This article was originally published in October 2020.
In order to rethink our working spaces effectively, we must consider new priorities.
“The office is dead!” some headlines have proclaimed. “What’s the point of an office anyway?” others have asked. Are these bold claims an exaggeration or, at the very least, premature? Despite recent enforced home-working, can online interactions and remote working really foster creativity and collaboration and sustain productivity for the longer term? A recent podcast by BDO named ‘Rethinking the Office’ tackled these issues and asked to what extent we will see a seismic shift in the way we work.
Recent events have caused companies to re-evaluate their property usage. As in previous recessions, we have already seen certain property trends play out, such as a decline in leasing, a rise in property vacancies and a stalling of developments. As office space typically represents a significant operating cost for a business, pressure is being put on boards and leadership teams to consider assets and to be smarter with their real estate usage. Businesses are likely to be looking at their occupancies and may seek to reduce their footprint, pursue shorter or more flexible lease terms or even move to a cheaper location. For those with upcoming lease negotiations, tenants may have the upper hand – as we have seen in other sectors.
One of the challenges facing many businesses is an always-on culture, where rising client demands and ambitious growth targets lead to a blurring of home and office working. Recent months have shown that people do not necessarily need to commute to an office to add value, so with a growing number of people wanting greater flexibility, could a mix of office and home-working be the answer?
Savills’ recent Office Fit survey found 89% of respondents felt the office would remain a necessity, but the preference expressed on working from home post-lockdown was on average two or three days a week. On BDO’s ‘Rethinking the Office’ podcast, KKS Savills’ head of workplace strategy and design, Katrina Kostic Samen, comments: “I think long term there will be roughly 50% of people that want to work 50% of the time at home, and 30% will want to be back in the office or working in a third space.” Savills’ survey showed it is the younger generation (those aged 18-24) and the over-65s that want less time at home and more in the office, compared with those aged 45 to 55.
Now that working from home has been proved possible, what role will the office play? Hot-desking is certainly off the cards for the short term at least, but will we see a radical shift away from desks and a move towards office spaces as flexible, collaborative environments? Kostic Samen certainly thinks so: “It’s about a workspace that you can do many things with and meet many people.”
Now is possibly the biggest opportunity for firms to reconsider and redesign the way they use property
What is clear is that people need a reason to come into the office, and that reason could be face-to-face collaboration. Darren Comber, CEO of architect Scott Brownrigg, explains some of the challenges his teams have faced during lockdown: “The big thing is collaboration… We can’t do that effectively at home. As architects, it’s very difficult to design a scheme interactively over a screen where you’ll keep twisting your sketchbook and saying, what do you think of that?”
In all companies there are benefits in chance meetings and picking up ad hoc information. Jonty Bloom, an ex-BBC employee and the BDO podcast host, says: “It’s about the interaction of meeting people at the printer and being able to pick someone’s brains immediately or pick up a bit of information that you didn’t know. People think the office is just a place where you have a desk and a computer terminal. But it’s the interaction that works, isn’t it?”
If companies are going to encourage people back into the office, they will have to make it a much more attractive place to interact. One of the reasons that firms invest in bricks and mortar and in creating ‘wow’ spaces is the critical role they play in attracting and retaining the best and brightest talent. This poses a paradox. On the one hand, greater home-working could unlock much bigger workforce pools and at a lower cost to premium city salaries. Likewise, companies will have the opportunity to tap into the global talent pool more easily.
The flipside, however, is that physical offices have an important role to play in coaching and mentoring, which in part could explain the findings of the Savills survey. Darren Comber explains that his company is looking to utilise its office space in a similar way to universities – becoming task based rather than hours based – with people undertaking work at home and then coming into the office to share ideas and to learn from others. There is also the importance of company culture: in a remote working environment, it is challenging to maintain this successfully and to foster a sense of belonging. “People are going to be less tolerant of spaces that don’t promote wellbeing or something that gives something different to what they’ve got at home,” says Comber.
So, what is the future of office space and what is the demand likely to be in the future? Comber says: “In many instances we’re going to need more space, because the space in the office will be given over to different tasks. We won’t be packing people in side by side. To do those tasks is actually going to require more space. And so lots of companies are already looking at how they can adapt their current office space and announcing that we’re going to need more than this – because even though we’re going to have less people in there, the space we’re going to need to provide is going to be very, very different.”
Companies now face a juggling act, balancing the desire of many workers for greater flexibility, the high cost of maintaining office space and the need to gather skilled workers in one place to foster greater collaboration and teamwork. Whether they are looking to invest in office space, or re-evaluate the space they have and its usage, now is possibly the biggest opportunity for firms to reconsider and redesign the way they use property. This really could be seen as a blank-page moment.
One thing is certain: businesses face tough decisions around their property and workspaces. Perhaps most important for the modern office is to reflect the needs of its workforce to foster culture, be distinctive and to attract and retain talent – and no two workforces are the same.
To listen to BDO’s ‘Rethinking the Office’ podcast, click here.
