“Wait a minute, Doc, are you telling me you built a time machine?”
Time machines, rather like Deloreans and hoverboards sadly don’t exist in 2022. But offices still do – just about. With Covid-19 rates reducing across the globe, many employers are again preparing to bring their staff back to the office. However, they are not going back to the office in December 2019 – something else is waiting for us, something better.
Businesses of all kinds, across multiple sectors, have been setting their return dates in the UK. With some sectors, most notably Finance, insisting on a hard return in Q2 of this year, other sectors have taken a more laissez-faire approach. In the technology sector, we have seen companies such as Spotify and Dropbox openly adopt flexible working by offering full-time remote contracts and a mix of hybrid working arrangements.
Similarly, this trend of hybrid working can be seen across the Consulting and Pharmaceutical sectors. In the latter, we have seen companies such as Glaxo-Smith-Kline, based in Brentford, suggest that agile working will be flexible, as their main competitors in Europe, Pfizer, and Novartis have indicated significant hybrid working models, thus creating a War on Talent. In the former, Consulting firms such as Deloitte have suggested that all its UK staff will be able to choose where to work in the future – the company has been an ongoing champion of agile working since 2014.
Return to Office Approach by Industry
However, some organisations have already switched permanently to remote working and/or hybrid models. While some organisations may be holding out for staff to return to their desks, each delay further entrenches hybrid working patterns, rendering a full staff return more difficult to sell to older staff in particular. Even more so when job markets appear to only be becoming more aggressive.
In response to employees working remotely, many organisations have been thinking of ways to entice their staff back to the office. Some have gone down the incentives route, offering, free gym memberships, discounts at café’s/restaurants and even subsidised travel or childcare. Others have focused on developing their existing space or workspace offering, betting on the fact that an improved experience will mean employees choose the office as a space that ultimately is more productive for many tasks.
With recent studies suggesting that remote working can in fact increase productivity and still lead to innovation, more and more organisations continue to adopt hybrid working models within their corporate real estate strategies. As we can see from our research the majority are taking a hybrid approach and as of yet not strictly enforcing what has been implemented. So far at least.
What is being done differently?
Instead of going back to the past, we will be going Back to the Future, or more pragmatically put, towards a more balanced world of life & work. Forget about the long morning commutes, as Dr Emmett Brown said in Back to the Future, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”. Instead, the future will be a place of digitalisation, whereby organisations offer an array of flexibility to not only compete for talent, but also to achieve sustainable goals, whilst simultaneously achieving innovation and productivity in the wave of Digital 4.0. It is telling to note that the world’s most innovative firms are backing the office – by signing significant leases – but this time they think they can simply do workspace better. The rest of us are going to have to catch up.
