Hybrid Working is Not the Answer: Part 2 - Knowledge Workers are being Liberated!

PART 2: Knowledge Workers are in the process of being liberated

In Part 1 of this series of 6, I summarised that demand for offices has changed forever, and that hybrid working is not “the solution” that organisations and landlords are seeking to fill their empty office space.?In this Part 2, I take a look at this underlying demand shift, and specifically examine the liberation of knowledge workers which is leaving office space across the globe sparsely occupied.

Underutilised office space is not a new phenomenon.?Even prior to the pandemic, leased office accommodation throughout the world was grossly underutilised.

Workspaces including desks, offices and other types of workspace were occupied on average about 42% of the time, according to a time utilisation study by AECOM over the past decade, that has recorded more than 10 million observations from 500 offices across 27 countries.

If organisations were paying a full-time salary for an employee working only 42% of the time, performance management would be the immediate response, likely followed by termination.?Yet companies seem comfortable to tolerate ‘lazy’ real estate, incurring a huge global cost.

On the assumption these office spaces were designed in a ‘right sized’ manner to accommodate the forecast total number of employees, we can reasonably conclude that more than half of workers were already working at locations outside of the office.?

In Australia, many companies have long recognised this vast waste of space and resources. ?For the past 10 to 15 years, time utilisation data has been used to support the extensive implementation of activity-based working (ABW) with unassigned seating, recognising that not only is office space significantly under-utilised, but also that a normal working day/week/month involves a broad range of tasks that cannot always be completed sitting at a desk.?At its core, however, ABW still assumes that the office is the place that most work is undertaken, perpetuating the link of work to place and the now outdated notion that people must “go to work”.????

Few companies had a formal flexible work policy pre-COVID-19, instead allowing some workers to work flexibly but ‘on the quiet’.?Indeed, there was a certain stigma associated with working from home.?As Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2017: “Some people are deeply sceptical about it.?They refer to it as ‘shirking from home’ or ‘working remotely, remotely working. They think it means goofing off and watching cartoons.”

The regular routine of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday has its origins in the 18th century Industrial Revolution, where workers operated machinery inside factories, which were located near a source of power. Workers had to travel there to undertake their shift, under the watchful eye of the factory floor manager.?

Some 250 years later, line of sight management and presenteeism remains prevalent in many businesses, and there is a deep-seated fear that productivity and corporate culture will diminish significantly if people aren’t attending the office daily.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic.

Businesses that were forced to send workers home have kept going – and many have prospered as a result.?Workers have found that they don’t need to “go to work” to get their work done, and that the central ‘place’ is no longer important for performing task-based functions.?

Workers who previously had limited flexibility are now finding significant benefits with the introduction of some remote working, and this has created conditions where corporates can no longer ignore flexible working policies.?There needs to be equality for all, and companies must consider what purpose the central office provides for their business operations.

The desire for flexibility is nothing new, but now employees and jobseekers are feeling confident about communicating it. Pauly Grant, Chief Talent Officer at Publicis ANZ, noted that “people wanted flexibility, but they may have been scared to approach it because people weren't talking about it on the same kind of level that they are now”.

In a June 2021 survey of 10,000 knowledge workers, CEO Daily found that:

• 76% want flexibility on where they work
• 93% want flexibility on when they work
• 56% are open to new job opportunities that may provide more flexibility
• 21% are likely to jump ship to get that flexibility
• Flexibility is now second only to compensation (salary) leading people to change jobs

From a smaller sample of 2,000 employees across the globe, JLL found a similar response, with 66% wanting to alternate between different places of work post-pandemic, and 72% wanting to work from home from time-to-time.

As Alan Murray summarised, “workers want flexibility and are willing to walk if they don’t get it”.

Google employees are taking pay cuts in return for greater flexibility.?Real estate futurist Dror Poleg observed: “Since June, roughly 10,000 of the internet company's more than 135,000 workers have asked for permission either to work remotely on a full-time basis, or to relocate to a different office once COVID-19 subsides. Google has so far approved 85% of the requests. The catch? Employees who choose to work from home, or even at an office in a new city or state, often must accept pay cuts".

We are witnessing the liberation of knowledge workers, driven by high demand for their services, and a realisation that the balance of power is now firmly, in fact very firmly indeed, in their favour.

Organisations must respond to meet the needs of their Employee-Customers, and the Hybrid Workplace is widely voiced as the solution to providing greater employee flexibility, subject to the parameters being controlled by the employer.?

However, as we will see in part three of this series next week, Hybrid working is a only rudimentary quick fix that does not provide a robust solution for the future of work.