 |
| Picture: BBC |
It is now six weeks since the UK went into lockdown and from a working perspective, everything is going well. On Thursday I’ll celebrate the first full month in my new job, one in which I have so far met only three colleagues in person - one, a few years ago, and my boss and his boss during my interview in February. Now I think of it, they were probably the last non-family members I had any real proximity to before everything came to a halt (delivery drivers dropping food at the front door, and the neighbours across the road clapping on a Thursday night don't count).
Since I came on onboard at the company everything has been done virtually, from my induction to the ramp-up of tasks and projects with my various internal “stakeholders”. As you can imagine, working for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, the IT has worked perfectly. The Skype calls, even when subject to the vagaries of home broadband (from another supplier, I have to confess) have proven almost as good as being in the same room as colleagues, and even though you don’t have to see the whites of their eyes - face facts, a good old phone call is just as good - it is strangely reassuring to see co-workers in their home habitats, like everyone else ignoring workplace dress codes and not worrying (too much) about hair roots showing.
This has raised the inevitable question: will we ever need to return to the office? In one of my former companies, working out of one of a select number of ‘hub’ locations for at least three days a week was deemed mandatory. In another, an incoming CFO once told me that the policy of proactively encouraging remote working in the firm’s vast and extremely spaced out US workforce (done partly to save costs and partly to encourage more socially sustainable working) might have to be reversed, and we should return to everyone working in the same place. For colleagues based out of homes as diversely remote as rural Massachusetts, the Nevada desert and, I believe, a part of Oregon that barely had electricity, this was clearly going to be a step too far. As word spread of a possible return to centralised working, CVs became refreshed rather sharpish. Now, anyone lucky enough to have an office job (or, indeed, still have a job), has been told to work from home. So, should it stay that way?
For a start, social distancing and the lockdown have probably been a minor boon to corporate balance sheets, as the overheads of running office spaces have shifted to their homeworking employees, who are still paying for their normal household broadband and their utilities. A story in The Times on Saturday reported that Her Majesty’s Taxperson had seen a spike in homeworkers claiming tax relief on things like office chairs and printer ink, personal costs they’re now having to bear that would have otherwise been met by employers. As someone who, now, sits at a kitchen table on a vintage wooden chair which, while exceedingly characterful, is about as comfortable as an 11th century village church pew, the thought of ordering one of those nice, springy ‘David Brent’ chairs does sound like music to my benumbed rump, especially if I could claim 20% of the cost back.
If, then, it’s been proven so easy to have the corporate workforce work from their kitchens, living rooms and home offices, the old concept of hundreds of people amassed across the floors of corporate campuses seems strange to go back to. There are still cultural advantages to everyone working under the same roof, but the apparent success with which some sections of the workforce have switched to homeworking calls into acute question what long-term need there will be for great sheds full of desks. That, though being openly debated in the media, is still for the long-term. The noises coming out of yesterday's No.10 press conference were quite clear, that any easing of the lockdown won't happen soon as the government's five-point criteria for easing seem unlikely to be met, all the while the risk of a second and worse peak of COVID-19 is high. Despite this, a partial return to office working is being considered by the government, with defence secretary Ben Wallace this morning telling Sky News that there are "options".
Boris Johnson’s frankly remarkable recovery from the virus has no doubt injected some new vim into the Government’s plan for getting Britain back to work and restarting the economy. One theory is that any easing of lockdown might first allow construction workers back to building sites (though how two-metre social distancing would be maintained there remains to be seen). And then there are offices. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is believed to be looking at a number of proposals for the limited reopening of offices, including a ban on ‘hot desking’, canteens remaining shut, strict rules on communal spaces, and desks and workstations spread out to a minimum two-metre distance (adding another half a metre to the current average separation). There is even talk of a ban on pens being shared by coworkers.
But, then, how do you move several thousand people about office buildings? Who would be brave enough to press the lift buttons, let alone share a lift safely with others all trying to get to their desks for the requisite start time? Most office lifts I've been in at clocking-on time have been stuffed to the gills (and there's always one individual who has to squeeze on just as the doors are closing). Some have suggested staggered working even over seven days, rather than five, with shift systems enabling different employees in on alternating days. That might sound practical, but what would it actually achieve? And, still, for those people who have been instructed not to leave the house for 12 weeks “at least” due to health conditions, a return to the office may not be on the cards at all: it has been suggested that the government and its health and scientific advisers think that the most at-risk in society will have to remain in lockdown for up to a year, or however long it takes to produce a viable vaccine.
Even if we could go back to the office would we want to? A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times yesterday revealed that just 25% of adults felt safe about returning to work, a figure compounded by the continued opposition by a sizeable percentage of the nation to schools returning to normal. This would impact those who, even if they could wouldn’t be able to return to work while supervising home schooling. And, then, even if people were OK about going back, how would they get there? The insane scenes of overcrowded Tube trains in the early weeks of the crisis, as Tube services were cut but demand remained high, will weigh heavily on the minds of anyone remotely paranoid about claustrophobia brought on by the contagion.
