What Office Perks Would Make the Commute Worth It?

I’m sure all of you have seen this question posted on LinkedIn – ‘What office perks would make it worth the trip in?‘. I’ve seen it a million times. Things get even funnier when we also use the LinkedIn poll feature to survey the world. Here’s a good example with 4 options, listing all the bad reasons you may want to commute to the office:

• Ultra-fast internet
• Fancy snacks and treats
• Top-notch video/audio hardware
• Quiet, focus spaces

Why would any of these make me go to the office? It’s simple, they won’t…We already have all of them at home!

Then the question is what will make the trip to the office worth it?

To answer that, we can draw a lot of know-how from the world of coworking spaces. Why? Because for more than a decade, flex and coworking spaces have been selling desk and office memberships to freelancers who were all working from home. So how did they do it? If we have fast internet, fancy snacks, hardware, and quiet space at home, why would we pay the extra money and commute to a coworking space? Especially when no one is ‘forcing’ us to the office?

The answer is simple – community! We go to offices because we want to have a face to face contact and work with other awesome people. Sitting next to others is not a goal on its own. Just being around people won’t make magic overnight but in the long term, it helps us in so many ways.

For example, working closely with other professionals makes us better at what we do, helps us learn faster, grow faster, and advance our professional life faster. That’s it. We learn by osmosis, by absorbing the experience of other people. Also, working physically together helps us unlock our combined creativity and spark ideas that are otherwise so much more difficult to come by.

Bars are a good analogy here – we rarely go to a bar just because of the drinks and music there. We can have these at home too, right? We go to a bar because we want to hang out and have fun with other people and that’s beautiful. And yes – there are drinks and music which just make everything nicer.

Following the same logic, we rarely go to the office just because of the internet or the hardware that’s available there. Sometimes we may need to, but most of the time we go because of the people! Of course, the office must offer super fast-speed internet, high-quality facilities, convenient location, snacks, hardware, a mixture of spaces and all of that, just like a bar has to be comfortable, offer high-quality drinks and have nice music. What sets apart the offices that are worth going to are the people there!

Put simply, we go to the office to spend quality time with amazing colleagues and advance our careers faster! By the way, from that perspective, it’s very cool to know who’s in the office when. If your team doesn’t have the technology to help you do that (or work in a hybrid way in general), you should definitely check out OfficeRnD Hybrid!