Oct. 28, 2022 "Hybrid work is the future, but expect to be in the office more often than not": Today I found this article by Victoria Wells on the Financial Post:
Remote and hybrid work continue to dominate in offices, but knowledge workers should expect to be back at their desks more often in the future.
The professional workforce is currently split between one-third working from home, one-third on a hybrid model and one-third in the office five days a week, according to a survey of Canadian employees and employers by Staples Professional, a division of Staples Canada ULC, and Angus Reid Group. But hybrid work is emerging as the winner.
“What our Canadian employers are telling us is it’s going to be more balanced toward hybrid,” Staples Canada chief executive David Boone said. “Most of our customers are bringing people back to the office a greater number of days.”
That doesn’t mean the transition back to the office even for a couple of days a week will be an easy one. Companies and workers are still dealing with growing pains as they shift from a predominately remote-work model to one that brings them into the office more often.
Hybrid and remote workers continue to face challenges around communication, and, for some, their home workspaces are still not up to snuff, the survey said.
“Companies and their employees still need help getting hybrid work to work,” Boone said. “Fundamentally, there’s still a lot of challenges for implementing this new way of working across almost every dimension.”
Remote work has been good for employees from a work-life balance perspective, the survey said,
as they save time commuting
and can better manage their workloads.
Employers also agree that remote work has benefits for employee well-being.
But working from home presents major trade-offs between time savings and workplace connection.
Remote workers are more likely to say they find it difficult to develop relationships with co-workers, have trouble communicating or feel disconnected from their employers, the survey said.
Many also lack proper equipment to get their jobs done two-plus years into remote working.
Basics such as adjustable chairs and dedicated desks are missing in some spaces, and many lack proper lighting, which Boone said can have a big impact on employee morale and productivity. Lighting is also not something workers often consider when planning their home offices.
Those issues are important to employers, too, and some have offered allowances to help employees outfit work-from-home arrangements, Boone said.
But most workers say they’re still paying for their home-office upgrades themselves, with the survey noting that only 19 per cent are receiving money from their employers to address their workspace needs.
Such communication and workspace challenges may be good reasons to bring people back into the office more often, and companies, including Staples Canada, appear to be heading in that direction, Boone said.
“I would say the overarching trend is that hybrid is here,” he said. “It’s going to become a little less fully remote and a little more hybrid and trend towards more on site days than off.”
• Email: vwells@postmedia.com | Twitter: vwells80
Hybrid work is here to stay, but workers will be in the office more | Financial Post
We have an opportunity here to redefine the way we work.
Let's not just jump back into the office because we lack the imagination and innovative thinking to evolve work.
When we use words like 'productive', let's take a broader look at what this mean... it certainly not more productive for the person who commutes 2 hours each day. Nebulous ideas like 'cohesion', 'engagement', 'collaboration' must be clearly defined before we can address them in remote work models... it is possible to get 'more' out of remote work than we ever got from sticking people in offices and disconnecting them from family and community. We can do better.
Has anybody called a company or government in the past year, for example? How quickly did you get through or get through at all? Sometime you leave a message and may or may not get a call back. If it's urgent, good luck to you. Not saying everybody needs to be in an office, but, for productivity, cohesion and organization, an office works a lot better.
Oct. 31, 2022 "'Working from home will stick': Hybrid work emerges as new normal among office workers": Today I found this article by Valentina Romei in London on the Financial Post:
Office workers across the world’s biggest economies have not resumed their pre-pandemic commuting, instead embracing hybrid work as the new normal according to widely watched commuting data.
In Japan, footfall was seven per cent below pre-pandemic levels while in the U.K. it was down 24 per cent. Across major advanced economies office trips are more popular on the middle days of the week, while Monday and Friday tend to show large drops in attendance.
Cities which host financial and business districts saw a larger loss of office footfall than in other major population areas, according to the Google figures.
Economists said the shift towards remote working had become the new normal.
“Working from home will ultimately stick,” said Cevat Giray Aksoy, an economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development who has researched the trend. “Workplace-related mobility levels will remain lower than the pre-pandemic levels.”
The big shift to working from home “presents challenges for dense urban centres that are organized to support a large volume of inward commuters and a high concentration of commercial activity,” said Aksoy.
Aksoy’s research found a rising share of job postings in many countries offer employees the opportunity to work remotely one or more days per week. Sara Sutton, founder and chief executive of FlexJobs, a careers service specializing in remote and hybrid jobs, agreed.
“We have definitely seen a tipping point towards a deeper and more permanent integration of remote and hybrid work into organizations,” she said.
Survey data suggest that people like working from home and the practice helps
to lower firms’ overheads
and carbon emissions,
but evidence on the impact on productivity is mixed.
The Freespace index, which tracks office usage in big corporations around the world, shows that occupancy is about half its 2019 levels for both workspace stations and meeting rooms.
Kastle data, which tracks fob access to United States offices, particularly in big professional services businesses, shows that occupancy only returned to about half of pre-pandemic levels in mid-October.
A survey by the Munich-based think-tank Ifo Institute showed that in August one-quarter of employees in Germany still worked from home for at least part of the time.
In the U.K., a regular survey run by the Office for National Statistics showed that more than a fifth of U.K. workers were using a hybrid model of working in early October, largely unchanged since the spring.
The proportion rose to more than half of the workforce for information and communication, with professional, scientific and technical activities being only a little lower.
Google began to publish daily data on travel patterns in April 2020 as a tool for governments and policymakers to track the effects of COVID restrictions on the economy. It initially showed a collapse in visits to workplaces as people in many countries were forced to stay home.
The mobility reports were used by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank as a snapshot of the impact the pandemic was having on the economy, as they were published months ahead of official figures.
The data was a “fantastic” proxy for economic activity, said Bert Colijn, economist at ING Bank NV. The daily count of trips to the workplace also provided one of the best indicators globally to show how incomplete the return to the workplace had been, he said.
But as post-pandemic commuting patterns have become established, Google will not update the series further from now on.
© 2022 The Financial Times Ltd
Hybrid work emerges as new normal among office workers | Financial Post
It's next to impossible to put the Genie back in the bottle once you release it.
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