The office is dead. Long live the office!

Let’s cut to the chase.

What you did yesterday isn’t working today. And it won’t work tomorrow.

As we begin to create tomorrow’s workspace we have to accept that how we lease, access and use office buildings has changed. We can’t go back. 

The Global Re-set

Economies around the globe are in free-fall as governments scramble to rebuild confidence while the Covid pandemic rages on. As we try to assess the impact this will have on the future of workspace the temptation is to fall back on our acquired knowledge, the data we built up from owning or operating office spaces over decades. We look at the trends that were in play, the standards we understood and are naturally drawn to what we know and understand. Or at least, what we knew and understood.

Because the extraordinary social experiment of having hundreds of millions of people working from home for the first time in the digital age is a tectonic shift. A fracture line that renders pre-covid data at best suspect and at worst, dangerously misleading. 

We understand that working from home has broadly been successful. But we need to understand the deeper issues, the nuances . As we begin to come out of lockdown what have we really missed and what have we learnt we had been doing wrong all along?

Today’s reality is that we are only at the very beginning of understanding the impacts of this shift away from the office. The effects on team bonding, brand integrity, wellbeing and long term efficiency are simply not yet known. We’re hearing murmurs but are far away from statistically significant findings. We need to admit that we just don’t know enough to commit to any one, single workspace solution.

‘I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.’

Carl Sagen

What we do know is that budgets will be tightened and overheads attacked. The typical workspace sees significant use for around eleven hours per day, five days per week. This means that your company only uses that expensive overhead for around 33% of the week. Your CFO should be thinking about that.

The Radical Mindset

So if we do not yet have reliable data, how do we move forward? Do we carry on as we were? Change nothing?

We move forward with the understanding that we need to be able to flex and adapt as the situation changes. The future of workspace is not binary, it will not be a choice between working from home or working in a large city centre HQ. Instead, there will be a broad spectrum of options between these two extremes. Companies and their employees will search out more appropriate options that better match their needs and they will flex between these approaches as it suits them.

In 1989 Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase ‘the third place’ to describe the place that isn’t ‘home’ or ‘work’ but a space between, a space that combined social activity with the ability to work and with the comfort of home. Seized on by Howard Schultz, this succinct statement became the central concept for Starbucks, the idea that took them from being a coffee shop to a global icon.

77% of employees would prefer hybrid working

Adecco survey UK

Thirty years on from Oldenburg’s declaration we are now looking at an emerging desire to have access to different working environments, fit for different purposes and in a variety of locations. It isn’t about working from home, it’s about being able to work anywhere. Ultimately this flexibility is the way forward. In such uncertain times, the only smart choice is to avoid being locked into a fixed format. Companies should be working now to discover the range of interactions, spaces and functions their teams require, and then to understand where, when and in what way they need to access them. 

Only then can we see what the real need is, the ultimate flexibility of space on demand. And by on demand we are not talking about leases measured in years but in bookings by the day or even by the hour.

Learning From Others

If hiring space by the day or even less sounds impossible, just think about the hospitality industry. Hotels allow you to book rooms by the night. Restaurants effectively allow you to book a table for a matter of hours. The models are there, they just need to be learnt from and adapted. 

‘Standard, desk-based work can be done quite easily from home,’

John Mulqueen, CBRE, Property Week

For a few, the big central office in a prime location will remain an option. But for most, access to a distributed network of spaces will be key. Work from home, from a coffee shop, from a local office, from a high spec studio, from a prime location. No single approach is right, the ability to choose is the prize.

But we must be brave. The industry talk of moving to hub and spoke models does not go far enough. It’s a baby step when giant leaps have already been taken.

Digital First

Building from the customer’s perspective, we begin to see a new opportunity. If we think about what the end users want we can image a scenario in which a company might take a relatively small space to act as their brand HQ. A space infused with their culture and attitude. Part brand showroom, part collaboration space, part community support. 

Everything else, the offices and meeting rooms, the open plan offices and the scrum rooms are all outsourced. Accessed on demand, either on a pay to play or on subscription basis. 

‘more people are likely to pop to a satellite office,’ 

Jonathan Gardiner, Savills, Property Week 

In this new workspace landscape the key supplier migrates from being the building owner, or as is the case with most coworking outfits, the operator of the space, to being a facilitator. A digital platform, an aggregator that guarantees a level of quality while providing the flexibility and the availability to provide users with access to what they want, when they want it. Think Airbnb meets Expedia. But better.

This digital first approach enables companies to flex their office space to exactly suit their needs. Big company meeting? Hire a conference facility for the day instead of office space. Pay only for what you need. 

For years, traditional retailers treated ecommerce as a side show but its rise to dominance was as inevitable as the death of Blockbusters at the hands of Netflix. The industry might try to resist such a fluid customer centric approach but the direction is clear.

App enabled bookings through your phone. An elastic, flexible source of appropriate physical space on demand. 

The solution for the workplace of the future might literally fit in the palm of your hand.