Where the Hub and Spoke Office Model Might Falter

At some point in time, life will return to normal and people will go back to their office. But when they do, things might look different. Some firms might shrink the size of their main headquarters and lease smaller spaces in the suburbs, called spokes, which would welcome employees that didn’t want to commute into the central hub.

But urban planner Christopher Rhie, an associate principal with the Los Angeles office of global firm Buro Happold, doesn’t think hub-and-spoke is for everyone.

“I think that [hub and spoke]  is highly, highly dependent on the sector,” Rhie says. “I think in places like Silicon Valley where housing prices are just completely out of control and it’s relatively easy to work remotely, there are strong factors where a lot of the workforce don’t need to be in the main office,” he says. “But we’ll see a little bit more of a distribution in other sectors.”

But in other sectors, Rhie says there is a certain status attached to working in a headquarters building in a large metropolitan area. 

“Goldman Sachs built a giant tower just across the water [from New York City] in Jersey City, and nobody wanted to go there,” Rhie says. “That was how strongly the global financial sector workforce wanted to be on Wall Street. So even moving just across the Hudson River was too much of a leap. So that’s why it’s going to be highly dependent on the industry.”

Rhie says his architecture firm is having discussions about the future of its workspace and using satellite offices as a way to expand its geographic reach. In the past, keeping satellite offices required an investment in work space and a cost to maintain another server. 

“We’ve given all that up now that we’re in COVID,” Rhie says. “We canceled our WeWork space, and we figured out we don’t need that server. We were able to find some other technologies that allowed us to connect to the server in our main office.”

While spokes might make sense in some cases, Rhie doesn’t see office workers leaving the city for the suburbs en masse. 

“Suburban office parks were very highly valued in the 80’s, but we’ve seen a reversal of those trends where they’ve hollowed out and the workforce has expressed a desire for city living,” Rhie says. “In order to attract and retain talent, there has been a movement to cities and locating the offices within cities.”

And there are many reasons for workers and companies to be in those metropolitan areas in the future.

“I do think that cities are going to come back strong,” he says. “They have a diverse, intelligent workforce. People want to be around others who have creativity and talents. And they want to be around the educational institutions. Cities also give entrepreneurs access to capital.”