Ghost Town

With so many people working from home these days, people just aren't coming into the office as much and so it's kind of eerie to walk through the halls in the middle of the day and have whole hallways with dark offices. People are online and available by phone, but it's so different from just a few years ago when I first took the job with Tivoli. Then, there was so much more life in the office - lots of interaction between people, hanging out in offices, etc.; not so much anymore. It's cool that IBM accepts and embraces working remotely - goodness knows that I've taken advantage of that quite a bit - but it's also very interesting to see the effect that this paradigm has on corporate culture. Things seem a lot more disjointed and distributed, and I'll wager that this has some sort of effect on morale.

I know that for me, while I definitely enjoy being able to just work from home if I happen to get up late or am not feeling well or something, I also need the notion of having a workspace away from home to go to and I don't think I would function entirely well if I worked from home all the time and didn't have that away-from-home space. There's just something about being able to walk to someone's office and talk with them face to face or hear the day-to-day goings on that helps me feel connected to my team and the work that I'm doing.

We've compartmentalized our home lives so much that neighborhood interaction is mostly gone. If we do the same to corporate culture, what do we have left?