In April 2022 Future Forum surveyed 10,000 “knowledge workers” across a number of world economies, asking them about flexible working.?
Just 21% of those surveyed wanted to return to the office. We can all appreciate that this is not a high percentage.
Weighing against this are a number of business leaders, including Elon Musk but also many who regularly post on LinkedIn in their capacity as leaders of government or service organizations, who make arguments in favor of returning to the office ranging from fairness, productivity, ease of collaboration to mental health.
There’s plenty of research and real world anecdotes to debunk or support arguments on both sides. For example, Stanford’s research of 16,000 people concluded that productivity did in fact increase by around 13% among those working from home. One assumes this didn’t include factory or leisure industry workers – no doubt productivity in those sectors has the potential to be seriously hampered by remote work .
As people have become more entrenched on either side of the debate, a middle ground has been lost, which might provide a compromise.
This solution might look something like:
- Offices as collaboration hubs – dedicated (not shared) social hubs with common areas and plentiful quiet or conference-style rooms. Nooks for small meetings, or board rooms for big pitches - coffee and cafes at the centre of offices to support more impromptu collaboration. Offices should feel more like members clubs (the membership being employment) – the office should be designed to be the best place to collaborate, not the mandated place to collaborate.
- Anchor days – many who have returned to the office complain of being a tiny minority who choose to attend on any given day. I’d recommend that Tuesday and Wednesday, for example, become mandatory anchor days where substantially all of the team attend, with Thursday also potentially added to this group as the need arises. The remaining days are flexible.
- Improved and proportional support for those who do commute more frequently. The concept of higher salaries being paid in higher cost cities is familiar to many businesses – we should consider attendance-related cost-offsets for workers to reflect the fact that commuting requires workers to spend time and money, both on travel but also potentially on more extensive childcare provision.
- Reduced emphasis on fixed working hours, reflecting the reality of flexible work responsibilities – we manage capacity through projects and deliverables, rarely on minutes left in the day. Do we really care whether tasks are completed at 8pm, when a person might feel at their most productive, or 2pm, when a person might feel at their least, or have a doctor's appointment, for that matter?
?Interested to hear thoughts.
