Shopify boss says office centricity is over amid coronavirus crisis
Shopify, the e-commerce platform provider that has emerged as the anti-Amazon, is now a digital by default company.
As a result of the coronavirus outbreak, it will keep its offices closed until 2021, CEO Tobi Lutke, said on Twitter, “so that we can rework them for this new reality”. After that, most employees will permanently work remotely. “Office centricity is over,” Lutke commented.
“Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup,” he added.
“This means that the work experience should be the same for everyone who works together at Shopify no matter where they are working from. Everyone will be in their own tile during meetings and we will use the best digital communications tools to work together.”
This is also true for many of its merchants. Many DTC companies, Lutke claims, are digital by default. “It will be good for us to have more empathy in building Shopify in this way and preparing it for the new requirements.”
“Shopify has had many big transitions. The first was when Snowdevil became Shopify. Becoming a venture-backed company in 2010 was another. In 2015, on this very day, we went public. In 2017, we reorganised the entire company into multiple product lines. And here we go again,” he declared.
The other side of the argument
“Tobi seems like a great guy but I think saying ‘office centricity is over’ is a gross over simplification of human social evolution,” Jason Greenwood, Director of Solutions at Moustache Republic, said on LinkedIn.
“I really don’t see this becoming the norm anytime soon. Many people (eg with kids, animals etc) just don’t have a good WFH environment and can’t easily create one either. Humans are hardwired social animals and zoom just doesn’t cut it long-term.”
Home internet access for many is “pretty crap,” he argued. Many businesses just use WFH as a way to cut their office costs by offloading this to staff. “Most people on lockdown I know can’t wait to get back to the office, their colleagues, the banter, the energy of proximity.”
“Why are physical conferences still a thing? Proximity. Oxytocin and other chemicals are based on proximity and contact (our endocrine system rewards physical collaboration, it’s part of our evolution as a species). C19 doesn’t suddenly change our base biology,” Greenwood concluded.
