Remote Work is Here to Stay | Webinar Replay

I’m a researcher at Hassel, which is a global architecture and design company. As you might imagine working at an architecture firm right now, a lot of our clients have been coming to us and asking to help them understand what might be happening in the workplace and what the workplace might look like after the pandemic.

When our clients come to us with this question, in part, they’re asking us about the design of their workplace, but implicit within their questions about how they allocate capital, because buildings themselves are expensive to create and maintain; how they manage employees, because where someone works influences how you manage them; and how they structure their business after the pandemic.

18 months ago, this wouldn’t have even been a question! Then, people worked in offices, and unless they were really trying something radical, that was basically the end of the discussion. But today, this isn’t quite as obvious.

I think we’ve all been surprised to see how effectively people can work from home during the pandemic. It left us in a strange place as the pandemic begins to recede because it’s shown that a lot of our conventional wisdom around how the workplace functions may not quite apply as we thought it once did, so I want to focus on this question of the workplace today.

Everyone has an opinion about what the future of work is going to be. I probably receive one email a day about what’s about to happen in the workplace, and I think what’s probably most striking about this is that there’s really no consensus about what’s about to happen.

Some of the experts will argue that our experiment with working from home has been so successful that remote work is here to stay. Others speculate that people are just starving for face-to-face interaction and that central business districts are going to come roaring back.

And splitting the difference, there’s this other group that believes that the future of work won’t be either of these two extremes but some hybrid between the two, where people split their time between a traditional office and a homework environment.

What I think is interesting about a lot of this writing is that there’s this idea that there will be a consensus on this issue. For example, before the pandemic, people worked in offices. Each office might have had slightly different furniture or somewhat different amenities, but for the most part, you could walk into the headquarters of a legal firm, a newspaper, a technology company, basically anywhere in the world, and they’d all look and operate much the same.

We had that kind of same experience of working in a similar manner during the pandemic. So although the pandemic was a really tumultuous time, and it was really difficult for a lot of people to get through, there’s still this kind of commonality in how we worked, which is to say that most people that used to work in an office suddenly found themselves working at home.

We had this common experience of being at home and doing work, but because we’ve always done this thing, I think you’ll also see this sort of assumption in the media that after the pandemic, we’re also going to be always doing the same thing together as well.

So no one’s quite sure what that thing is. Perhaps we’ll be working from home, or maybe we’ll be working from the office, or we’ll be working in a hybrid scenario, but they’re all fairly sure that we’ll be doing the same thing. And our research at Hassel suggests this isn’t the case, and in fact, I think companies are starting to diverge in how they approach the workplace rather than converging on one method.

And if you take anything away from this talk today, I just ask you to challenge this assumption when you hear that everyone will be doing the same thing after their pandemic or that there’s one correct way of doing things after the pandemic.

Thanks to the prudent policy of the Australian Government, the country fared quite well in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and now is one step ahead of other countries in adjusting to the new socio-economic realities.

At the moment, sure, it’s in a bit of a tight spot because the Delta variant emerged and managed to get into Australia through the border, so in the last few weeks, the country’s actually gone back down into lockdowns.

But businesses there at least had this period of say six months where they got to operate without the daily threat of the pandemic. And because they’ve had more time to experience it, the way companies over there adjusted to the post-pandemic workplace and how they’re thinking about it, I think, provides an early indication of what’s likely to happen in other countries.

In Australia, one of the most interesting things that came out of this shift back into the workplace is that you saw the change in focus from basically short-term concerns to this long-term outcome outlook.

By short-term concerns, I mean that initially, as people were returning, many things that people were concerned about were these practicalities of whether elevators will have enough space, how do we get enough physical separation, how do we maintain hygiene in the workspace.

But then, very quickly, that flip to being more about the long-term concerns:

• How does the culture of work change?
• How does work itself change?
• How do digital systems need to keep up?

And I think those are far more interesting because they touch on the core of what it is to do work.

