Twitter is out of the office. Last week, the social media company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, informed employees that many of them would be allowed to work from home permanently, even after the Covid-19 pandemic subsides. Other tech giants, including Google and Facebook, have not gone quite so far but have also said that they plan to continue working remotely at least through the end of 2020.
This may be a sign of where things are headed for the other white-collar industries that take their cues from Silicon Valley in the design and culture of their workplaces. For an industry that thrives on disruption, this might be its most disruptive move yet.
Part of what makes the move to remote work so remarkable is that the technology industry has resisted it for so long. From the midcentury-modern palaces to the playful campuses of today’s tech giants, the industry has invested heavily in the idea that “knowledge work” depends on carefully designed office environments.
Some facilities emphasized cloistered isolation, such as the elegant campus in Murray Hill, N.J., that Eero Saarinen designed for AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1962. Tech companies founded in Northern California took a different tack, designing more free-flowing offices that mimicked the collaborative environment of the engineering lab. The layout of these offices encouraged what Bill Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of Hewlett-Packard, called “management by walking around.”