We asked our team how they would like to approach office work in the future. Here’s what they said.

Over the last few months, many of us have found ourselves setting up shop in the corner of a bedroom or at the kitchen table. With so many people spending so much more time working from home over lockdown, there has been a lot of speculation about what office life will look like when the restrictions are lifted. Do we all just get back on the train or bus back to the office as before? Are our expensive office leases in major cities now redundant? Or is there going to be a new model of office work?

At Blokur, we took the opportunity to ask our team what they would prefer in an ideal world. We wanted to understand how people were feeling about their current temporary work arrangements and also what kind of work environment we might need in the future. Disclaimer: the results are probably specific to our team culture — and they are certainly not going to give you statistically significant insights about your own workplace — but they do give a sense of how at least our team are feeling about the world of work post-Covid-19. So without further ado, here are the results.

How much time do people want to spend in the office?

The first question we asked was: “If you had the choice, how many days would you work in the office in a typical week”. This was partly intended to let us know how much office capacity we might need in the future, and also to give us an idea of where the new balance might lie between home and office working. As you can see from the chart below, the responses were spread pretty evenly across the range of 0–4 days, with only five days proving to be an outlier. It turns out nobody’s perfect week consists of five days out of five in the office.

The second question asked people to score out of five the three options of home working, office working or a combination of the two. Despite nobody voting for 5 office days a week in the previous question, full-time office work was at least the equal highest scoring option for a small number of people. At the other end of the spectrum, a similar-sized minority gave full-time home working at least their equal highest score. But the vast majority gave their highest score to dividing their time between home and the office. This is perhaps not so surprising because it is relatively common for members of Blokur’s team to work from home from time to time, but it does seem to suggest that full-time office work is not going to be the default when workspaces re-open.

What about working hours?

Our third question was not directly linked to the present situation, but dug a little deeper into people’s ideal work schedule. We asked the team to choose from five different work start times, ranging from 730am to 11am. Although there was some variation, the vast majority plumped for plain vanilla 9am–530pm. I must admit I was a little surprised by this result — I expected more people to vote for a later start — but I suppose it makes sense that most people’s interests outside of work coincide with traditional non-working hours.

What is the cost of home working?

Finally, we asked everybody to let us know one thing that the company could offer to make home working more comfortable or productive. The requests were really quite modest, with requests related to chairs coming top of the list (which makes sense — if you don’t already have a home office, you probably don’t have an office chair at home) and a large number of responses indicating that they didn’t need anything. I should note that Blokur’s work tools are all already online, so we didn’t get any requests for software. But the answers seem to suggest that there isn’t a long list of hidden costs for software companies in having people work from home.

So what does this all mean for all those moth-balled office spaces? For Blokur, the purpose of a shared working space has always been to encourage collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas. For that reason, and taking into account that most people would like to spend at least some of their time in the office, it’s unlikely that we will do away with an office entirely. Instead, our current thinking about our next workspace is focused on how we do collaboration and teamwork safely.

But like everybody else, we are still learning and adapting to the current situation — and watching to see how things develop. One thing seems certain though. Now that people have tried working from home and in many cases seen it succeed, it’s going to be much harder for organisations to require everybody to spend 40 hours in the office every week.