My Office Is Actually a Barcalounger

Take a second to ask yourself, when the last time you felt productive while working? Was it at your desk? In an office? Was it even at your office? Was it perhaps at your favorite coffee shop? Or, maybe, was it in your brown leather Barcalounger at home you’ve named “The Thinking Chair?” Regardless of where it was, or the type of work you were doing, there was most likely a correlation between the type of space you were in and your level of productivity.

Over the past two decades, the workplace industry has seen the debate around open-office vs enclosed-offices play out in lectures, news articles, and chatrooms across the world. Last month, Jeremy Reding gave a brief history of this debate with his own article. As he pointed out, when a pendulum swings to one side of the debate, we often lose perspective on the benefits of the other. This debate centers around a much larger question we should be asking ourselves: As technology improves, allowing employees to work from almost anywhere, what will even be the role if the physical workplace? And what does that workplace look like, if it even exists at all?