By Andrew Macdonald
At The Notebook, I have worked in a home office for the last six years, just like many realtors and other self-employed often do.
Now that the pandemic has given new impetus to the use of a home office, I reached out to Tom Rose, founder and proprietor of Atlantic Business Interiors, the Halifax-headquartered office furnishings chain that operates in the four Atlantic Provinces.
Rose, who founded ABI in 1986, said the push for home offices “started 20 to 25 years ago, and it grew out of large corporations and the cost of real estate, and traffic congestion in big cities, and time lost. There was a momentum and a drive to put people in home offices 25 years ago, and a lot of companies did that. And some like Yahoo moved their entire staff, and Bell Aliant.
“But several years later, guess what they did? They moved them back into offices. They moved them back into offices for an obvious reason: productivity,” he tells The Notebook.
“Some people did work harder at a home office, but others a lot less, so it is harder to monitor people’s performance, and in business, it is all about performance, and you need that measurement.
Tom Rose founded Atlantic Business Interiors in 1986. He still puts in six-day work weeks.
“The other thing they found, the creative juices of people were less by working from home offices. You could not see the excitement in a person’s face when you had an idea, another person could not bubble and go with it.
“Yahoo eventually moved them back and companies like Bell Aliant did, too,” says Rose.
“People are still working from home offices — it’s not a small number of people — but the research lately has been to say they miss the social activity of being in an office. For many people who go to the office during the day that is a big part of their social lives — and you miss it, too, sometimes,” he points out, referring to my home office.
“That’s why leading companies brought people back, and companies like Apple, Amazon and Google — they have huge campuses, their people are allowed to work from home, but they come to their campus for the interaction with the people, and the creative ability that is unleashed on those teams.
“Research has pointed to that. Ten to 15 years ago, Steelcase…determined home offices are here to stay, but they are not ideal, and can’t be all of what a corporation does, (but) they can augment it, they can allow flexibility and freedom.”
Steelcase is an office furnishings brand that Rose represents.
Today’s office environment is designed to allow for “25 to 30 percent of what we call shared spaces — creative spaces and auxiliary furniture like soft chairs, casual tables to have a coffee, an ottoman chair or bean bag chair. People are more relaxed and as you relax people, their creative juices flow,” says Rose.
“Home offices have existed for us for a long time, and in the gig economy over the last 10 years, it became more prominent. The gig economy largely work from home,” he says referring to freelancers and self-contractor consultants.
“So many people are doing that,” he says. “In the gig economy, a lot of people are working from home, and with very quality seating because they are spending a lot of time in it,” says Rose.
An office designed by Atlantic Business Interiors. (ABI website)
Rose says many of his staff already had been working from home before he closed his showrooms because of COVID-19 on March 16.
“Everyone went to work from home, and it was quite seamless. However, it was much harder to get things done. I could not walk to my VP finance and say, ‘Here is my idea’. I’d call her, and she would be busy, and then it would be another two hours, and I’d be into something else.
“So we were meeting with our senior management team every morning on the phone for half an hour to correspond. Sometimes the technology worked well for us, sometimes it is a little glitchy. We are now at two days a week with our teleconference,” he tells The Notebook.
“But, it’s harder to get the things done quickly with as much input working from home.”
He notes the Canadian founder of Shopify, a competitor to Amazon, has said all of his staff will work from home until this coming January.
“I think work from home will be more pronounced for a little while, but I think that the trend that has established itself in the office marketplace, all have realized that home was here to stay but they started to design offices in a more creative focussed productivity manner. And it has already been moving that way,” Rose tells me.
“I will tell you something else, even at ABI we are now designing post-COVID workplaces because the workplace will change in the near term for 12 to 24 months until we get a vaccine… and if you go to our website you can download and read reports on that,” he explains.”
Question: Are the new office designs to allow for proper social distancing until a vaccine is found?
“You got it. It’s at the office building. We know people are at home and they know how to social distance, but in the office it is different. We will need barriers, we will need hand sanitizers, and we will need different approaches for office meetings.”
He says the designs include a radically different look, “while some are modifications and more traditional ideas coming out because of COVID,” he tells The Notebook.
“We are going to design them, and we are doing it right now for enterprise and office buildings — not so much for the home,” he says.
“For us, it is making us really busy because, if you can imagine, we have some major, major customers. We have the largest share of this market in Atlantic Canada, and we are working with them to decide how to bring people back to the office safely because no one wants to put them back and cause any harm.”
Question: Do you think some office employers in Halifax or the Atlantic will opt to keep staff at home until there is a vaccine for COVID-19?
“I am sure some will. What we’re hearing as they get ready and sanitIze their offices and re-design them, they are leaving it up to the employees on whether they feel safe or not.
“If there are no new cases, if we have a vaccine that would be great, but people want to go into the office. They want to get in there— they just want out of the physical space they are in.
“Our offices are open now for appointment, our people are still working, mind you only five in a building that can house 50 or 100.
“People are tired of being at home, they need to be in a different physical space, they need it for their mental health. They need to get files or because of the computers and printing machines.
“I think to frame it, will major offices around the Atlantic Provinces force everyone to work from home? No, I don’t think so. Will they give them that option to feel safe? Yes, a lot of them will.”
Question: Due to the home office concept taking off in the pandemic, how does it affect your bottom line at ABI?
“Oh, we won’t be selling a lot of home offices, that is not our business. We’re a large contract office furniture company, we sell some home offices to people who want it, but it would not be a large enough economic model to sustain Atlantic Business Interiors with five offices around the Atlantic Provinces.”
He does not disclose his annual revenues but says the 2020 year-end on July 31 will be the firm’s most successful year ever. “But it started before COVID. Since COVID, our business is down 70 percent – 2021 and 2022 (will be impacted).”
Rose says his forecast “is that we will be 95 percent of normal, and we have consulted economists and researchers on this, we will be 95 percent of normal in January 2022, 18 months from now,” Rose tells The Notebook.
As for the home office environment, 20 years ago a financier told Rose that in another two decades would see the end of office furniture dealerships and manufacturers.
“That was the last wave of people working from home. But, I am here to tell you our business volume is about 300 percent of what it was then. You have to look at trends, and determine whether it is sustainable over the long term,” he adds.
“It took the office several hundred years to develop. I don’t see COVID-19 changing several hundred years of economic efficiency development. I see this as cataclysmic, not a structural change in the office environment, and how it produces.
“The office is the most efficient way to develop, and deliver goods and services that the human race has been able to develop over 200 years. You can’t let a virus (change that), and sooner or later they will have a vaccine. It won’t destroy that. Will it affect it dramatically for a period of two or three years, yes it will. Will people work in offices again? Yes, they will, because of the ability to get things done quicker because of the exchange of ideas and work as teams. They will need to gather.”
Rose says other events in history such as SARS in 2002, and 9-11, saw things return to normalcy eventually.
“I was on a flight…out of Dallas when SARS was in full steam. There were four people on a 200-seat airplane, because of fear of SARS. A year and a half later, the planes were packed,” he recalls.
“After 9-11, I had to get on an airplane. There were half a dozen on the flight and two or three Middle Easterners on the flight, and some people were panicking and got off the flight because of the World Trade Towers, but those things changed.
“One thing I have to say about the human race, there is incredible, incredible creativity and resiliency. We will get through this, we will be back,” says Rose.
