Guest Blog: Flexible Working Can Save the UK High Street

Can the increase in flexible working can offer some resolution for declining UK towns and high streets?

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Unified Communications

Published: September 6, 2018

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

We have all seen the headlines, ‘High Street Collapse, ‘High Street Crisis’ and my personal favourite for over the top sensationalism ‘Hell on the High Street’. All of these refer to the continuing decline of the UK High street in cities and towns around the country. Many potential solutions have been postured, reduced business rates, shop sharing and free local parking but none of these have successfully been implemented and stemmed the tide of the high street’s apparently inevitable demise.

The rapid rise of the internet retail giants has been attributed as the primary cause for the decline with tech savy shoppers much more inclined to take advantage of the convivence and in most cases savings offered online. Rather than trying to save a clearly outdated high street model, I ask you if there is another way? What about reusing these spaces to house the ever-growing armies of flexible workers who are looking for more local office locations rather than completing their usual commuting slog into metropolitan city hubs?

Is there a bright new future for our failing department stores?

Iain Sinnott, Sales Director Vanilla IP and Uboss

With a little bit of flexibility in the planning world and a bit of creativity from the buyer of House of Fraser and alike, you could have a winning combination for the High Street and for some of the communities outside the M25 and in other areas surrounding the UK’s major cities. It needn’t be restricted just to department store buildings either. Any convertible space, close to a rail link and a retail centre with high speed internet is a potential shared office. They might even occupy the first-floor spaces above a parade of town centre shops.

Flexible working, home working, remote collaboration are all buzz words at the moment, but some limiting realities still need to be addressed.

  • Not all homes are conducive to home working, failing to have the right space, noise control or understanding cohabitors
  • People like to be part of a physical team so home working is a part-time requirement
  • Domestic technology including broadband and routers can under perform and not provide the requisite security for certain industry sectors
  • Businesses don’t trust everyone to perform as a home worker

In big city centres shared workspace is a booming industry, creating a community of workers from disparate employers, so why not deliver this in the suburbs and surrounding satellite towns too? Imagine an old department store where 50% of the space is now a selection of open work spaces, meeting rooms and individual small offices whilst the other 50% is a combination of retail and food concessions which creates the perfect work village and generates the retail footfall the high street and town centres so desperately crave.

The office users get the home/work balance they need for kids, clubs, community and transport links get a reduction of peak time activity reducing pressure on their increasingly overburdened infrastructure. It’s not only office users that benefit. Employers can ensure their staff are working in suitable surroundings and can take advantage of the high-speed core connections available in town centres.

This could transform the timetable of the working day too. Enabling a more psychologically friendly local start time for a few days a week at least, preserving the two-hour commute to only a couple of days a week for the most important visits to the city centre office. If everyone operated a similar system you might even be able to sit down and work on the train with the reduced consumer rat race taking place every day!

Is it that easy?

The answer can be assumed to be no. If it was that easy it would already be done, so what steps need to be taken to make it a reality? I live in Welwyn Garden City, one of the original Garden Cities and the brain child of Ebenezer Howard. He wanted to create a new town that combined industrial with residential estates offering space, fresh air, freedom, employment and security to the disadvantaged workers living in poor conditions in London.

There are surprising parallels today, substitute lower paid workers with those managing impossible London house prices, kids growing up in polluted streets and you have a similar situation. Back then however we made more stuff which meant factories and assembly plants were part of the mix but as the iconic Shredded Wheat factory and the Norton Building ably demonstrate, times and job opportunities have changed. This story is replicated throughout the post-industrial UK.

Welwyn Garden City is more and more a dormitory town feeding the ever-growing offices of London but as it feeds those offices it fills up the trains and also empties the local cafes, restaurants, sandwich bars, florists, cloth stores, sports centres and pubs during the working week. Kids get dropped off at schools and clubs earlier and picked up later and the community starts to lose cohesion.

To the unimaginative this may be considered inevitable but we in the telecommunications and cloud service world know that is no longer the only option. Work production can return to the outer suburbs and countless studies will tell each and every employer that has a pc-based, office-based workforce that productivity will rise, staff churn will fall, wage demands will fall, happiness will rise, and ideas will flow.

So how could the process start? Where is our modern Ebenezer? As with most new products the solution needs a promotional offer. Entrepreneurs need to be tempted in with a reduced risk opportunity to exploit a gap in the market and get rich. Long rate free, or rent-free periods, flexible planning options, support with infrastructure, the provision of high quality connectivity, IP and mobile connections could all encourage investment. Fellow town centre businesses need to understand that the bigger working community will deliver greater local prosperity so encouraging them to get behind and agree to these incentivised programs is also crucial. Institutions and major city employers could be encouraged to invest in outer suburb business village developments. We could look to push the locations further and further out into satellite towns so that we can all commute less, share the workforce more evenly and break the cycle of high wages, high house prices and low satisfaction with life’s working balance.

Can this project be call the Field of Dream? If we build it will they come?

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