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Tag: hybrid working

Post pandemic continues to force the adoption of new ways of working. Companies must reimagine their work and the role of offices in creating safe, productive, and enjoyable jobs and lives for employees.

COVID-19 has left unprecedented challenges, many companies across the country rose to the occasion, acting swiftly to safeguard employees and migrate to a new way of working that even the most extreme business-continuity plans had not envisioned. Across industries, leaders have used lessons from this large-scale work-from-home experiment to reimagine how work is undertaken and what role offices should play—in creative and bold ways.

Changing attitudes on the role of the office

Before the pandemic, the conventional wisdom had been that offices were critical to productivity, culture, and winning the war for talent. Companies competed intensely for prime office space within cities and emerging locations, and many focused-on solutions that were seen to promote collaboration. Densification, open-office designs, hoteling, and co-working were the operational cries.

During the pandemic, many people have been surprised by how quickly and effectively technologies for videoconferencing and other forms of digital collaboration were adopted. For many, the results have been better than imagined.

According to research, people questioned report that they enjoy working from home. Stating that they are more productive than they had been before and followed by being just as productive. Many employees released from long commutes and travel have found more productive ways to spend that time, enjoyed greater flexibility in balancing their personal and professional lives, and decided that they prefer to work from home rather than the office. Many organisations think they can access new pools of talent with fewer locational constraints, adopt innovative processes to boost productivity, create an even stronger culture, and significantly reduce Estate and FM costs.

The office experience won’t remain as it was before the pandemic. Many companies will require redesign of spaces to ensure agile physical distancing and restrict movement in congested areas. As a result, even after the discussions of Hybrid working, attitudes toward offices will continue to evolve.

But is it possible that the satisfaction and productivity people experience working from homes is the product of the social capital built up through countless hours of water-cooler conversations, meetings, and social engagements before the onset of the crisis? Will corporate cultures and communities erode over time without physical interaction? Will planned and unplanned moments of collaboration become impaired? Will there be less mentorship and talent development? Has working from home succeeded only because it was viewed as temporary, not permanent?

The reality is that both sides of the argument are right. Every organisation and culture are different, and so are the circumstances of every individual employee. Many have enjoyed this new experience; others are fatigued by it. Sometimes, the same people have experienced different emotions and levels of happiness or unhappiness at contrasting times. The productivity of the employees who do many kinds of jobs has increased; for others it has declined. Many forms of virtual collaboration are working well; others are not. Some people are getting mentorship and participating in casual, unplanned, and important conversations with colleagues; others are missing out.

Steps to reimagine work and workplaces

Leading businesses will boldly question long-held assumptions about how work should be done and the role of the office. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The answer, different for every organisation, will be based on what is needed, which roles are most important, how much collaboration is necessary for excellence, and where offices are located today, among other factors. Even within an organisation, the answer could look different across geographies, businesses, and functions, so the exercise of determining what will be required in the future must be a team effort across the estates, human resources, technology, and the business. Tough choices will come up and a leaders must be empowered to drive the change across individual functions and businesses. Permanent change will also require exceptional change-management skills and constant pivots based on how well the effort is working overtime.

We recommend that businesses take the following steps to reimagine how work is done and what the future role of the office will be.

During the lockdowns, companies have necessarily adapted to go on collaborating and to ensure that the most important processes could be executed remotely. Most have simply transplanted existing processes to remote work contexts, imitating what had been done before the pandemic. This has worked well for some businesses and processes, but not for others.

Companies should identify the most important processes for each of their business, geography, and function, and re-envision them completely, often with involvement by employees. This effort should examine their professional-development journeys (for instance, being physically present in the office at the start and working remotely later) and the various stages of projects (such as being physically co-located for initial planning and working remotely for execution).

Previously, for example, businesses may have generated ideas by convening a meeting, brainstorming on a physical or digital whiteboard, and assigning someone to refine the resulting ideas. A new process may include a period of asynchronous brainstorming on a digital channel and incorporating ideas from across the organization, followed by a period of debate and refinement on an open video conference.

Companies should also reflect on their values and culture and on the interactions, practices, and rituals that promote that culture. A company that focuses on developing talent, for example, should ask whether the small moments of mentorship that happen in an office can continue spontaneously in a digital world. Other practices reconstructed and strengthened so that the business creates and sustains the community and culture it seeks.

For both processes and cultural practices, it is all too tempting to revert to what was in place before the pandemic. Reimagining and reconstructing processes and practices will serve as a foundation of an improved operating model that leverages the best of both in-person and remote work.

