The Office is Dead. Long Live the Office!
I’m currently sitting at a desk in the Betahaus Hamburg that opened its doors today with a breakfast. It’s a so-called coworking space that aims to solve a problem every independent knowledge worker faces today: They just need a place to go. According to Seth Godin, that’s the only problem left why we still need offices today. The other six historical reasons to have an office are gone: If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to…
I’m currently sitting at a desk in the Betahaus Hamburg that opened its doors today with a breakfast. It’s a so-called coworking space that aims to solve a problem every independent knowledge worker faces today: They just need a place to go.
According to Seth Godin, that’s the only problem left why we still need offices today. The other six historical reasons to have an office are gone:
- If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
- If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
- The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
- How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
- You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
- Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
- So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.
Besides Betahaus, there is another coworking space in Hamburg that setup shop just a few weeks ago called Werkheim Hamburg. It’s located just a stone’s throw away from SinnerSchrader’s main office. (Yes, we still have one.) Werkheim resides in an office space where SinnerSchrader was located till 2001.
If you happen to look for a place to go, you might want to check out Hallenprojekt.de, a coworking network for digital workers and digital places. For some reasons, Betahaus Hamburg and Werkheim are not listed there, but many others are.