Apologies for the newsjacking-style title, however, the mainstream press has been running with clickbait headlines such as ‘the office is dead’ and ‘will we ever return to the office?’ and so on, since the Covid-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns in March 2020, so, we thought it was fair game.
In our last post, we spoke about how businesses are once again examining how they can best make themselves recession-proof and how adding flexibility to office space occupancy agreements may make businesses less vulnerable in the future.
Making office space agile, to us, feels like the case for the inoculation program but there will always be disagreement.
We can see on every social media platform that there are disagreements over how various governments have dealt with the pandemic, how they have or have not supported businesses, how they have removed individual freedoms, how they are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of closed businesses, the millions that have had their roles made redundant and, of course, we have heard the arguments against vaccines.
There have been grand sweeping statements about how businesses should be run in the future, and there is a large contingent that believes that we should now WFH completely and forever.
The thing is, this just doesn’t work for every business, nor for every employee.
Every business is different, even businesses within the same sector or market vary significantly, as do the individuals within those businesses. This is due to so many factors including the age of the company, the size, the location, the legacy, the management structure, and many other nuanced elements within each company’s business model canvas.
Covid-19 did not invent working from home – businesses have known about it for decades. Many had experimented with it and many had already incorporated it into their operations models, however, others had decided it didn’t work for them, their clients nor their employees.
The pandemic saw many things grow – online workouts gained millions of views, however, it didn’t mean that people wouldn’t prefer to get to the gym or do a group boot camp session in the park when they got the chance.
Peloton saw its subscriber numbers more than double to 4.4 million between Q1 2020 and Q2 2021, yet, surely, cyclists would prefer to be out on the road or in the forests when the lockdowns eased.
We all started baking bread and cooking at home – recipe kit companies such as Blue Apron and Hello Fresh saw numbers rise significantly (excuse the pun).
Founder of UK-based Mindful Chef, Giles Humphries, advised of a 425% increase in orders in the first few months of the UK lockdowns.
Yet this doesn’t mean that we won’t return to restaurants when the lockdowns lift.
Online alcohol sales increased significantly as more people drank from home but surely we’d prefer to be in a bar or country pub when we can be.
We know that eating and drinking out is more expensive and slower than partaking at home. But it’s a lot better, isn’t it?
Businesses knew all about working from home, too.
The companies of Silicon Valley have, collectively, spent billions on physical office space in the last decade.
We’ve all looked on with envy, or curiosity, at least, at images and videos of the Google and Facebook offices with their meditation rooms, sleep pods, cafeterias that put Whole Foods to shame, slides, creches, gyms and so on.
Apple, alone, spent $5bn on creating One Apple Park in Cupertino.
Silicon Valley, collectively, did not accidentally forget that there was an internet that could facilitate a remote workforce.
The Valley is one of the biggest advocates for flexible working and distributed teams – Matt Mullenweg has been running WordPress – the platform upon which over 30% of the internet’s websites are built – with a remote team since 2003 as Mullenweg explained on this Tim Ferriss podcast episode in 2015.
It is far from being a new concept and has been experimented with for years. If businesses could have gotten rid of the liabilities associated with physical space, they would have done so long ago.
Of course, flexible working can look very different for different businesses, and a remote workforce can work perfectly for many businesses.
But many businesses already know that working from home all of the time isn’t great for business.
Many will reel off the benefits of an office with ease – a collective space for collaboration, for sharing product and market knowledge, for the creation of a team base, a showcase for clients, a place where relationships are formed, people of all levels are mentored, where we can hold impromptu, or planned, meetings, and many others.
While it may feel base or simple, so many employees are missing the after-work drink or the mid-morning coffee with a colleague – these are things that simply cannot be replicated via a screen.
We are social beings with 200,000-year-old brains and associated ‘software’ – with all of the technology in the world, we cannot hack that.
The well-being and mental health of employees is, of course, paramount. And employers should respect the wishes of their teams – there should be a discussion about flexible working now. But it must be good for the business because if it’s not, then it won’t be long before a business suffers. And that’s no good for anyone.
Employees shouldn’t be forced into working from home if they don’t wish to, either. There are many employers and employees alike who are against it, not just for the management challenges that it can present but for employee welfare.
CNN reported about the potential mental health dangers due to the loneliness experienced by homeworkers in April 2020.
We don’t yet know the results of this collective homeworking experiment. Like many non-Covid related health issues that went untreated due to the pandemic, we won’t know the longer-term mental and physical health effects of working from home for some time.
What many businesses are now looking to create is a blended approach to positioning their workforce. Known as a hybrid working or workplace model, whereby staff members work from home some of the time, work from the office some of the time, and in the case of certain companies with a higher level of geographical segmentation (or for other reasons), in workspaces that are near the homes of team members.
Satellite office locations such as business parks, out-of-town office parks and other suburban non-central business district locations are becoming more popular for many businesses for use within these models as they have the added benefit of reducing commute times for employees and their exposure to busy city centres and public transport.
As we saw the demand for these solutions increase during the pandemic, we created a directory of workspace operators providing flexible working space solutions in these UK satellite locations. This can be found below:
The Office Providers – UK Satellite Offices Locations
This type of model is being adopted as a form of compromise between working from home and in-office work which will hopefully reap the benefits of both styles of work.
There is no doubt that the world of work is in flux. Many behaviour patterns that were already in-train have been accelerated, and many that had been experimented with in the past, have been re-awakened.
It would be brave to bet on how the world of work, and many other elements of life, will look like in post-pandemic times.
And this is why we are seeing companies of all sizes and from all sectors, hedging.
They are adding agility and flexibility into their operations models and, specifically, their commercial real estate strategies. They are opting for flexible offices with shorter-term contracts and a turnkey or all-inclusive element to the agreements under which they are occupied.
Many are opting to incorporate home working into their operations models, yet not fully and completely.
This is how Apple is approaching post-pandemic working, initially – it was recently announced that Apple employees will only have to come into the office three days a week post-pandemic. However, these days need to correspond with the days that fellow team members are in as the purpose for the in-office days is for collaboration, social cohesion, mentoring, team bonding and for other functions that can’t be performed optimally through Teams, Vidyard or Zoom.
We don’t believe that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to how businesses should operate post-pandemic, in the same way that there wasn’t one pre-.
We do believe that we should make the protection of individuals and businesses the priority.
Like the vaccination program providing individuals with an enhanced immune response, we should also inject some agility into our businesses for their protection.
We can then go about getting on with running our lives and our businesses in the way that works best for us, and them.
However that may be.