Breakfast and lunch are served daily. For wellness, there are several 24/7 gyms (with group classes), outdoor sports courts and a bike shop. To relax, visit the respite room or book a massage. Don’t forget the games rooms and the music room.

This is neither a luxury hotel, nor a gentleman’s club – it’s an office (LinkedIn, South Bay). These days, many high-prestige companies have equally attractive offices, as pointed out in Carl Cederström’s encyclopedic The Office (English translation of Kontoret), which I reviewed recently.

There are several reasons to splurge money on fancy offices. Colleagues need a place to meet; a good office makes it happen. Office amenities could also be viewed as any other employee benefit, which helps attract talent and (arguably) makes employees more productive¹.

An office is defined as a room or part of a building where people work. That used to be the case, though the definition seems outdated now. Indeed, most people can work from anywhere. Moreover, for many white collar workers, the distinction between work and non-work is rather blurry. Is having cocktails with clients work? How about pickleball, since it increases focus? Trying out new AI tools? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then LinkedIn’s campus is an office through and through.

You may reasonably object to the relevance of some office services. While I’m not too concerned with companies squandering money on gaming rooms – I trust they’ll figure out what’s unprofitable – I’m wondering what happens with the employees.

For if your office is like heaven on earth, you could easily end up spending 12h a day at the office, just out of convenience. Maybe your living situation isn’t ideal, you dread the feeling of downtime², or the office just feels like the default place to be.

However, you can’t consistently be productive for 12 hours a day³, even if your job requires little exertion⁴. When you’re too tired to get anything done and stick around just because, the office is more like daycare for grown-ups. But it would be immoral to convince someone – whether child or grown-up – to spend too much time at daycare.

Office time eats into people time – the time you need to become a responsible friend, partner and citizen. For example, you can’t build genuine relationships in an office. Even if you’re looking to befriend colleagues, you should hang out at a café or go to the pub. Similarly, doing small acts of kindness gets harder in a business context: is he offering a helping hand as a negotiation strategy? Moreover, your family and non-office friends also need some time (a lot of time, actually), and that’s time you can’t spend at the office.

Part of me thinks the office should be an office, in the old sense of the term – a place for slow, boring work. Should we stop the hotellification of offices, and instead provide more third spaces? At some point, your office might feel more like home than your real home.

There’s a famous hotel, located where they work the most. They say ‘you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’.