The Future of Corporate Workspaces

Even pre-Covid, corporate work habits and policies slowly moved towards more hybrid work environments driven by growing commute troubles, availability of secure and high quality network (5G) outside of main cities and at home, and the growth of the knowledge workers population which can work from anywhere. Covid just gave the trend a boost, just as it did to many other, unrelated trends. Pre-Covid, as part of a larger effort to try and identify the trends that Covid I wrote this blogpost about post-Covid opportunities in technology, which included a section on hybrid work.

In the last couple of years there has been abundant research on hybrid work, and why do we believe that corporate work is not going back to what it used to be pre-Covid and in the past. A good example is the following research from McKinsey: The future of work after COVID‑19. Thus, this blogpost is taking this upcoming change for granted, i.e. as something that will happen at some pace in the next few years, and is exploring how will corporates cope with that and what models they will use workspace-wise.

So how do we expect corporate workspaces, environments and work habits to change in this new, connected, worker-favorable, post-Covid world?

Corporate Workspace Variables

We expect corporate workspace environments to follow a limited set of models that will play with the variables of:

· Work at a fixed desk or a “hot” desk: Do each of my employees have an assigned desk, or do employees use any desk available when they come in (“hot” desks)?

· Work at the office or elsewhere: Do my employees work only at the corporate offices, or can they work in locations that are not part of the corporate properties?

· My employees only, or “outsiders” too: Do I allow “outsiders” to use some of the corporate desks and infrastructure, when it is not used by the corporate employees

Corporate Workspace Models

There could be multiple combinations of these variables, creating a large number of permutations, but we believe that the vast majority of companies will converge to one of the five models below.

· Fixed: The Fixed model is the classic, old fashion model in which most corporates worldwide used to work pre-Covid. In this model the corporate employees work from one place only: the desk or workstation assigned to them at the corporate offices. We expect most companies to move off this model to one of the more flexible models described below.

· Hot Desks: In this model, which was already adopted by some companies worldwide, none of the employees have a fixed desk or workstation assigned to them. Instead, employees reserve a desk every day they plan to work from the office, or simply show up at the office and use one of the available desks or workspaces. This model works best for companies where the employees are knowledge workers and do not need a special equipment to do their jobs.

· Mixed: The Mixed model is a combination of the Fixed and Hot Desks models. Some of the desks are assigned to specific people, and some are available to any employee. We anticipate that more and more companies will gravitate over time to this model.

· Hybrid: Given the trends discussed in the beginning of this post, most companies will have to offer to (some or all of) their employees the option of working away from the corporate offices, at home or at a neighborhood workspace/hub. There are clear signals of such a demand today mostly from employees that cannot work at home and still want to avoid the commute, or that need the social aspects of meeting other people while working.

· Shared: Pre-Covid, companies have built or leased office space that will be sufficient for the needs of all their employees, usually in the Fixed model. Some of the wealthier companies are still doing that today. Post-Covid, and in the new hybrid world, companies are struggling with trying to figure out how much space they actually need, given the hybrid nature of how their employees work. They could take space they might not need and either release it back to the leasing company or sell or lease it to other companies, but it will deny them the ability to contract and expand space based on employee behavior and changes in the company size. Many companies are likely to keep the space in anticipation of future growth and occasional higher volume of use by its employees. These companies can make that extra space dynamically available to others on a short-term basis. The space can be leased either to the exponentially growing community of freelancers, or to employees of other companies that live in the area (proper security measures will have to be implemented). We call this model the Shared model.

As companies undergo this vast change of the workspace environments and struggle to adjust to the new physical perimeter of their offices, they will need to manage it, for space and budget efficiencies, but even more so for the positive experience of their employees. They will need to experiment and pilot with different models before they will land the model that works for them. They will need tools to help them manage the new office physical perimeter and provide their employees with tools to maximize the experience of using the multiple corporate and external workspaces.

While not directly related to the topic, it is hard to not notice the similarity, in a different context, to the move of companies to the cloud. As companies gradually moved from on-prem server farms to the cloud, they created a temporary or permanent hybrid model for their infrastructure, as they increased their virtual perimeter. These companies too needed tools to manage the hybrid model and the challenges that the new (virtual in this case) perimeter created.