While the restrictions slowly lift in the UK to allow the high street to open up again, finding answers to the questions hanging over hybrid working is becoming more important.
Although businesses have implemented and made a success of working from home solutions, the call of the office for structure and a social aspect that has been missing for a year, will be stronger than ever as life gets back to normal.
“We have an interesting split within our workforce” explained Iain Sinnott, Sales and Marketing Director at VanillaIP, “the more mature staff want to continue to work from home, swerve the commute every day and get on with what they want to do after work. Whereas predominantly the younger staff miss the social aspect of working in an office, going out for lunch and a couple of drinks when they are done for the day.”
These splits may not be surprising to a lot of employers but Sinnott added that it points to a wider question about who goes back to the office and how often.
“If I took the VanillaIP UK team as an example, salespeople often worked from home before the pandemic and had been split between visiting the office, visiting clients and working from home. So, they were set up with a homework scenario and their eventual pattern is likely to be going back to field work and working home.
“Team managers and senior people in the company will also be in a tricky position as the team that are in the office may need to see their senior colleagues, network with them and gain that insight and advice.
“But I’d expect half the meetings they do with the partners will be virtual and the rest will be face to face. It could be even less face to face as senior management may well want to keep the fuel and expenses bill down, so there will be a different blend there between virtual and in-person meetings and meeting in person could become a differentiator for companies after the pandemic.”
Knee Jerk Reaction
All the talk in the industry at the moment is of how often employees will be working from home, in theory leaving empty office spaces. “I think there might be a knee jerk reaction from the commercial side of businesses who will argue that the office spaces aren’t needed and they should get rid of them,” said Sinnott.
“What we might find is that the energy in the company and the growth that comes with that won’t be sustained in a full remote working and more people need to come back into the office.
“At VanillaIP, we’ve taken the speculative decision to downsize our office space so that half the company can come to the office at a time, based on feedback we’ve had from employees"
“Businesses will be asking themselves whether they need to make a similar decision or take some time to let the market settle before signing a new lease.”
