In August 2021, in order to display their vr virtual world horizon workspaces, Facebook (meta) enabled office workers to remotely participate in work, communication and meetings, and be able to use virtual characters, computers, tables and chairs... This is undoubtedly another new idea about the form of remote office. COVID-19 enables home and telecommuting to become the mainstream mode of work. Office SaaS software traffic, including Zoom, Teams and Slack, has seen explosive growth. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and other large companies not only actively advocate the benefits of telecommuting, but also actively invest in the layout, which seems to be extremely optimistic. However, on the other side of actively promoting online office, Silicon Valley bosses of "chicken thief" did not stop buying land rental buildings to expand new offices during the new crown period: Google and Amazon spent billions of dollars, while Facebook expanded office space by hundreds of thousands of square meters. In addition, although the "back to office" date has been delayed again and again, technology companies are still happy to update the specific schedule of offline office. According to the latest schedule, employees of apple, Google and other companies must return to their offline offices one day a week from this week, and this number will become three days a week next month. It's agreed to work together remotely. Why do giants keep buying land rental buildings? Is it another "insincere" story? The answer may be more complicated than you think. I can't stop buying land On January 14, 2022, the Central Saint Giles building in West London announced that it would change hands at a price of US $1 billion, becoming the largest office building transaction in the history of the area. The new owner of this colorful property covering 400000 square meters is Google. In addition, Google is also building a new headquarters on King's Cross Street in London. If offices in other parts of the UK are added, the transaction will enable Google to accommodate 10000 employees in the country. Google's great efforts in the field of office property have not stopped. Last March, Google announced plans to invest more than $7 billion to open new offices and expand data centers across the United States. In September, Google broke the price record of the most expensive single office building in the United States since the epidemic, and purchased the St. John's Wharf office building in Manhattan, New York, for $2.1 billion, which is planned to be put into use in 2023. By then, Google will have more than 3.1 million square feet of office space in New York. It's not just Google that invests tens of thousands of dollars to buy a house. In April last year, Apple also announced its investment plan for the United States in the next few years, involving an amount of up to $430 billion. A very important project is to open a new park in North Carolina, which is expected to cost $1 billion. Apple plans to arrange 3000 employees here to be responsible for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Amazon did not stop expanding during the epidemic. In 2020, Amazon bought the Lord Taylor building in New York for us $978 million, with an office space of 660000 square feet (about 61300 square meters). Intentionally, this building was once a beautiful joint office space. Wework, the flag bearer, bought it for us $850 million in 2019; In the same year, Amazon announced three new office locations in Alberta, Canada, at a cost of about $120 million; In addition, Amazon is preparing to add 3500 corporate jobs to its new offices in New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Detroit and Dallas. Even Zuckerberg, who is particularly active in promoting telecommuting, is actively expanding the territory of the office. In 2020, Facebook (meta) not only rented all the office space in the 107 year old James A. Farley building in midtown Manhattan, but also successively purchased land in Austin, Boston, Chicago and Washington. According to CBRE, the office space leased by the technology industry increased by 76% in the last three quarters of last year compared with a year ago. In addition, the technology industry has become a major force in the Manhattan office rental market for several consecutive years. If you are not familiar with the above companies, the people really think they are going to devote themselves to real estate. Giant bets and "self rescue" Why do giants buy land one after another? The most direct answer: money. According to the ranking of global enterprise cash reserves released by FactSet, a financial data company, in mid-2020, the top names are still those familiar names: Microsoft has the most cash of $136.6 billion, apple, which has always been in the forefront, retreated to the fourth place, with cash reserves of about $100 billion and alpha, the parent company of Google, with cash reserves of $1200, Facebook and Amazon hold $5.3 billion and $4.3 billion, respectively. Under the background of global flood irrigation, it is better to find high-quality target investment rather than devalue the real gold and silver in hand. Especially during the outbreak of the epidemic, the asset prices of office buildings fell. At this time, they made a bottom reading. Even A-share Xiaobai felt that they were sending sub questions, not to mention the wolves of wall street around the giants for a long time? As the market warms up, the asset prices of commercial real estate in the United States are also rising. Some analysts predict that in the first half of 2022, the average cap rate of all types of commercial real estate is expected to be 2.8% - 3% higher than the yield of 10-year Treasury bonds. Look how fragrant it is. Of course, if the elite of Silicon Valley are speculating in real estate, the pattern must not be opened. Giant gambling is about to gamble big - betting that the global