You Asked Us: Using data to dispel back to workplace anxiety

Our expert panel:

Tim Oldman, CEO, Leesman

Raj Krishnamurthy, CEO and Founding Partner, Freespace

Home working requires a high level of trust between team members. Is there a danger that we could see an uptick in “staff surveillance” – potentially especially invasive given that it will intrude on people’s home lives?

Raj Krishnamurthy: There is a general concern that remote working will increase distrust in staff and push managers to increase digital surveillance to monitor performance. However, this is a time of momentous change for ways of working and businesses will need to take a holistic view of outcomes and results, rather than just focus on output from individuals. Trust will be key. Businesses that are able to build a culture of trust and manage individuals for outcomes and results will be the most successful when it comes to retaining and attracting the best talent.

Tim Oldman: The best organisations trust their employees, and they already did before the pandemic – they weren’t forced to because of it. A good manager knows how to offer flexibility and work with team members to ensure they’re supported and can achieve what they need to. I think people will actually be more understanding and welcoming of things like workplace sensor technology when they do go into the office. Whether it’s to ensure spaces aren’t overpacked, or to see what colleague is in the office on what day, the tech will be there for their benefit.

Is the ability to work from home likely to be a hiring criterion moving forward? What will that do to diversity and inclusion policies?

TO: We know that workplaces are tools for competitive advantage, and in the same way, the way you work and how your organisation thinks about work is a tool for competitive advantage. Flexibility will be an expectation, not a ‘nice to have’ for those looking for work moving forward – you’ll choose the employer who can prove that they trust their people to have flexibility in how and where they work, not just the one with the ‘best’ workplace.

Interestingly, our early home working experience data may be showing that women are coping better on the whole with home working, regardless of work setting or the presence of others. Take from that what you will, but certain demographics need certain things from work to support the tasks that they do. That’s always been the case and businesses should have this front of mind at all times. We also now know that the lack of a dedicated workspace at home is the strongest statistical driver in achieving a high productivity agreement. Armed with this information, would business leaders not want to ask a prospective employee if they had a dedicated space to work from?

RK: I don't believe diversity and inclusion will be affected by a move to home-working. But the ability to work from home may impact hiring criteria. The flexibility that comes with working from home will benefit employees more than employers. I don’t think many employers will require new starters to work from home.

TO: In many ways, the option of home working has created a more even playing field. For instance, by removing the employee’s commute, those with a physical disability don’t have their chances at a role impeded in this way. This might also enable people to move further from city centres – again, opening up the talent pool. Though the same is of course true for your competitors, as we’ve all had a taste of home working. Talent attraction and retention management is well and truly back and is even more acutely necessary.

Real estate space-as-a-service has been talked about for a long time now. How might the Netflix/Airbnb/Spotify of the commercial real estate world look?

RK: Space-as-a-service was demonstrated by WeWork, albeit in a way attributable to private investor ambitions. There will be several new business models that emerge, designed to improve how space is consumed given the new ways of working being trialled right now. This will be driven as much by occupiers as service providers.

TO: Suddenly everyone is talking about ‘experience’. But how do we provide every employee with a blended physical and virtual work landscape that optimally supports them in their role, allowing them to be the best possible version of themselves? A critical component in that will undoubtedly be that we are all now likely to be itinerant visitors to our corporate workplaces, with almost every organisation accepting that their corporate centres no longer need to be sized 1:1 to their headcount. Netflix, Airbnb and Spotify are aggregators, conduits to other people’s services and products, so they’re not the best comparison. You can however ‘consume’ them from anywhere. In the same way, organisations will need to figure out how to stay connected to employees, wherever they are – not only for lines of communication, but to understand how they’re working and what support they might need.

You’ve talked about the possible problem of Covid-19 bias in future contingency planning, but how would you assess the likelihood that, actually, we’ll quickly forget all the lessons of the last few months, and return to the “old ways”?

TO: In many regards, I think we will retreat to what we know and have known. We know how important physical workplaces are and without them, organisations will not function the same in the long term. I think that once employees taste that secret sauce that they get from being with colleagues in spaces that offer variety, learning from others through overhearing conversations and the social aspects of work that are so important, they’ll quickly be reminded why offices exist, whether they choose to be in them all the time or not. Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way we work, albeit by default, but I do not believe this means that the office is dead. We’ve adapted, as we’ve had to, and for some, it’s working well. For many others the situation is far from ideal.

There are two phenomena here – the genie is out, mass mobilisation to home working is ‘possible’, but we haven’t yet proven if it has a long-term benefit. We now have our three wishes but it’s imperative that we’re wise with what we wish for and what we plan next. What is it that we want, and why? We need to remind ourselves of the true value of workplace, not least because landlords can’t afford to reduce cost. Tenants should be carefully and accurately assessing the benefit of corporate spaces.