To get a better sense of where things were heading in Australia, we ran a series of interviews with Australian business leaders and workplace experts. Then we also ran a survey with 1600 Australian office workers, and we also surveyed 500 office workers in the US. It’s important to note that the people we interviewed were not our clients, friends, family, or anything like that. We had a representative sample of people that work out of offices in Australia, or they would have typically worked out of an office prior to the pandemic.

For me, one of the more fascinating things that we saw from this research was just the variety of workplace models that companies were considering.

There’s a huge range that goes from being completely in person again (going back to the office as it was,) through to a bunch of different hybrid scenarios, such as activity-based working, the Clubhouse, Hub and spoke, or being completely remote as well (no office.)

For me, one of the more fascinating things that we saw from this research was just the variety of workplace models that companies were considering.

There’s a huge range that goes from being completely in person again – going back to the office as it was, through to a bunch of different hybrid scenarios, such as activity-based working, the Clubhouse, Hub and spoke, or being completely remote as well (no office.)

• Traditional mode
  • In-person in the office
• Hybrid mode
  • Turbocharged ABW
  • Clubhouse
  • Hub and spoke
• Virtual mode
  • Fully remote, no office

Those five buckets are the five things that firms were looking at, and so I’ll run through each of these models quickly to give you a kind of sense of what the range is there.

Those five buckets are the five things that firms were looking at, and so I’ll run through each of these models quickly to give you a kind of sense of what the range is there.

AS IT WAS

A central office in the city is an easy and proven strategy

The traditional office mode is the one that we’re all familiar with. Essentially it involves employees returning to the office and resuming a regular nine to five. The office may be a little bit more hygienic and flexible, but mostly this is the centralized office as it was prior to the pandemic.

For the organizations that we spoke to that were considering or adopting this model, the main appeal of it is that it’s familiar. These organizations felt like they’d gone through a year of upheaval and change. Many of the employees were going through what they described as change fatigue, and there’s something really comforting about the idea of returning to a place that was already known.

On top of that, it’s a model that is tried and true. Companies have been doing this for decades. They’ve got the real estate ready to go, they know how to operate it, they know that it works in a variety of settings and contexts, and that it’s pretty safe.

But there was also a contingent of companies that I’d say were shying away from this model. Generally, there was a sense for those companies that continuing as it was would be a missed opportunity to do something better than the status quo. Adding on to that was this concern that returning to things as it was may not actually be possible.

In particular, there was this concern that employees may be hesitant to return to the office and that these large offices may feel fairly empty if not everyone’s back in them, which takes away one of the key components of what makes these offices work – the energy that you get from the people around you.

TURBOCHARGED ABW

Activity-based working with a more efficient sharing ratio

We see from many organizations regarding the coming out of the pandemic that they’re considering how to use their office space if employees are spending less time in the office and more time working from home. The problem that they’re essentially facing is that if you have an employee only come into the office three days a week, their desk will sit vacant for two or three or maybe even four days a week.

One common solution here that many companies are looking at is agile workplace models such as activity-based working where employees no longer have an assigned desk. This idea has been around for a few decades now, although it’s not that popular in the US.

What happens is rather than going to an office and sitting at a fixed desk for eight hours a day, you arrive at the office, you’ve got your laptop, and you can choose where you want to work within the office. For example, you might work in a meeting room when you’ve got a meeting, or you might go to a phone booth to make a phone call. It might be a cafe inside your office that you set out to do some of your work, and then you might go into, say, a library-like space to do some heads-down work later in the day.

Activity-based working is fairly common in Australia as it is in some parts of Europe. With activity-based working, organizations are looking to push the sharing ratio of these spaces further as countries start to adapt to new realities.

Before the pandemic, the typical office space sharing ratio in Australia was 0.8, which means that there were 8 workstations for every 10 employees. And remember, those employees are “floating” around the office, so you’re never going to have a situation where you have 10 people trying to sit in eight seats all at once.

Now we see companies looking to push that ratio fairly aggressively to like 0.6 and 0.5, which means there would be 5-6 guests for 10 people.  While that sounds super extreme, the idea here is that employees are spending more time working from home, so there will be fewer of them in the office, and it won’t feel overcrowded. This model shrinks a company’s footprint quite dramatically and gives employees some flexibility over where they want to work.

