Hi Captain,
I was interested to reply to this one, as I have some first hand experience of this particular situation.
My housemate works for JPM here in London and works closely with the traders. From what I understand, the traders have been itching to get back to the office for a long time now.
‘Incidental information’ could be an advantage of working from the office, but in my opinion this particular advantage is not ubiquitous to all roles. I can well imagine that a trading floor brimming with interaction, and casual sharing of information would thrive in this environment. However I consider this particular example as something as an exception, or a niche in this respect. I would not consider ‘incidental information’ particularly relevant for my own role for example.
There are certainly some advantages to the office, no doubt, including intangible benefits like the one you are trying to capture here. However, I am firmly in the camp that a hybrid model is inevitable for the foreseeable future to make use of both office and work from home benefits, and to not get hung up over what these might be.
From many discussions with friends & colleagues covering various industries & roles, I am more than ever convinced by this shift. From anecdotal examples of a friend who is a corporate lawyer having never worked a single day from home in his life before the pandemic, to have his firm move to a hybrid model full time and his boss (one of the firm’s Partners) leave and set up his own firm so that he can remote work permanently. My own Director leaving and only looking for roles where he can remote work full-time, my dad (an office traditionalist CEO) video interviewing two people yesterday for a role with both requesting that it be full time work from home (a notion he has now accepted), my previous company moving their entire head office of several thousand onto a permanent hybrid model, as I’m confident will happen with my current company (we are still remote working currently).
These are among the biggest UK companies with hundreds of thousands of employees (albeit only a portion are office based), whose very structure are entrenched in archaic systems and are slow moving at the best of times but here, even they are adapting quickly. Personally I expect to work 2-3 days a week in the office, 2-3 days a week from home - up from 1 day a week at home historically. I could go on, but my point is the evidence is there to see before our very eyes.
There is not much point second guessing this inevitable shift, in my opinion. Yes, there are some advantages to office, of course, and some companies will stay with an office model. And you will always find use cases to exemplify that. But for most the times they are a-changin, and where there are current deficiencies to the work from home model, ever evolving tech will adapt to provide a suitable solution.
Yes, some people are resistant to change, they always are, but attitudes will change, they have already begun to. And ultimately that is my investment thesis and why ZM is my top holding, as I believe it is a company that has what it takes to thrive in this ‘paradigm shift’.
I would consider the importance of ‘incidental information’ to this thesis, as merely incidental.