Most people and organizations have used technology to “lift and shift” traditional workflows, using new tools but doing things the same old way. Though almost all physical workplaces today already include digital technology, they fall short of enabling the workers to work digitally in the above sense. Workers organize themselves around the work that needs to be done, rather than the requirement to work in a particular place. Or, if face-to-face interaction is required, the meeting can take place at a café or co-working space convenient to the workers, with notes and diagrams captured in the same digital platform. Rather than assume that a meeting will take place in a meeting room in the same office as the workers’ desks, the meeting can be moved to an online collaboration platform enabling the participants to be anywhere. In unbundling the workplace, we break apart the various places that comprise the physical workplace, understand the purpose that each place serves, and then find alternative ways to realize each one. The digitization of work enables us to “unbundle” the workplace and put it back together in more effective ways. A typical office building accommodates this by having different places designed for different uses: conference rooms for collaboration, private offices for quiet contemplation, lounges and kitchens for social interaction, and so on. Activity-based working 2 recognizes that people perform different activities throughout their day. The physical workplace is not a single monolithic place. The realization that we have this opportunity might be just the insight we’re looking for to make work most effective in the digital age. We need to stop thinking about the workplace solely in terms of a physical location, and start thinking of it as a virtual place where a team gathers when working digitally, teams that solve the problems that collectively make up the pursuit of an organization’s goals.

There’s a caveat, though: To seize this opportunity, we need to change our thinking. Because physical location is no longer the constraint that it once was, we now have whole new possibilities for combining digital and physical space to capitalize on the strengths of each-giving us the power to reach our business goals, and even imagine new ones, in new and better ways. Instead of giving workers access to equipment, information, and co-workers by warehousing them in the same location, working digitally frees workers to access equipment, information, and co-workers from anywhere, decoupling work and workers from physical space. What the pandemic really showed us is that digital technology can and should change how we think about, and use, the workplace.

And in doing so, we discovered that when work lives in digital space, when workers are working digitally rather than working physically, where the worker is located matters much less than how the work is done. We swapped pencil and paper, drawing boards and blueprints, and in-person meetings and get-togethers for equivalent digital tools, moving the work from the physical world to the digital one. The truly important thing is not that we worked from our homes, but that we adopted a wholly digital way of working. But though this change in location created logistical challenges, the fact that we were working in a different place was not the most transformational shift. During the global pandemic, when many of us were prevented from working in our usual offices for an extended period of time, we undertook what was commonly framed as a shift from working in the office to working from home.

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