For the foreseeable future, then, many offices will remain empty or at least sparse. This, the Financial Times discussed last week, will lead to corporate finance chiefs looking at their own bricks and mortar, glass and steel, to lower costs. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” Jes Staley of Barclays told the paper. “Maybe we don't need all the offices that we currently have around the world,” suggested another banker, while another said that his bank was already thinking about a new location strategy that wasn’t so city-centric. Tom Stringer, a corporate real estate manager in the US with the accounting firm BDO, also told the FT that: “In six weeks we’ve taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America and moved them to kitchens and living rooms and it’s been pretty seamless,” he said. “People are getting used to it. The stray dog or the kid wandering into the conference call is now accepted in corporate and governmental America.”
The story has replicated itself across multiple business sectors where office-based working is commonplace. Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising industry veteran who now runs S4 Capital, told the Financial Times that he spends around £35 million on business property in a year. “I’d much rather invest that in people than expensive offices,” he said, adding stoically that he has found the new normal of working from home to be “energising”. However, as the lockdown goes on, others are getting stir crazy. The kitchen coffee machine is no substitute for a quick trip to Starbucks, the fridge no replacement for a lunchtime dash to Pret. There are those, too, who cherish the morning and evening commutes as opportunities to place a buffer between home and work life, to catch up on books or podcasts, or simply to spend an hour each way staring out of the train window and contemplating. This is hardly facilitated by a daily routine that mostly revolves around moving between the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the toilet and occasionally the living room.
Skype, Zoom, Teams, WebEx and all the rest are, undoubtedly, great tools to be able see and hear your colleagues as if they were in the room with you. And it’s been well known for a while what a fortune these platforms save in terms of travel costs, not to mention CO2 emissions. But they do have their limitations. On Saturday we went up to a local golf course that has generously opened its fairways to the public to use for exercise, and I realised just how narrow a vista I’d grown used to during the lockdown. It may not have been a Mediterranean beach or the Lake District, but to see the widescreen panorama of blue sky and grass was enough to widen the stage beyond my laptop screen and the framework of our conservatory. I suppose it reminded me of the loss of freedom caused by the lockdown. That, in an office, I could just get out of my chair and walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question. To do that now - and bear in mind that I’m still getting to know the vast majority of people I work with - you have to intrude with instant messages, e-mail and, if it’s urgent, a phone call. Most if not all of my new colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of such impertinence, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t last. The bunker spirit appears to be strong, at least with whom I work. But having waited a long time to return to employment, I’m now at that stage of thinking when it would be nice to put on a suit and shoes and get stressed again about which train service SWR has cancelled today. No amount of looking up colleagues’ nostrils via poorly-adjusted laptop webcams can compensate for the social energy you only experience when you are a part of the ‘white collar masses’ assembled in a corporate office. Because there's more to the workday than simply completing tasks.
For now, the lockdown continues to be a great national experiment. The technology has not fallen over, and people are, for the most part, getting on with working from home. Even if the occasional dog barks during a Skype call, or a bored teenager drifts past the camera during a Zoom meeting, it seems hard to imagine that this would continue forever. People do, believe it or not, like to think of their colleagues as a second family, and even welcome being away from their main brood for a few hours each day - irrespective of whether it is conducive to productivity or not.
For a start, social distancing and the lockdown have probably been a minor boon to corporate balance sheets, as the overheads of running office spaces have shifted to their homeworking employees, who are still paying for their normal household broadband and their utilities. A story in The Times on Saturday reported that Her Majesty’s Taxperson had seen a spike in homeworkers claiming tax relief on things like office chairs and printer ink, personal costs they’re now having to bear that would have otherwise been met by employers. As someone who, now, sits at a kitchen table on a vintage wooden chair which, while exceedingly characterful, is about as comfortable as an 11th century village church pew, the thought of ordering one of those nice, springy ‘David Brent’ chairs does sound like music to my benumbed rump, especially if I could claim 20% of the cost back.
 |
| Picture: Microsoft |
If, then, it’s been proven so easy to have the corporate workforce work from their kitchens, living rooms and home offices, the old concept of hundreds of people amassed across the floors of corporate campuses seems strange to go back to. There are still cultural advantages to everyone working under the same roof, but the apparent success with which some sections of the workforce have switched to homeworking calls into acute question what long-term need there will be for great sheds full of desks. That, though being openly debated in the media, is still for the long-term. The noises coming out of yesterday's No.10 press conference were quite clear, that any easing of the lockdown won't happen soon as the government's five-point criteria for easing seem unlikely to be met, all the while the risk of a second and worse peak of COVID-19 is high. Despite this, a partial return to office working is being considered by the government, with defence secretary Ben Wallace this morning telling Sky News that there are "options".
