Reconstructing the workplace

During the global pandemic, when many of us were prevented from working in our usual offices for an extended period of time, we undertook what was commonly framed as a shift from working in the office to working from home. But though this change in location created logistical challenges, the fact that we were working in a different place was not the most transformational shift. The truly important thing is not that we worked from our homes, but that we adopted a wholly digital way of working. We swapped pencil and paper, drawing boards and blueprints, and in-person meetings and get-togethers for equivalent digital tools, moving the work from the physical world to the digital one. And in doing so, we discovered that when work lives in digital space, when workers are working digitally rather than working physically, where the worker is located matters much less than how the work is done.