We have an office for our company right in the heart of Manhattan in the Flatiron district. Any rent for a space of our size would be quite considerable, but it’s sad when we think of exactly how little time is spent in our office overall. It’s one thing to be away traveling for work or on vacation, but we legitimately have colleagues who barely come into the office one or two days a week, not because they are at meetings or on vacation, but because they simply do not want to come in. We have colleagues who live less than 10 blocks away who regularly work from home on Fridays, and somehow, it’s just acceptable. The culture in our office has definitely gone down a bit over the last year and has shifted (I would even argue that a tiny handful are trying to foster a stupid “bro” culture that we’ve never quite had before, but that is another story), but this is comical, ridiculous, and pretty unacceptable when I think of how much rent our company is paying for this extremely covetable and nice space, and the cost of the upkeep. We get free lunch when we go into the office from any restaurant in the vicinity that delivers; that in itself is a massive perk.

I don’t really know when this started to be okay, but I suddenly thought about it when I looked around the office today, which is a Friday. When I counted that there were nine of us in the office today, I was shocked, catching myself thinking, “Wow, we have a lot of people here!”

No one would ever say that about just nine people in an average office setting.