That said, companies adopting this model also face challenges. We know prior to the pandemic that activity-based working was a really challenging model for companies to adopt, mostly because it’s not just a kind of special transformation of what the office looks like but a cultural transformation of how the office operates

CLUBHOUSE

Maximize collaboration, connection, and socialization

Another hybrid model is slightly different from the activity-based model and implies that people are splitting their time based on what they’re doing. The basic idea is that people would come into an office to socialize, interact and collaborate and that they’d work from home when they need to focus more.

A bunch of studies during the pandemic have shown that people find it much easier to focus at home than they did at the office. They are more productive in reading, writing, and other kinds of heads-down focused work. At the same time, it has been difficult for people when they’ve been at home to do collaborative things like brainstorming, ideation, and other kinds of joint activities that rely on other people.

This model combines the strength of these two workplaces: you do all the focus work at home where you’ve got the space to do it, and you come into the office to collaborate and enjoy being around other people.

I don’t think there are too many examples of this being used prior to the pandemic. Still, like the activity-based working model, it comes with the benefit of really shrinking the floor plan within the office and saving a lot of money that way. For me, one of the lingering questions about this model is whether people’s schedules really fit into these neat moments of collaboration and focus and whether you can physically separate these two activities, so I think that needs to be a bit better developed.

HUB AND SPOKE

Live and work in the same area

The “hub and spoke” model was a big thing back in the 80s and 90s, but it’s coming back. It implies splitting a central office in a single city into several satellite offices closer to places of your employee residence.

The theory or idea behind this model is that you presumably end up in this best of both worlds situation, where employees don’t have to commute into an office every day. Instead, they can work somewhere close to their homes and have the benefits of being around their colleagues in an office.

In reality, we’ve had a lot of clients approach us because they’re in a “hub and spoke” office, and they want to consolidate back into a central office. That’s generally because having “a hub and spoke” office is a lot more expensive than having a centralized office.

NO OFFICE

Ditch expensive leases and embrace life at home

The final example here is just going fully virtual and having no office. While this would have sounded super extreme before the pandemic, many companies have found that they’re actually quite happily doing this, and they’ve done it for over a year now.

There’s obviously a huge benefit in terms of real estate costs if you no longer have to pay for an office. On top of that, companies have found that it’s a good way to attract talent because you’ve got a lot more geographic flexibility in where you’re drawing candidates from.

For me, some of the most interesting companies adopting this model are the ones that started during the pandemic. They’ve never known an office had never been a part of their core culture, and they’re building their companies around this model. However, I think there are some unknowns with this. Particularly, working remotely when everyone else is doing it during a pandemic, and doing it when a lot of your competitors are back in an office, might be two very different things.

THE ULTIMATE DECISION IS A COMPLICATED SET OF TRADE-OFFS

So, those are the five models that represent the range of options that many companies are considering in Australia. None of these models are necessarily new, but this scope and breadth that people can consider in this next iteration definitely is.

• To see the results of the survey conducted by Hassell, please open the webinar at this timestamp

A TAILORED APPROACH

How much space you need is not a question – it is an answer!

I’ve presented these five workplace models almost like a menu that a company could choose from, but I think it might be a kind of an answer to a whole series of questions that come before them:

• What is the company’s purpose?
• What is their strategy for the future?
• What are their culture and values?
• What type of work do they do?
• What do their employees and managers want from their workplace?

Without this kind of foundational knowledge of what a company is and where they want to go, picking the right workplace model can be somewhat fraught. I think if there’s one lesson to take from the workplace during the pandemic, perhaps it’s not that working from home was necessarily better or worse than working from the office, but that each of these modes of work had its own merits. There seems to be this growing awareness that these differences are one of the levers that a company could use to tune the workplace to their needs and the needs of their employees.

We might look back on photographs of workplaces prior to the pandemic and think that they looked odd, not because we’d cram people in so closely without face masks, but because offices before the pandemic were largely one-size-fits-all kind of affairs. It was strange that a company that is a legal firm or a newspaper technology company could all work from an office that looks and operates much the same?

• To jump to the Q&A session, please open the webinar at this timestamp.