Decide ‘people to work’ or ‘work to people’

In the past couple of years, the competition for talent has been fiercer than ever. At the same time, some groups of talent are less willing to relocate to their employers’ locations than they had been in the past. As a business reconstruct how they work and identify what can be done remotely, they can make decisions about which roles must be conducted in person, and to what degree. Roles can be re-classified into employee segments by considering the value that remote working could deliver:

  • fully remote
  • hybrid remote
  • hybrid remote by exception
  • on site (not eligible for remote work)

For the roles in the first two categories, upskilling is critical, but talent sourcing may become easier since the pool of available talent could have fewer geographical constraints. In fact, talented people could live in the cities of their choice, which may have a lower cost of living and proximity to people and places they love, while they still work for leading organizations. A monthly trip to headquarters or a meeting with colleagues at a shared destination may suffice. This approach could be a winning proposition for both employers and employees, with profound effects on the quality of talent an organization can access and the cost of that talent.

Redesign the workplace to support operational priorities

We all have ideas about what a typical office looks and feels like: a mixture of private offices and cubicles, with meeting rooms, tea points, kitchens, and shared amenities. Few offices are intentionally designed to support specific organizational priorities. Although offices have changed in some ways during the past decade, they may need to be entirely rethought and transformed for a post–COVID-19 world.

Businesses could create workspaces specifically designed to support the kinds of interactions that cannot happen remotely. If the primary purpose of an organization’s space is to accommodate specific moments of collaboration rather than individual work, for example, should eighty percent of the office be dedicated to collaboration rooms? Should organizations ask all employees who work in cubicles, and rarely must attend group meetings, to work from homes? If office space is needed only for those who cannot do so, are working spaces close to where employees live a better solution?

In the office of the future, technology will play pivotal role in enabling employees to return to office buildings and to work safely. Companies will need to manage which employees can come to the office, when they can enter and take their places, how often the office is cleaned, whether the airflow is sufficient, and if they are remaining sufficiently far apart as they move through the space.

To maintain productivity, collaboration, and learning and to preserve the corporate culture, the boundaries between being physically in the office and out of the office must collapse. In-office videoconferencing can no longer involve a group of people staring at one another around a table while others watch from a screen on the side, without being able to participate effectively. Always-on videoconferencing, seamless in-person, and remote collaboration spaces (such as virtual whiteboards), and asynchronous collaboration and working models will quickly shift from futuristic ideas to standard practice.

A transformational approach to reinventing offices will be necessary. Instead of adjusting the existing footprint incrementally, companies should take a fresh look at how much and where space is required and how it fosters desired outcomes for collaboration, productivity, culture, and the work experience. That kind of approach will also involve questioning where offices should be located. Some companies will continue to have them in big cities, which many regard as essential to attract young talent and create a sense of connection and energy. Others may abandon big-city headquarters for suburban hot spots.

These changes may not only improve how work is done but also lead to savings. Rent, capital costs, facilities operations, maintenance, and management make estates the largest cost category outside of compensation for many businesses.

While some companies have reduced these costs by thinking through footprints—taking advantage of alternative workplace strategies and reviewing approaches to managing space—many corporate leaders have treated them as a given. In a post–COVID-19 world, the potential to reduce estate costs could be significant. Simply getting market-comparable lease rates and negotiating competitive facilities-management contracts will not be enough. FM and estate managers should collaborate with the business and HR to redo the footprint entirely and develop fit-for-purpose space designs quickly—in some cases, by creating win–win approaches with property owners.

The value at stake is significant. Over time, some organizations could reduce their real-estate costs by 30 percent. Those that shift to a fully virtual model could almost eliminate them. Both could also increase their organizational resilience and reduce their level of risk by having employees work in many separate locations.

Now is the time

As employers around the world experiment with bringing their employees back to offices, the leadership must act now to ensure that when they return, workplaces are both productive and safe.

Businesses must also use this moment to break from the inertia of the past by dispensing with suboptimal old habits and systems. A well-planned office can use this moment to reinvent their role and create a better experience for talent, improve collaboration and productivity, and reduce costs. That kind of change will require transformational thinking grounded in facts. The aim of this reinvention will be what good companies have always wanted: a safe environment where people can enjoy their work, collaborate with their colleagues, and achieve the objectives of their organizations.

For building owners or occupying businesses, 2020/2021 was a roller-coaster year that left an unprecedented amount of office space empty for many months. Although working from home is a challenge for many, post Covid surveys highlight home working is here to staying in some form.

