The benefits of not going to work.

At the end of 2019 a good friend of mine who works from home bought a beautiful new apartment in a development in Islington, London - downstairs was a swanky new dine-in-cinema, a smattering of artisan stores and a vegan resterant, not to mention an Uber expensive gym. “I never need to leave home” he exclaimed proudly at his house warming. Now for myself - and perhaps for you, living, working, playing, shopping and eating in the same building sounds like hell, yet its a reality we have all had to adapt to at some point over the last 12 months.

For years big business has pushed back on the idea of remote working at any scale, cost for infrastructure and productivity have always been good scapegoats for keeping employees ‘visible’ (*read: changed to desks for the concrete 9-5). The rise of Zoom and like-hearted platforms that removed this scale of cost for business removed at least one of those hurdles.

Yes we’ve all adapted and while many of us have found the transition hard, there is no doubting the negative impact on mental health of the live-work situation. What’s less said is of the benefits we might have from being a little more in control of our lives, and not having to take time out to travel - or stick to a rigid 9-5. Starbucks COO, Roz Brewer, recently said in an interview for Fast Company “I’m so much more productive when I get sleep. Pre-COVID, I was only getting four hours of sleep a night. One positive, if anything, that I can get out of this is I can control my time more. Now I get six to seven hours sleep a night”. 

Fitness has become a booming industry, even in a time when gyms are closed, and supermarkets have seen shoppers return to buying ‘ingredients’ and away from ready meals, with Tesco declaring the ‘return of the weekly shop’. It seems that the great ‘disconnect’ has for some seen a ‘re-connect’ not only to friends and family, but also to ourselves and taking greater care of our bodies and health through keeping fit and being more active.

With the NHS in the UK, documenting no major flu outbreaks this winter, there is also much to be said for the impact on productivity loss of days through sickness and good impact on mental health from NOT running the gauntlet of the daily commute. The dread of spending 2hrs a day trudging to the station in the rain, or having to stand face against a sweaty arm-pit in the mid-summer heat on a packed train is a huge strain on the psychology of employees. Research from the University Clinic of umm in Germany studied the effects of commuting showing; “The psychosomatic condition of these people was terrible,” says Steffen Haefner, who led the study. The proportion who complained of symptoms such as pain, dizziness, exhaustion and severe sleep deprivation was twice as high as in a control group of non-commuters, 31 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women were in need of some form of medical treatment. The same study also calculated total personal satisfaction values for each individual by tabbing up the “profits” against the “debits” of the disadvantages. They concluded that for every minute longer a worker spends getting to work he will be less satisfied with his life, showing that Germans who commuted two hours a day were so much more dissatisfied than those with the average commute of 40 minutes. They stated by this scale, it would take a 40 percent raise in pay to make up for the ‘disgruntledness’.

Not only does not having a physical building make good financial sense for P&L, it helps hugely in lost work days from stress and sickness, it also makes great sense for payroll, enabling business to move away from the ‘compensation-culture’ of commuting.

So what does the future hold for big office blocks, and for employment, when companies like Salesforce commit to allowing remote working from now on, and Google offering employees grants to furnish their home office. What next for city centres and the industries that service them? We already see cities like New York and London noting population declines, former residents seeking a more Instagram friendly life have decamped to the country or sea-side. We also see initiatives in these cities by local planners seeking to de-urbanise city centres. The new Camden high Line, in London, a public beach on the Hudson in New York and a huge overhaul of the Champs Elysee in Paris all share the same focus on balancing a green first mentality to planning, and mixed-use development.

So what are the benefits of not ‘going’ to work. . . .

We can already see through these changes that a cementing of the importance of sustainable building, green-spaces, and open areas in the most urban of environments, a better balance of fitness space, gyms, public use facilities and more focus on leisure activities in housing and office developments. Perhaps like my friend, in the future we’ll all live and work in mixed-use developments that offer far more overall benefit to our lifestyles rather continuing to build houses, retail, and offices in zoned silos . . . Whatever the future of these areas looks like, we can all be sure that the way we work has changed forever, and I for one won’t ever be sad to see the end of standing on a sweaty train at the end of a long day.