The office is not just a workplace
How we use them will change, but there’s nowhere quite like the office,
We’re more than 20 weeks into lockdown and many businesses are beginning to look at staff returning to their workplaces, after the great working from home experiment. In spite of the occasional Zoom gaffe and the pressures of home-schooling, it has to be heralded as a success.
The big question for a lot of organisations has now become: do people really want to return to the office or should they be allowed to continue to work from home? Businesses are taking different approaches – while some are heading back, within government guidelines, a number have told their staff to stay at home at least for now.
Businesses need to reflect carefully on their operational needs and staff concerns before coming to a decision about what the future looks like. But as biased as I might be given my profession, I suspect many people are itching for a return to the office.
Research from the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), conducted in April, suggested the novelty of working from home wore off relatively quickly. The poll found that one-third (33 per cent) of respondents felt isolated, while 50 per cent were unhappy with their work-life balance, with blurring lines between workplace and home space and the irregular hours that can entail.
No doubt some of that will have eased as people became accustomed to a new way of life. There are also benefits to working from home – few people enjoy commuting.
However, as much as people will have acclimatised to working from home, new issues will have arisen.
Perhaps chief among them is, as someone put it on social media, that feeling that you are living at work, rather than working from home. Nearly half (48 per cent) of those surveyed by the IES said they were putting in longer and more irregular hours than they normally would.
There is a structure to life in the office that is difficult to replicate working from home. It depends on your personality type, but many studies have suggested that routine can have health and wellbeing benefits for many people – in fact, some of the most successful people swear by them. A routine is about much more than going to and from the office – it can include anything from going to the gym at lunch, meeting clients, or socialising with colleagues.
Working from home can also deprive you of the opportunity to build relationships with and learn from your colleagues. There is no substitute for spending time face-to-face with people. It might be a cliché, but a lot of businesses are about people – their skills and knowledge – and an office brings all of that together in one place.
We haven’t even got to the economic importance of the amenities and retail that surround workplaces – many of which rely on the steady stream of custom from office workers. And, while social distancing and other health measures must be maintained to combat the spread of Covid-19, a certain vibrancy to our cities would be lost without the hustle and bustle of working life.
The humble office has evolved massively over the past decade or so, to become much more than a place of work. The impact of Covid-19 means we probably won’t use them in exactly the way we did before. But, there is just no substitute for the office and they will continue to play a hugely important role in our lives for years to come. Andrew Hill is lease advisory partner at Knight Frank
“Working from home can deprive you of the opportunity to build relationships with colleagues”