The unexpected experiment in remote working surpassed expectations because of the mass adoption of collaboration technologies. It reset expectations for the future because it opened new possibilities for how much flexibility employees can have in choosing how and where to work. In fact, more than half of employees say that they would like their organisations to adopt more flexible approach to home working.

As occupiers reflect on the past year, they are trying to merge the best of the old ways of doing business with the best of what has learned during the pandemic. Many questions are swirling in the minds of office occupiers about how work should be done in new normal, how to think about retention and attraction of talent, what the role of the workplace should be, and how much space is need as businesses adapt to future change.

Despite the experience of working from home for almost two years, most businesses believe that the physical presence of workers is critical at some regular frequency. For example, moments of innovation and cross-pollination may not be happening.

 

Our own AMH survey evidence shows that physical space is still needed, some of the companies that have announced permanent work-from-home options are simultaneously signing major leases, pressing ahead new headquarters or a relocation.

The future will be hybrid, but the proportions of work-from-home and in-office time are far from settled. This reflection is already leading many to focus on the in-person, face-to-face “moments that matter” for collaboration, alignment, community, and so on.

Offices and Businesses are eager to see what these moments are and how frequently they occur—daily, weekly, monthly—to determine both the amount of space office tenants need and the designs and configurations that will promote the types of interactions the workplace seeks.

Much of today’s office space will not meet the needs of a business and its workers in a hybrid world. There will be an oversupply of space and a scarcity of offices purpose-built for hybrid work. Spaces, designs, experiences, amenities, leases, food-and-beverage options, and the like will have to be reimagined.

Solution Consultation with a welcoming transformation

Most business do not yet know how to navigate hybrid work. Many risk drifting into a hybrid model in which they get neither the benefit of having everyone in person nor the benefit of full flexibility. Business will have to evolve their employee and environment needs, through a consultative approach.

 

The most proactive business and building owners are going even further, partnering with AMH and utilising information and tools that directly address the businesses needs for physical space—for example, understanding desk and conference-room usage patterns. The aim being to deliver compelling value propositions that go beyond a mere “four walls” to solutions that create convenient experiences, measure in-space factors, and generate insights about what happens within those spaces.

Occupiers will increasingly focus on making the workplace an exciting place to be, recognizing that the next-best alternative for most employees—their homes—has turned out to be better than they had imagined. Workers need a reason to get up, get dressed, and commute.

Space should be purpose-built for hybrid work. Food-and-beverage systems, lounges, kitchens, cafeterias, all accessible, has to emerge. The experience of the workday will become more digital: ordering food and concierge services, showing that you have complied with a building’s health and safety protocols, booking rooms and workspaces, and so on will need to be as easy as a tap on a smartphone. But the need for a digital experience is about more than just apps that help owner/operators communicate with users of space; it’s about services and experiences contextually embedded within the workplace through the digital layer of office buildings.

 

The traditional allocation of 70% percent of space to desks and offices needs to be fundamentally challenged. People are going to return to the workplace only if the space is safe, comfortable, easy to navigate, invites collaboration, and offers a “wow” factor. Smart conference spaces, collaboration areas, and lounges (among other models) that inspire the collision of ideas and creativity will come to define the floor plate, depending on the nature of work taking place.

Our Senior Designer Corneluis Lourens speaks to Insider Media about his observations on some the new occurrences in office design and concepts to be thinking about for the future of the workplace.

Head over to their website to have a read.

This month we sat down with Marita Price, Founder of Hello Performance and all-round workplace culture expert who discussed the future of working from home, the importance of company culture and tips to improve the culture in your team.

How has working from home impacted workplace culture?

Working from home brings many advantages as employees gain flexibility, avoid long commutes (which has shown to impact job satisfaction) and also remain free from office distractions. Businesses reduce costs on office space which can be considerable in larger cities and opens up the possibility to employ talent from further afield.

However, what we see is that it makes it difficult for organisations to create and solidify their company culture. Company culture is fostered, in large part, by face to face interactions whether its meetings, one to ones, corridor chats or team building activities. So remote teams make strengthening a company culture more difficult to accomplish.

How important is company culture?

We have heard the statement “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Even though personally I believe you need both, in equal amounts. A culture can certainly make or break companies, if we recall the Enron Scandal of 2001 which was the epitome of a company culture leading to demise of a Wall Street corporation.

Developing a company culture isn’t just something to be done for its own sake; it has meaningful impact on employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity. The reason for this is simple: When employees clearly identify with a company’s values, they’re more likely to engage with their work, and engagement is key in today’s workplace.

So, what is the future of working from home?

