Step Into the Office-Less Company, Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2012

For months now, we have been trying to understand why the County planning staff raised the assumed size of office space per worker from 250 GSF to 300 GSF as the Reston Task Force began considering the issue of balancing jobs and households in the Reston station areas.  Besides informal conversations with members of the planning staff, we have also written Board Chairman Sharon Bulova (here and here) seeking an explanation if not a change in that assumption given overwhelming evidence that office space per worker is shrinking dramatically, perhaps below 100 GSF per person.  So far, no response.

And now we find the ultimate in office space shrinkage:  ZERO square feet per worker in this Marketwatch report from Rachel Emma Silverman.

The Web-services company Automattic Inc. has 123 employees working in 26 countries, 94 cities and 28 U.S. states. Its offices? Workers' homes.

At Automattic, which hosts the servers for the blogging platform WordPress.com, work gets done wherever employees choose, and virtual meetings are conducted on Skype or over Internet chat.

The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but project management, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internal blogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each other face to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up the phone.

Far & Wide

Web firm Automattic has 123 employees in 94 cities—and everyone works at home.

Having a remote workforce lets companies tap into a wider talent pool not limited by geography. Firms can also save money on real estate, though sizeable travel budgets may partly offset that.

Nobody knows for sure how many completely office-less companies there are or how fast their ranks are growing, but management researchers say such firms are still rare. . . .

Click here for the rest of this article. 

While not even we are willing to set this as a standard for office space per worker planning, it highlights the notion that office space is a much less valuable asset for developers, lessees, employees, and even County tax revenues than ever.  It is clear that the assumption that office workers need 300 GSF of space each is unrealistic and the County needs to develop an assumption more in keeping with the trend in the global office marketplace.