The Office in 2022
The 2022 Nigeria Real Estate Market Outlook published by Northcourt Real Estate provides a succinct post-pandemic expose of how the future of work is going to look like in the coming years
PwC announced that 40,000 of its employees in the United States will be able to work online and live anywhere they want – indefinitely, making it one of the largest employers to embrace permanent remote work. While employers have varied approaches, with IT companies preferring a more flexible approach and financial institutions preferring more traditional working arrangements it is likely that office sharing arrangements are more likely than a demand for new office space.
With a staggered return to the office, over 30% of workers on average will require space reconfiguration to accommodate declining demand. One of the most significant lessons acquired during the pandemic is the value of more adaptable, flexible, and sharable spaces. It seems apparent that remote working, the acceleration of online purchasing, as well as other pandemic-era behaviours, will persist, at least in part, affecting land uses and location. There has also been a shift in locations as workers can choose to work from anywhere in the world. Time will tell if migration and space use patterns persist.
Property owners and managers must be adaptable to changes in the desired use and placement of space driven by demand.
The continued decline in demand for grade A office space has accelerated the demand trend for B+ offices and residential conversions. As every organisation entered the pandemic with distinct strengths and vulnerabilities, there is no prepackaged blueprint strategy for recovery. In the short term, weaker organisations will try to revert to pre-pandemic paradigms. Others may copy the decisions made by those who most closely resemble them. More at tuned organisations will make the right adjustments.
It may also be useful to use a linear scale which may have permanently remote employees on one end and permanently office-based employees on the other. From an investment perspective, the office isn't dead – however, its percentage of many investment portfolios continues to fall.
As each variant of the COVID virus showsup, companies continue to revise work methods learning from the mostly successful trial of mass remote working during lockdowns in 2020.
While some employers insist on a complete return to the office, others prefer hybrid or even entire ly remote employment. Companies are main ta in ing social distancing, reversing a decade long trend of pursuing greater space efficiency. Individual company preferences will ultimately differ based on location, nature of work, ability to share desks, and corporate finances.