As remote studio owners, it’s complicated. As people who study people who talk about their experiences working remotely vs in an office, it’s a bit more complicated. And as people who help design spaces that usually have some semblance of an office in them, it’s a total mess. Here’s where we’ve landed:
Jake’s Take 👨🦰
Remote Personal Pro’s — if you took away the agility of remote work, my family would struggle. As a parent of two young kids, I’m constantly dealing with some sort of sickness, doctor’s appointment, or weeks off of school. And there aren’t enough alternative caretakers at the ready to help us out. As a neat freak and an interior design lover, my office is fully optimized for my preferences: big screens, cool vibes, etc. I’d be a bit reticent to have anyone mess with my flow (even if I have a meaningful say on the design decisions). Overall, flexibility, personalization and metaphorical-temperature control make remote work a plus.
Remote Personal Con’s — I need to interact with humans, face to face. For me, more than something is lost in translation on Zoom. I can get out once, twice, three times a day and it doesn’t do the trick. I’m not sure I buy the productivity argument for in-person–I’ve seen academic studies that aggressively dispute the management musings, and the time and cost savings of no commute is obvious–but I definitely have more energy for an in person work day. And it doesn’t help to mix church and state. It’s nearly impossible to manage the “I need to get something done, but the kids are already home” fiasco.
Remote Studio Pro’s — We strive to work with the most talented people, regardless of where they live. We have partners in Mexico City, Poland, Copenhagen, the UK, LA, Seattle, NYC, and probably a few more places that I’m forgetting. To only have employees and partners in Chicago (Andrew and my home city) would severely limit our intellectual capital...in fact, we’re really skeptical of the “I have a project in X city so I’m going to hire a creative partner in that same city” mentality: it leads to sameness. We also are more agile with our overhead: what we don’t spend on an office goes back into bringing the best talent to any given project and supporting our business.
Remote Studio Con’s — For one thing, we’ve never met some of our partners in person. I believe it helps to break bread with your team. I also think there are aspects of our work that are better served in a physical environment: analysis and synthesis of research, preparation for workshops and big meetings, and anything associated with a local client. That being said, digital input often leads to a flexible digital output: we use the best tools to provide distributed access to our work to our clients...which usually empowers their own remote or hybrid work teams.
Andrew’s Take 🧔♂️
Remote Personal Pro's — if isolation were a noise, I’d have it on repeat. In fact, I write this in my toy-collectable cluttered study room as I stand at my desk with my noise canceling headphones shoved into my ears playing nothing but the sound of me chewing Orbit Sweet Mint gum; on second thought, I need to spit this out, I can’t focus. Ahhhhh, that’s better. Now with nothing but white noise and ambient pressure pressing up against my delicate ear drums, my ability to escape distraction — despite my high-anxiety Border Collie humping my leg and barking at the dog next door, and my wife on back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls in the next room — remote work has served me well. Very well in fact. It is something that I truly take for granted and admire as a creative and small business owner. While the thought of being remote still seems preposterous to my parents — Boomers, what can ya say? (smh) — it has provided me with the space to think clearly and freely, wherever, whenever, and however I want.
Remote Personal Con’s — Collaboration is key (at times and in the right doses). And, meeting face-to-face is key (at times and in the right doses). But too much of anything isn’t always a good thing — we’ve heard this hundreds of times throughout our lives. But, defining that balance and identifying where remote breaks down (or in this case, simply doesn’t work), you must look at one’s day-to-day or specific working style. What are they doing? Are there specific jobs to be done that are prohibited by remote work? How does one work? What’s their personality? Is there a required set of standards or practices that can only be achieved in-person? I for one find meeting with specific vendors in person (e.g., printers, fabricators, etc.) is the only way to meet. To see, smell, play, break, build, rebreak, rebuild is a freshening and quite stimulating activity that keeps the mind fresh — it’s like an in-person jigsaw puzzle. But yeah, I get it, remote isn’t for everyone (and fun fact: I am not everyone).
Remote Studio Pro’s — As the other co-owner of this small and mighty (remote) creative studio, it's clear that to thrive in this fast-paced environment, we must consistently infuse our most valuable and essential ingredients: exceptional (and dependable) talent - duh, diverse disciplines and personalities - duh, clients that believe and trust in everything we do - duh, processes that can scale - duh, and most importantly, centralized and clear communication – duh? I’ve found that “remo-comm” — a term I just invented (I think) — has proven beneficial not only for our clients, but also our entire team. With partners all across the world, adopting tools like Slack, Asana, Milanote and Notion have streamlined our communication channels and reduced any risk of missed information or misalignment on what to do/expect. Sure, there are plenty of companies, with actual physical offices, that use these very tools — in fact, most do — but the rigor at which we deploy and use these tools with our team and clients has proven to be our superpower. We look at these tools as our virtual headquarters. Wait, do we have four headquarters? Damm, we’re doing well!
