobs I’ve had, he’s right (although of course, it’s taken technology which has only become available in the past few years for it to become so). I enjoyed working in the same building as other people working for the same purpose, but to be honest, the main attraction was their presence: the interactions I had with them which were business-related could easily have been done remotely. Which really leaves the attraction of the office as being the social factor. And much as I’ve liked many of my work colleagues over the years, they’re not the people I’d have chosen to spend all day, every day, cooped up in a room with. They’d have said the same about me. We all just made the most of it.

So maybe if it’s just avoiding loneliness which people crave, we’ll see groups of like-minded individuals in different jobs get together to create the offices of the future, funded by the allowance they’ll get from their employer who saved so much money by closing the office. When I think of the guys I was down the pub with the other night, watching the football, yes …I would like to work in the same office as them. It’d be a lot of fun, and for me, a fun working environment is a productive one.