The unheavenly workplace

The workplace as we know it is finally over. The concept of commuting hours a day at the busiest time to be sat at the same desk for 40+ hours a week has swiftly revealed itself to be archaic and entirely unproductive. All it took was a global pandemic. Overnight, companies came to a standstill and shifted their workforce to set up home offices instead; be it from a desk or a sofa. It crystallised the realisation that the days of adult daycare are over. Employees are more than capable of fulfilling their workloads away from teams and managers and free snacks. But with companies like Twitter announcing that all of their employees are to continue working from home indefinitely, you can’t help but wonder whether the complete flip to ‘work from home’ is actually what the world has been waiting for, or will be sustainable in the long term.

Employees may have enjoyed some newfound flexibility that comes with working from home, but is it enough when it comes to creating the most productive workspace possible? Are Zoom conference calls going to sustain a sense of team morale, or build the best ideas? Could we instead provide people more freedom to work wherever and however their work becomes most efficient?

Co-working spaces have provided a stepping stone in the right direction but they’re barely office space reimagined. They’ve offered an alternative to working from home, but they don’t offer an alternative to the office model as we know it. They don’t account for the individuals’ varying needs or requirements for workspace and as of yet haven’t provided hyper-local solutions either.

Multiple recent reports on the state of the workplace have suggested that the answer is outside of the city and instead within the suburban areas that workers usually commute from. While the concept of satellite offices is nothing new, in fact, it was suggested in Jack Nilles’ 1973 book, ‘The Telecommunications-Transport Tradeoff’ as an answer to increasing traffic congestion occurring as a result of increased commuter traffic. But now it comes with a renewed purpose. Not only do our roads and environments demand it but workers have had a taste of flexible working. Returning to how things were will not only prove a difficult health and safety issue to manage, in the long run we now know it’s not the most effective way of mobilising a workforce.

It’s also been calculated that a local flexible workplace could save employees a collective 7,416 hours each year by reducing travel times. Time spent commuting long distances not only eats into work time but, more importantly, eats into people’s emotional and mental energy levels. Simply put, starting your day on a packed, delayed train — for example — is never conducive to preparing for a day’s work. Beyond that, a move to local flexible workplaces is estimated to eliminate carbon emissions by 118 metric tonnes of CO2 every year. This movement is bigger than where we work best, it could actually positively change our environmental impact.

At Oasis, we vehemently believe it’s time to move away from the current binary choice that’s on offer: “work from home” or “in office”. Instead, we want to provide a “work from anywhere” mindset: an entirely new ecology of work. We’re not reinventing the office, we’re bringing a whole new perspective to it.

At the core of our mission is not real estate, it’s to unlock the greatest productivity and employee satisfaction while at the same time dual-purposing existing spaces. There’s a surplus of under-utilised sites in both city centres and local towns. Restaurants, hotel function rooms, retail spaces and showrooms all stand empty — now more than ever before. But why can’t they also be used to bring your employees together, or allow them to work independently? Dual-purposing these venues into third spaces provides a solution somewhere between the corporate office and working from home. Closer to where people live, the result is higher productivity, inspiring locations and safe environments for work.

At the core of this shift is a comprehensive understanding of what actually motivates and inspires people to work — and work well. We’ve seen a couple of key work-related pillars emerge that form the foundations of this, and will surely continue to define the future of work: refocus and reconnect. It’s proved difficult to achieve focus in an open plan office or even at home, with its myriad of distractions. People work differently in different environments and that needs to be honored; having somewhere peaceful to work undisturbed is imperative. Yet there’s something that offices — open plan ones in particular — provide can’t be replicated in remote working situations. And that’s the opportunity to reconnect. Socialising allows for the kind of spontaneity and connection from which truly exciting ideas spark; and that just can never be achieved to the same degree over video calls. Reconnecting in person needs to happen in order for businesses and companies to thrive.

But right now we’re witnessing a workplace revolution where people have realised the office isn’t as important as we always considered it to be. This realisation will have a permanent and long-lasting impact on the evolution of the workforce, the competitiveness of companies and their according needed workspaces. People just don’t want to go back to how it used to be. It didn’t work for companies and it certainly didn’t work for employees — even cities have become strained with too many people commuting into the centres from the outskirts. Instead, understanding that workspaces don’t have to be one single fixed abode feeds into the professional freedom and flexibilities employees working from home recently gained, in turn resulting in increased efficiency and productivity. It’s putting more trust into a workforce, while ensuring they’re supporting in the best ways.

Oasis is a network of hyper-local satellite offices in unique hospitality locations. Members have access to every drop-in location, re-purposed to help them re-connect and refocus, all close enough to commute by foot or bike (city and outskirts). Hosts generate a new revenue stream for both the short term (to partly recover from Covid-19) and long term (to provide a solid alternative to general downtime periods). And for companies, it offers a framework to save money in commercial real estate and office design, freeing it up to invest in their people instead. We’re not reinventing the office, we’re bringing an entirely new perspective to work and the workplace, for the people.

“OASIS, work from anywhere”