Boris Johnson’s frankly remarkable recovery from the virus has no doubt injected some new vim into the Government’s plan for getting Britain back to work and restarting the economy. One theory is that any easing of lockdown might first allow construction workers back to building sites (though how two-metre social distancing would be maintained there remains to be seen). And then there are offices. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is believed to be looking at a number of proposals for the limited reopening of offices, including a ban on ‘hot desking’, canteens remaining shut, strict rules on communal spaces, and desks and workstations spread out to a minimum two-metre distance (adding another half a metre to the current average separation). There is even talk of a ban on pens being shared by coworkers.
But, then, how do you move several thousand people about office buildings? Who would be brave enough to press the lift buttons, let alone share a lift safely with others all trying to get to their desks for the requisite start time? Most office lifts I've been in at clocking-on time have been stuffed to the gills (and there's always one individual who has to squeeze on just as the doors are closing). Some have suggested staggered working even over seven days, rather than five, with shift systems enabling different employees in on alternating days. That might sound practical, but what would it actually achieve? And, still, for those people who have been instructed not to leave the house for 12 weeks “at least” due to health conditions, a return to the office may not be on the cards at all: it has been suggested that the government and its health and scientific advisers think that the most at-risk in society will have to remain in lockdown for up to a year, or however long it takes to produce a viable vaccine.
For the foreseeable future, then, many offices will remain empty or at least sparse. This, the Financial Times discussed last week, will lead to corporate finance chiefs looking at their own bricks and mortar, glass and steel, to lower costs. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” Jes Staley of Barclays told the paper. “Maybe we don't need all the offices that we currently have around the world,” suggested another banker, while another said that his bank was already thinking about a new location strategy that wasn’t so city-centric. Tom Stringer, a corporate real estate manager in the US with the accounting firm BDO, also told the FT that: “In six weeks we’ve taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America and moved them to kitchens and living rooms and it’s been pretty seamless,” he said. “People are getting used to it. The stray dog or the kid wandering into the conference call is now accepted in corporate and governmental America.”
The story has replicated itself across multiple business sectors where office-based working is commonplace. Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising industry veteran who now runs S4 Capital, told the Financial Times that he spends around £35 million on business property in a year. “I’d much rather invest that in people than expensive offices,” he said, adding stoically that he has found the new normal of working from home to be “energising”. However, as the lockdown goes on, others are getting stir crazy. The kitchen coffee machine is no substitute for a quick trip to Starbucks, the fridge no replacement for a lunchtime dash to Pret. There are those, too, who cherish the morning and evening commutes as opportunities to place a buffer between home and work life, to catch up on books or podcasts, or simply to spend an hour each way staring out of the train window and contemplating. This is hardly facilitated by a daily routine that mostly revolves around moving between the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the toilet and occasionally the living room.
 |
| Picture: Cisco |
Skype, Zoom, Teams, WebEx and all the rest are, undoubtedly, great tools to be able see and hear your colleagues as if they were in the room with you. And it’s been well known for a while what a fortune these platforms save in terms of travel costs, not to mention CO2 emissions. But they do have their limitations. On Saturday we went up to a local golf course that has generously opened its fairways to the public to use for exercise, and I realised just how narrow a vista I’d grown used to during the lockdown. It may not have been a Mediterranean beach or the Lake District, but to see the widescreen panorama of blue sky and grass was enough to widen the stage beyond my laptop screen and the framework of our conservatory. I suppose it reminded me of the loss of freedom caused by the lockdown. That, in an office, I could just get out of my chair and walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question. To do that now - and bear in mind that I’m still getting to know the vast majority of people I work with - you have to intrude with instant messages, e-mail and, if it’s urgent, a phone call. Most if not all of my new colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of such impertinence, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t last. The bunker spirit appears to be strong, at least with whom I work. But having waited a long time to return to employment, I’m now at that stage of thinking when it would be nice to put on a suit and shoes and get stressed again about which train service SWR has cancelled today. No amount of looking up colleagues’ nostrils via poorly-adjusted laptop webcams can compensate for the social energy you only experience when you are a part of the ‘white collar masses’ assembled in a corporate office. Because there's more to the workday than simply completing tasks.
For now, the lockdown continues to be a great national experiment. The technology has not fallen over, and people are, for the most part, getting on with working from home. Even if the occasional dog barks during a Skype call, or a bored teenager drifts past the camera during a Zoom meeting, it seems hard to imagine that this would continue forever. People do, believe it or not, like to think of their colleagues as a second family, and even welcome being away from their main brood for a few hours each day - irrespective of whether it is conducive to productivity or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment