Life After Lockdown Continued…
By: Kelvin Bromley
Following the country’s lock down and all being sent home to work I have been engaging with a number of our dealer customer principals and senior management. Once we get past the talk around the current situation the conversation does turn to what will life be like in three to four months’ time and how our society will change and a view of the workplace.
For many of us working from home and embracing all the tools that modern technology bring to the table is something that’s here to stay and to this end the size and shape of offices will be changed for ever. I understand several corporates have commissioned work on this subject in order to explore the cost savings and other benefits of home working and to understand the benefits of such changes in how and where employees engage in the daily activities.
However, I would heed with caution any suggestions that a virtual world of working will supersede the workplace as we know it.
…Granted the employee would save time and money on commuting by moving to a home-based role, but the only people to really ‘benefit’ are the employers in the perceived cost saving around the reduction in real estate. But the real costs lay in staff happiness, and wellbeing as this will have a huge impact on retention.
In a straw poll I conducted today with the team at Connection they could see the benefits of working from home one to two days a week but were very much missing the face to face interaction with colleagues, good or bad! Collectively whilst they have embraced home working, they are all looking forward to returning to the office, showroom, factory and our customer’s premises. As a company we will certainly be considering how we facilitate this balance on a permanent basis once things return to some kind of normality and when the kids are not on school holidays! The key driver for me in the whole of this is staff retention and asking people off to work from home permanently will not work… humans are tribal and need to be around other people.
Which then turns our thoughts to “will the office landscape change” and how it needs to change to facilitate interactive collaboration and at the same time provide a degree of social distancing, which I believe will be an understandable hang over from this pandemic. Clearly working from home one or two days a week has merit and for a lot of company’s it is worth considering, the challenge is the “how”!
My thoughts on how the office interior will change are for another day!
