Why Employers Want You Back in the Office

The pandemic is fast becoming a distant memory now, but offices are still not as full as they were before. For most of 2022, office occupancy in 10 major U.S. cities remained below 50%. Bosses are dealing with workers who do not want to return to the office full-time. Workers say that commuting to the office every day is inefficient and that offices make them unproductive. Bosses have to make arguments for why it’s better to work in the office full-time. The best they can come up with is something about “reinforcing corporate culture.” This isn’t really a positive idea—it means nothing.

Anyone who has spent time in an office knows that corporate culture is just people saying hello to each other in strained ways. Sometimes people talk about their vacations. Usually it’s just chatter about the weather or sports, and everyone wants every interaction to be over as soon as possible. Culture is just dead negative space between the oasis of returning to your workstation so you can stare at your monitor or your phone.

Corporate culture is pure nothingness, yet it must be reinforced at all costs. Employees will only be kept on, and new employees will only be hired, if they play the game, and agree to come back to the office full-time, so that this nothingness can be sustained.

The sociologist Siegfried Kracauer has a nice essay called “The Hotel Lobby” where he makes the point that hotel lobbies are the new churches, but inverted—what he calls negative churches. Everything about a church is present in a hotel lobby, but without any of the content, meaning, or purpose. “In both places,” he writes, “people appear there as guests. But whereas the house of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one.” In the same way, an office is a place where you go to meet no one. You see your coworkers and bosses, but you don’t meet them there. You see them, and navigate around them. But you aren’t going there to meet them. Who are you going to the office to meet? Nobody. You will see people who work there, and you’ll have to deal with them, hopefully as painlessly as possible. But meeting someone implies intention and positivity—you don’t meet people at work, you just see them there.

To lure workers back to the office after the pandemic, office perks are getting fancier. More extravagant catering, tricked out conference rooms, and lots more. But it is a comfort that is purely superficial—it isn’t your home and you aren’t meant to get too comfortable there. It is a comfort meant to offset the unpleasantness of having to commute to work and spend your day there, when you don’t want to be. Most of the amenities in an office are not really taken advantage of—most of the catered food isn’t touched, and if there are big comfortable couches, they are rarely touched. It’s a comfort for no one—like you find in a hotel lobby.

A hotel lobby is comfortable and fancy, but in a way that is for nobody. Who is a hotel lobby for? It’s not really for the hotel guests, because they spend their time in their rooms. It’s more for people waiting to check in or out, so those who aren’t yet guests, or who aren’t guests anymore. You’re waiting to become a guest, or waiting for your taxi to come pick you up. It’s a place for waiting. It’s a waiting room, but you aren’t waiting for any particular service, like at a doctor’s office. And you aren’t really even supposed to spend much time in a hotel lobby, unlike a waiting room, where you can wait for a long time (especially for a doctor, who takes forever to see you). Hotel lobbies, like offices, have nice couches—but it’s rare to see someone sitting on them, in both places.

How much time have you ever spent in a hotel lobby? Even if you go to hotels a lot, you’ve probably barely spent any time in the lobby. It has to have the appearance of a comfortable, hospitable place, even though nobody is supposed to spend much time there. If someone spent a full hour in a hotel lobby, there would be something very strange going on. (The hotel bar, which is sometimes near the lobby, is a different story, of course). The hotel lobby is the transitional space between the anonymity and bustle of the street, and the quiet comfort of the hotel room. But a transitional space isn’t one where you’re supposed to spend much time. And the more transitional a space is, the more it has to be dressed up to disguise it as something other than what it is. This is why hotel lobbies are so tricked out—they have to look like anything other than what they are.

In his essay on hotel lobbies, Kracauer points out how one key feature of churches is equality—everyone in the congregation is equal before God. But in the hotel lobby, “equality is based not on a relation to God but on a relation to the nothing.” Applied to the modern office, this gets to the heart of what bosses really mean when they say they want workers back in the office in order to “reinforce corporate culture.” It is a way of building solidarity, but the only kind of solidarity that corporate capitalism can understand—a negative solidarity. It is a solidarity or equality before nothingness. Before nothingness, all workers are equal. This is the kind of equality that the bosses want to promote—not the economic equality of all workers, because that would mean the bosses and major shareholders wouldn’t make all the money they’re making.

What bosses want is an equality of nothingness only, and this is at risk when workers do not slog to the office and force themselves to have interactions with each other. In resisting returning to the office, workers are fighting against negative solidarity, against the nothingness of corporate culture.

The modern office, like the hotel lobby, is a negative church—a space that has the forms of a church, without the higher purpose of worshipping God. This extends also to silence. As Kracauer writes, “The observance of silence, no less obligatory in the hotel lobby than in the house of God, indicates that in both places people consider themselves essentially as equals.” Hotel lobbies are weirdly quiet places—even before everyone was glued to their smartphones, they were places that were filled with people, but they didn’t talk much. You can’t really talk much in a transitory space—you’re just passing through, that’s the only purpose. In a church, there is also silence, but it is a positive silence, not a negative one. It’s a silence that is full—everyone is trying to transcend this world and reach a connection with God, and noise gets in the way of this higher purpose.

In the office, like the hotel lobby, there is silence, but it is a silence of negativity and avoidance. It isn’t a silence caused by people trying to achieve something (since nobody really works in these stupid offices anyway). It’s the silence of something missing. This silence is what the bosses want to be reinforced—it is their precious corporate culture. They can’t achieve this precious silence without workers coming back into the office—the offices would be empty, and they would be silent, but it wouldn’t be the correct kind of silence. It would be the silence of emptiness, as opposed to the silence of nothingness, which is what is achieved when workers are back. The silence of nothingness—the heart of corporate culture—is the most precious thing that the bosses have, because it makes them feel safe, that negative solidarity is being maintained. If they can force workers to maintain nothingness and silence, then their status as bosses is secure. If nothingness starts being questioned, however…that’s when things can get dangerous.