Remote Studio Con’s — Let’s put it bluntly. We are in the industry of placemaking, yet our only “place” is the Google Meet link that we send out with every calendar invite. Or that vibey restaurant or coffee shop we meet up at to talk business or life. We do not have a physical address (other than our personal home addresses). Our cell phones are our home office lines with built-in personal extensions. And, like much of our team, both Jake and I live in separate places — one in the cultural hub of Chicago, the other in some blue-collar village in Northern Illinois. These degrees of separations provide obvious challenges for our team, our clients, and the projects we work on, and are often the reasons for us either missing out on a project or being overlooked as “hometown experts.” Here’s how we see it — it’s about your spaces, not ours.
What we’ve learned - The somewhat unbiased perspective
We’ve studied many people in all sorts of spaces, and a lot of those spaces have been work spaces in one way or another. Here are broad insights that we’ve gathered about office, remote work and some gems in between:
Fear of loss is real and we’re pretty invested in our home workspaces. When we started this business at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone wanted to get the hell out of their houses. They would work from anywhere for a change of scenery. Now, most people have spent significant money and emotional energy in creating the perfect personalized space; they’re protective of their home offices. The promise of an office needs to offer exponentially more in return for the loss or partial loss of our home workspaces and all of the positive benefits of work from home (which extend well beyond where we work).
There are lots of modes of work, some of which can be accommodated in an office of the future, others can only work at home. Unlike Milton in Office Space, most people do not sit in a cubicle the entire day…they float through different contexts that support their emotional, social and functional needs. With remote work, we’ve adopted a much broader array of modes (after all, we’ve added several different work location types to our rosters). You can imagine how some of these obvious modes of work play out: heads down work alone, heads down work surrounded by others, small group collaboration. But you’re probably not considering the less obvious modes that are fairly entrenched in our work culture (and which we believe actually contribute to productivity): fake workday, work on my home while I work from home, comfortable & off camera, etc. The best spaces consider the full range of work modes in their planning, not necessarily incorporating all of them in a single design.
Landlords, property managers, office tenants, and employees are different people with different journeys. A traditional office setting has several nested interests that are rarely reconciled. The landlord wants secure tenants, high rents, dependable management and good market value. The property management firm wants a happy landlord, strong occupancy, and not vocally unhappy tenants. The tenant wants a good deal, happy employees and a successful business. The employees want a comfortable and inspiring space (among many other things). Too often, we design without considering the relationship between all of these users; more often than not, we miss on thinking deeply about how our tenants and their employees need to work. For example, what industries are they in? What is our target tenant’s business model? What does their team structure look like? What do their employees care about? How do those employee values differ across specializations? What does a day in their employees' lives look like? How do they get to work? When do they leave? How do they explore the area around work? The best spaces are empathetic to the full range of users, and enhance their journeys via a cohesive brand and design.
In many cases, the distribution, placement, scale, and organization of residential offices are out of whack. The majority of modern apartment buildings in the US have some workspace. And most of these workspaces don’t take into account their residential setting, such as: 1) a bunch of strangers (aka tenants) with little personal or work affiliation (vs. in an office building, the employer, team and collaborators manifest a forced relationship – ex. at the office, you may have a smelly coworker, but that’s your coworker and you have to deal with it), 2) a more intimate and personal connection to the environment…in the end, these buildings are homes 3) the introduction of partners & cohabitors who may share the workspace 4) a number modes that are just remote work oriented and 5) the technology, furniture, and supplies we need to work. The best spaces start from scratch and consider designing workspace to a home context rather than plopping a work cluster in an apartment building.
When we work from home, we need stuff we would normally consume in a central business district nearby. To the chagrin of all of the office brokers on LinkedIn who keep cherry picking data on occupancy and reposting quotes from VC’s like the “future of work is in the office ggggrrrrrrr”, our lives have shifted away from downtown and back into neighborhoods. But our neighborhoods haven’t adapted to our workday rhythms. We need coffee, salads, gyms, small essential stores, and other retail functions closer to home. We don’t need these business district amenities at the scale of Midtown Manhattan, but we certainly need them within walking distance. We know this is a zoning issue, but it's worth considering when planning for a master development or a mixed use project. We also think the inverse is good food for thought: how do you create an environment at work that accommodates the shift towards home? The best homes will feel like walkable villages.
Take these insights with a grain of salt, because the most important thing we’ve learned about workspace since the inception of our business is that everything is changing quickly. To be successful in designing a workspace is to be willing to experiment, listen, and adapt…over and over again. If you’re too stuck in any mindset, you’ll miss the signals on the horizon that our preferences are about to shift.
Change is good, it keeps us young. ✌️
🚨 WHO IS NO WALLS STUDIO (AND WHAT DO WE DO)?
No Walls Studio is a design and brand consultancy that helps placemakers create spaces that people love.
Our mission is to make sameness extinct in real estate, which means that everything we do comes with new ideas and unique angles — all, grounded in a deep understanding of culture and consumers.
We do three things for our clients (often, all in the same project):
Research
Brand Development
Spatial Experience Design
Want to work with us or learn more?