Will the UK ever return to 9-5 office working?
It’s almost as hotly contested as the lockdown v no lockdown debate – will the UK ever return to 9-5 office working or is trillions of square feet of office space doomed to lie empty forever?
For many, the novelty of not having to pull on business attire and commute to city centre offices in favour of being able to dress down every day and work from home (WFH) has worn off.
Flexible and agile working has been with us for a while – we adopted it at Pinsent Masons several years ago – and its advantages have been underlined during the Covid-19 pandemic. But most of us miss our colleagues and the chance to collaborate and be creative together, to encourage and support junior staff, acknowledge each other’s small victories and commiserate when things are not going so well.
And it’s collaboration which may prove to be the saving grace for the future of the great British office. Kevin Ellis, UK chairman of PWC, the world’s second largest professional services firm, said recently that his firm had no plans to downsize any of its office space. With most of Pwc’s 22,000 UK staff working from home, he said he had received many messages from people who place a high value on the option of being able to use an office.
If social distancing is here to stay in some shape or form it stands to reason that businesses are likely to need more, not less office space – there may well be fewer desks, and hot-desking may now have had its da. How we view our office space has arguably changed forever.
When people start returning to offices, it will be to collaborate, a creative coming together to share in and get support on projects, but likely for shorter spells and blended with WFH. However, few businesses have office space set up to accommodate this. Greater thought will have to
be invested in how we make the transition to spaces that are truly adaptable, and which align the needs of businesses with a workforce which has different expectations of how and where they will work.
This will inevitably lead to a re-design of office space as we currently know it and even greater emphasis on providing robust IT networks, and the latest communications technology, to optimise a mixture of in-person and virtual collaboration.
Developers and architects are faced with a major challenge when there is little consensus right now on what will provide the most marketable office space in future.
We are supporting HFD Group with adaptations to their 313,000 sq ft development at 177 Bothwell Street, which will be Glasgow’s largest single office building, and advising Barclays as construction of their 470,000 sq ft bank campus at Tradeston progresses.
Where less office space may be required, the focus could switch to better quality accommodation, with the ripple-up effect potentially affecting rental yields.
Already in 2020 we have seen plans to repurpose obsolete office space for new residential buildings or hotel and hospitality use. This may become a collateral feature of the evolution of the office market in coming years.
However this plays out, 2020 will undoubtedly prove to have been the catalyst for a fundamental change in the way we view and use our office spaces.
• Martin Devine is a partner and commercial property specialist at Pinsent Masons