epidemic will stabilize in the past two years and that more employees and more offices will be needed when the economy recovers - in fact, they do the same: Amazon has started a crazy enrollment expansion model since 2020. According to CNBC, Amazon has added more than 400000 employees in 2020 alone; Google accelerated the recruitment process last year and plans to recruit 10000 more employees; Apple's local investment plan revealed that it would create 20000 jobs within five years. Of course, more importantly, although telecommuting is convenient, various defects are gradually exposed: Fuzzy work and life While people in the workplace enjoy the moment of lazy fishing, it may also make you feel like you are waiting for orders at any time. A workplace report released by Microsoft early last year showed that 54% of people said they were "overworked" and 39% felt "exhausted" because of work. According to the report, on the teams platform, more than 60% of calls and meetings are "temporarily initiated" outside the plan, and employees are facing the indiscriminate bombardment of various online meetings and text messages. Communication efficiency While telecommuting has lost the annoying part of working from 9 to 5 or even 996, it also makes you lose the beautiful part: face-to-face communication and mutual assistance among colleagues, chatting in the corridor and gossip in the tea room - these are the key elements for migrant workers to establish meaningful relationships and stabilize the community. In the new office mode, this familiar set of interpersonal rules needs to be broken and started again. For managers, face-to-face communication is an important basis for building team connections, and bosses are also worried about being unable to control employees' work status, process and efficiency - which can also explain why so many third-party monitoring tools are sold; For the workplace rookies, the lack of communication experience makes it more difficult for them to find a foothold and grow in the workplace. Specific work scenarios are still important. Google's chief financial officer pointed out that although the company has shifted to a more flexible mixed office mode, allowing employees to get together personally, collaborate and build a work community is still an important part of the future. In their Book Ghost work: how to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass, Mary L. gray and Siddharth Suri concluded that online work has spawned a large number of "gigs" (temporary workers). They work on the Internet platform. Because they have no fixed office location, It is often easy to fall into helplessness and become atomized individuals and procedures on the assembly line. The meaning of work is simplified into a reward. A background that needs to be added is that the era of "great resignation" in the United States since the outbreak of the epidemic is falling. The US Department of labor recently disclosed that the US unemployment rate fell sharply to 3.8% in February this year, and 678000 new jobs were created in the non-agricultural sector, better than market expectations. As more and more workers enter the market, companies fed up with the pain of the epidemic recruitment have naturally made every effort to expand their offices and hope to resume offline offices as soon as possible. Twitter announced that it would fully reopen the office from March 15, Facebook set the latest date on March 28, Apple employees would return to the office on April 11, and Google planned to pilot in April and promote it on a large scale in September. New office trends The return of employees to offline is inevitable, and the exploration of remote office will not stop. Whether online or offline, the epidemic and mobile technology have profoundly changed our working mode, and mixed office is becoming the mainstream trend. CBRE's research shows that workplace flexibility will be more deeply embedded in the company's business model, and the average working time of office employees in the United States will be reduced by 24%. According to its 2021 tenant sentiment survey, 87% of large companies plan to adopt mixed working methods - employees return to the office a few days a week, You can choose to work from home at other times. Although the technology giants spent a lot of money to buy buildings, the new office space is no longer the same as the previous "office", but has a new change: it no longer pays attention to the work station, but emphasizes more spaces such as lounge and conference room, which are mainly used for team communication: Google said it regarded the office as a "place for collaboration and meaningful employee contact" and expected to invest millions of pounds in renovating the new office building in London; Dropbox has transformed its existing office space into a flexible joint office space - Dropbox studios, which is mainly used for team building and cooperation, rather than "just work"; Salesforce has set up a new "trailblazer Ranch" fake Village Office Park in the redwood forest of California, covering an area of 75 mu. Employees can not only work, study and group construction in the park, but also carry out natural walking, meditation and yoga. Decentralization will spread to office space, and enterprises and employees will not have to concentrate on the core areas of core cities. The new headquarters of apple and Oracle in San Diego will no longer be regarded as a new investment opportunity of apple and Oracle in San Diego, while Tesla will no longer focus on moving to San Diego and Colorado Detroit, Dallas and other places blossom in many places - the new working mode makes technology companies more flexible in office location and manpower allocation. After two years of running in, COVID-19 has explored the comfort zone of online office. Online work has become more focused, reducing unnecessary meeting procedures and leaving more room for employees