Are you coming into the office for the right reasons?

The office was the place to get work done, at least before Covid-19 hit. Whether you had a corner office or a ‘hot desk’, you were equipped with all the tools needed to be productive, the expectation was that most employees spent the vast majority of their time in physical offices.

After a year of working at home for many employees, workforce surveys are all showing that there is little appetite to return to the traditional ‘9–5’ working in offices.

Instead, there is a global shift to a hybrid workplace, offering a mix of office-based and home-based work, with a set of guidelines (or rules!) around the expected mix of working environments.

So: you will be spending some of your working week in the office. But are you coming into the office for the right reasons?

Productivity or connectivity?

A PwC remote work survey conducted in January 2021 surfaced important differences in expectations about the benefits of working in physical offices.

According to employers, the top four purposes of an office are:

1. increasing employee productivity
2. providing a space to meet with clients
3. enabling our employees to collaborate effectively
4. enabling our company culture

According to employees, however, the top purposes of an office are:

1. collaborating
2. accessing equipment or documents securely
3. meeting with clients or colleagues
4. training and career development

In short, leaders see the office as a place to be productive, while employees saw benefits around making connections and collaborating with others.

This is an important distinction that will touch every aspect of hybrid workplace strategy and execution.

Getting the most out of time in the office

The hybrid workplace framework developed by Step Two enables organisations to identify decisions and actions needed to make the most of time in offices.

Stance: organisations should put a priority on the culture and collaboration benefits of the physical office, setting the expectations that day-to-day work can just as easily be done from home. This will need to be reflected in the design of office spaces, further pivoting floor plans away from fixed workstations towards flexible meeting and collaboration spaces.

Leadership: senior leaders must set the tone, by establishing personal working practices where ‘head down’ productive work is done at home, and face-to-face time in offices is utilised for fostering stronger work relationships. This may be a significant shift for leaders who have spent literally decades working in traditional office environments.

Management: if much of the productive work is done at home, then people leaders and managers will need to shift strongly to utilising digital collaboration tools to keep teams connected. ‘Hot desks’ in offices will then be typically booked in groups enabling the whole team to be side-by-side in the office environment, with time set aside for informal and more fluid interactions.

Enablement: more will need to be done to ensure that employees are fully productive at home, with an emphasis on increasing adoption and maturity of digital platforms. This will require an equal focus on digital literacy and the delivery of new online tools.

Physical offices aren’t going away, but they are entering into another sustained period of transformation, as they shift away from being places of work towards being hubs for collaboration and connection.

With a clear stance and strategy, organisations can make the most of the shift to a hybrid workplace, strengthening work culture while providing greater flexibility for leaders and employees.