One thing seems certain in these uncertain times: when your office re-opens, nothing will be quite the same again.
Before 2020, flexible working was the exception rather than the rule. Too many bosses over-relied on command-and-control structures and a heavy dose of presenteeism; managers needed to see their staff to believe that they were being productive.
All that changed in 2020, as companies, their workforces and their day-to-day activities switched to home working. Almost overnight, everyone had to be trusted to get on with their work remotely – and, for the most part, the results have been positive.
Almost half (44%) of bosses believe home working is proving "more effective" than their previous setup, according to Research by the Institute of Directors (IoD). The Research also suggests three-quarters (74%) of managers plan on keeping increased home-working hours after the coronavirus.
All this and more has been established away from the traditional heartbeat of the enterprise: the office. So what does this new-found trust in remote working mean for the way we work and the places we do it?
Experts suggests the future of employment will be a hybrid mix of office- and home-working. As many as 90% of HR leaders believe employees will carry of working remotely in the post-COVID age, says tech analyst Gartner.
That shift to hybrid working is something that resonates with Paul Coby, CIO at global science and chemicals company Johnson Matthey, whose guess is that people in the future will split their time between working from home and going into the office.
What that means for many of us is that the traditional nine-to-five working day at the corporate HQ isn't coming back. "It seems to me that sitting in an office doing emails doesn't seem like a great use of offices or an individual's time," says Coby.
Other experts agree. Researcher CCS Insights predicts more than half of all office-based employees will still work mainly remotely through 2022. IoD research, meanwhile, suggests more than half of business leaders plan on reducing their long-term use of workplaces, with more than one in five reporting use will be significantly lower.
The office that many of us knew – with its command-and-control leadership styles – is probably gone forever. Get it right, and managers could change how we all work for the better. But quite how business leaders will organise and manage the hybrid workplace of the future is still very much up for debate right now.
"I don't think any of us really know where the new normal is yet and we're going to have to work it through," says Coby.
If less of us are based in the office permanently, then we're all going to have to think very carefully about how we use the time when we are together. Instead of being a place to work, the office of the future might be more helpfully viewed as a place where we go to meet.
