I Don't Know... What's Next For The Office

Exploring the promise of 'hybrid working'

Yesterday, the UK guidance to ‘work from home where you can’ was removed, allowing workers across the country to return to the office in the coming weeks. There is hope that this will be the end to any coronavirus related restrictions, meaning companies and workers now have a lockdown-free future to plan for.

Consensus seems to be that “hybrid working” – a combination of home/remote working, mixed with days in the office – is the future. In a recent study by Accenture, 83% of workers identified that a hybrid working arrangement was what they wanted.

Hybrid working promises the best of both, the flexibility to stay at home when you need to, fewer days commuting and a space to come to engage and collaborate with your colleagues when that’s needed. For businesses, “hybrid” means giving staff what they want, and the image of a revamped (potentially smaller) office, ready for collaboration and flexibility where innovation and planning happens, is at the front of mind for many Execs as they look forward.

There also seems to be consensus that all the pandemic has done is accelerate an existing trend. With technology improving and workers becoming more global, it was inevitable that for many, working remotely or flexibly would become more common.

Having said that, for the first time a decision needs to be made about how people should work. Pre-pandemic, working from home regularly was rare and coming to the office – although sometimes a chore – was the norm. Throughout the pandemic there was no choice, we were made to work from home to keep ourselves safe.

Now there is a choice to make. Hybrid working is the easy and obvious one. As mentioned, it gives the best of both worlds. But change, particularly driven by a ‘top-down’ decision, will always lead to some groups being left unhappy. As the graph below (taken from wfhresearch.com, based in Chicago) shows, whilst most people want an element of working from home, the two most common responses are fully remote, or not remote at all.

Most hybrid work suggestions that I have come across suggest a split either way of 2v3 days. Judging by the above, this isn’t what most workers want.

The vision of hybrid working is to provide the best of both worlds, but done poorly it could quite easily become the worst of both worlds. An important question to consider is whether the idea of hybrid working is to make as many people as possible happy by delivering the optimum solution, or to make the fewest amount of people unhappy with compromise?

There is a large group who have become so accustomed to doing their jobs from home that they don’t see any need to return. They feel more productive and more comfortable without the need to travel into the office. For them, being forced to come back in even for only a few days a week might feel like an unnecessary waste of time. Why change what’s been proven to work? Especially with the “increased productivity” unlocked by working at home.

On the other side of the coin, you’ve got another group of people who are desperate to get back into the office. This includes those who have smaller or less comfortable work from home set-ups or rely on work as part of their social life, a place for meeting new people and developing themselves. For this group, the last 2 years have been a frustrating, worrying time. Invariably these people are more likely to be young.

Opening the office so that this group can return to the office a few days a week is surely going to solve those challenges, right? Well, not if the office they return to is barely full, meaning much of the day is still spent on zoom calls or alone. Not if the purpose of the office for a young, ambitious professional is to learn from others who have more experience and those older, more experienced folk have decided that they are more comfortable working from home.

To not only get people back into the office, but to get people back in on the same schedule as the others they need or want to be with, is a challenge that will require lots and lots of planning, especially for larger businesses. This won’t be easy.

Another risk is that people that do come into the office more often may be treated more favourably, simply through “being seen”. Those who have decided that working from home suits them best run the risk of being “out of sight and out of mind”. Is this wrong? If this is impacting people who have decided that working from home is a way to avoid the office or difficult conversations, this might not be an unwarranted result, but for those where remote work is genuinely more appropriate, this is not fair.  

If in 6 months hybrid working doesn’t take off and offices aren’t being fully utilised, then what? A scenario that could play out if some workers are reluctant to return, is a quiet, empty space with only a few younger workers coming in. Without the benefits of a full, vibrant environment those individuals may deem the return pointless and come in less or look to move on. If offices remain largely empty despite no restrictions, Execs will have a real choice to make. Do they ‘force’ people to return and risk upsetting people, or do they lean into the perceived mood and reduce office space further (with the added benefit of cost savings). In this instance I worry that older Execs will forget all that they took from the office in their formative years, when making decisions on behalf of those trying to make the most of theirs.

Most people will insist that they have the right to choose. The problem with the combination of hybrid/flexible working and personal choice, is that people (rightly) will choose what is best for themselves as individuals. The benefits for those who want to return to the office are largely centred on being around colleagues, which relies on others making decisions that align with theirs. Lots of offices are diverse: people of different ages, with different living arrangements and therefore with different preferences. Giving people a choice is likely to lead to the scenario laid out above, where hybrid working morphs into people doing their own thing and diminishing the benefits of the office altogether.

I don’t know how this all plays out, but I do know that the answer isn’t easy. Without careful consideration, hybrid working may become the compromise nobody wants, rather than the optimum solution that is currently being presented.