Industrialisation and the growth of urbanisation historically led to the growth of office jobs. Offices and factories were co-located. People became commuters and travelled every day to work in a central location ‘where the work was’.

Fast forward to the time of writing, and the biggest question one must ask is why would there be a continued need to ‘go to work’? If we put aside questions of human nature and sociology (which provide very good reasons why people like to work with other people), there must be a lot of reasons why there is no reason to ‘come into the office’.

Virtual companies have sprung up all over the globe, and virtual companies can allow workers to live anywhere and still work and interact with the business and its systems.

One such company is Basecamp (Fried and Hansson). Originally called 37Signals, it does have a headquarters, but many of its employees work away from a traditional office environment.

Basecamp’s ethos is that people need to work where they are most productive. This means they need to have a set of work systems that allow a worker anywhere to access and use the same systems as an office-based worker in the same way. Fried argues that by allowing people to work at home, the quality of their work is greater. Rather than look at how long people are spending at work, managers should look at what is being produced. To do this, a company like Basecamp relies on systems and a culture that accepts how those things work. Those systems are also about processes and practices that take advantage of the technology system put in place to enable remote working, and they are quite different to those used in organisations that require people to

‘come into work’ (Fried, 2016).