Even though in the UK, employers expect the proportion of regular home workers to double, from 18% pre-pandemic to 37% post pandemic1 a large percentage of companies are moving to a ‘Hybrid’ approach. Hybrid work tends to include more freedom around when to work as well as where.

One approach to hybrid working that was common, even prior to the pandemic, is designated days in the office for collaboration type meetings and then home working for the more individual focused tasks. This approach considers that physical presence is valuable and will accelerate orientation, team building and a project kick off for example but is not necessarily critical for all tasks.

Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor with expertise in remote work believes that that working from home 2 days a week will be optimal for balancing collaborative and quiet work while benefitting the reduced stress of less commuting.2

Some companies are going further. Kissflow, a provider of digital workplace services with offices in the US and India, has introduced a mixed working model called REMOTE+. This combines three weeks of working from wherever you choose with one week of office-based work. The company covers accommodation costs for the office week and then encourages employees to return home for the rest of the time. 3 

How does face to face interactions support workplace culture?

Face to face can overcome the 4 key challenges we come across as we support remote working companies to strengthen their culture:

  1. Face to face prevents colleagues and teams being siloed from each other – Culture is the unwritten “its how we do things around here”. When new (or longer term) employees are continuously exposed to the behaviour of their colleagues, they’re able to grasp the standards of performance and communication much more quickly than they would remotely. This is the core of a culture. Positive behaviour breeds positive behaviour so face to face just accelerates this process and can bring you closer to your aspirational culture sooner. One idea that has arisen is modularisation, where an employees tasks are divided into collaboration tasks which should be done face to face and then individual tasks which can be more easily achieved working alone.  
  • Face to face reduces the feeling of isolation – Though working from home can make life easier at first, it can be detrimental to employees’ mental health. Humans are social creatures and working without seeing anyone can make employees feel cut off. Remote working can also cause anxiety. A recent study concluded that the lack of close contact hinders the formation of trust, connection, and mutual purpose, three key ingredients in any effective working relationship. Second, social interaction is strongly correlated with workplace engagement and satisfaction. A Gallup study4 surveying more than 15 million employees indicated that those with a “best” work buddy are “seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, [and] have higher well-being,” compared to those without
  • Face to face make it easier to create enthusiasm for building & growing – You want employees to be passionate about the work they’re doing. Inspiring passion across a dispersed team is not impossible, but certainly not easy. Unless your employees are 100 percent intrinsically motivated, it’s difficult to stimulate enthusiasm about your service or product without ample social engagement—high spirits are tough to express digitally. Face to face can certainly be smartly used to develop that enthusiasm.  
  • Face to face reduces conflict – Conflict is more likely with digital communication, partly because our social inhibitions are more powerful when dealing with people face to face. Face to face can also support a feeling shared social identity which promotes team effectiveness and performance. This is more difficult with distributed remote teams which can impair trust and team spirit. 

Top tip to improve the culture in your company or team?

The top tip we preach is MEASURE MEASURE MEASURE  – find out where employees are at! The old mantra of “what get measured get managed” is very true here. A regular cross company survey will identify how engaged employees are and which areas are strong and which need to be improved.  This allows leadership teams to select a key area of focus that the company can commit to improving. Taking a regular temperature check (a ‘Culture Pulse’ in our language) allows you to see if the action you are spending time and resources on is having the impact you need.

“A culture will form no matter what you do, so you can either influence it or take your chances”. By measuring it, this is the first step to identifying what actions needs to be taken to so you can consciously lead the culture in the direction you need to achieve that strategy!

What should an organisation consider when redesigning their space to support the workplace culture?

The design of a company’s office can cater for many of the aspects of their culture they’re trying to promote. Wanting to create an autonomous and free-thinking culture? Provide various workstations for different purposes to allow activity-based working. Wanting to foster a culture of caring about your team’s wellbeing? Adorn the space with plant life, good lighting, and spaces to relax and break-out in. Wanting to create a culture of pride and belonging? Celebrate your business achievements, the brand and the qualities of the people who make up your teams as part of the design. It’s also important to have the right technology and AV equipment within an office to allow people working from home to feel like they can still have a presence in the office, albeit virtually. This helps to promote a culture of inclusivity.

Your surroundings impact your wellbeing, performance and overall engagement. Companies should consider what the space is being used for, what the aspirational culture they are trying to create and what do the employee wants. Creating environments which foster collaboration and interaction is key going forward.

  1. https://www.cipd.co.uk/about/media/press/home-working-increases
  2. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200710-the-remote-work-experiment-that-made-staff-more-productive
  3. https://kissflow.com/news/kissflow-launches-remoteplus/
  4. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/127043/friends-social-wellbeing.aspx

Well-being in the workplace has always been an incredibly important consideration for businesses, but even more so moving past the pandemic.

We caught up with well-being experts Sharon Critchlow and Nicky Marshall from Discover Your Bounce to find out new well-being trends, how to create a well-being strategy, and how to assess how well you’re supporting your team’s wellbeing.

What is new in workplace well-being?

How we use office space is changing and this could be a really good thing for businesses.

According to the Office for National Statistics 46.6% of people in employment did some work from home in 2020 and for many businesses this trend is continuing. Whilst this can appear to make it harder to see everything your team are doing and what they are struggling with, it gives an opportunity to adapt your businesses practices, introduce technology and focus on your people in a meaningful way. 

Does culture matter in business?

I’ll let you in to a secret about getting more from your team. According to the 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends “Employees who are given the freedom to apply their interests and passions to organisational needs will be more motivated and engaged”. However, this is only part of the story as people search for more meaning in the work that they do. Research by Garton & Mankins shows that an engaged employee is 45% more productive than a merely satisfied worker. What is more interesting is that an inspired employee (one who has a profound personal connection to their work and/or their company) is 55% more productive than an engaged employee. This is more than twice as productive as a satisfied worker. The better an organisation is at engaging and inspiring its employees, the better its performance.

Employees are looking for more connection and more meaningful work and your workspace can be adapted to become a collaborative space. However, it takes a change in leadership thinking for people to feel safe to speak up and ready to get creative. So alongside creating an awesome workspace you need to create the culture that supports that.  

What about Vision and Values?

A great place to start is to look at your company’s vision and values. We spend a lot of time looking at our branding, but does this translate into a team who understand and love what you do? If you are bringing people back into the workplace, make your first collaboration an opportunity to discuss and describe the great things you do as an organisation. Remind everyone of the impact your product or service has on your customers. Also remember that we have all been through a lot in the last 18 months and create a wellbeing action plan to support their wellbeing and a wellbeing strategy to provide a framework for success.

Sharon Critchlow and Nicky Marshall

How can businesses create a Wellbeing Strategy and Wellbeing Action Plan? 

According to the CIPD wellbeing at work report in April 2021, investing in employee wellbeing can lead to increased resilience, reduced sickness absence, higher performance, and productivity. To gain the real benefit, wellbeing needs to be embedded throughout the organisation. Wellbeing strategies can include regularly checking in with your teams, pinpointing areas of concern, education, and benchmarking for engagement. A good place to start is to remind everyone of the benefits you already have available to help them. Do you have an employee assistance programme or helpline? Private medical insurance? Access to a financial adviser? Whatever it is, get clear on communicating it.

Senior leadership buy in is essential to any wellbeing strategy as it may require the business to change its approach to certain topics such as mental health. Other aspects to consider are updating your wellbeing policies around sickness and mental health and having a wellbeing budget – even if it is quite modest. What do you encourage as an organisation that promotes good health? Does everyone get involved? If not, consider creative wellbeing activities as well as physical activities all of which could lead to greater team cohesion.

Finally, your people are all individuals so consider their individual needs. A wellbeing action plan is an individually tailored plan that enables you to have a conversation about the health, stress levels and wellbeing needs of your team members.

How can organisations assess their well-being activity?

We have created a quiz to help you to think about different aspects of workplace wellbeing and it is free! www.discoveryourbounce.scoreapp.com we are also available to help you to create a wellbeing strategy, engage your teams to create your vision and to train your managers and staff in stress reduction and increased personal resilience. We are Discover Your Bounce! www.discoveryourbounce.com

During the ‘Create’ stage our our design and fit-out process we always endeavour to to provide a number of design solutions for the client to choose from.

In recent times there has been an increase in the demand for effective collaboration and meeting spaces as teams focus more on being creative and innovative together on the days that they are in the office.

Each solution will offer a slightly different benefit and have somewhat alternative functions to how the space can be used and for what reason. This demonstrates the need for the in-depth research and analysis which we conduct during the ‘Explore’ phase of working with a client as we’ll be able to identify in the various needs and requirements and offer the most appropriate design concepts based on that information.

Every element of our design is thought about and have reasoning behind them to help you achieve the objectives of your workspace project. We provide direction on furniture for comfort and functionality, furnishings for aesthetics, workplace solutions such as acoustics to reduce noise pollution, storage solutions to maximise your space, all in a manner which fits with your budget.

If you have a workspace design project that you would like to discuss with the team, then please get in contact on 0117 231 0077 and watch how your ideas are brought to life!