Aug. 16, 2023 "Bosses dislike it when employees work from home, but think they’re stuck with it": Today I found this article by Alex Tanzi on the Financial Post:
Business leaders think the spread of remote work has had more negative effects than positive ones, but they also see the practice becoming ingrained, according to a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said remote work had a negative impact in four areas:
workplace culture,
cohesiveness and team environment,
communication among employees,
and training and mentorship.
The upside for employers:
more than half said working from home makes it easier to recruit staff,
and more than two-thirds said it helps to retain them.
The study comes as high-profile companies from Citigroup Inc. to Amazon.com Inc. are pushing to get more of their workers back in the office.
The shift to remote work during the pandemic is enduringly popular with employees, but corporate chiefs worry it’s making their businesses less productive.
Commercial property markets, and downtown businesses like restaurants, have also taken a hit.
According to the New York Fed’s survey,
68 per cent of employees at service firms work in-person all the time
and 13 per cent entirely remotely,
while the other 19 per cent have a hybrid status,
averaging 2.2 days per week out of the office.
That balance isn’t seen changing all that much in the coming year.
At manufacturing firms, 94 per cent of employees work in-person.
The study found that 25 per cent of business leaders have changed policies over the past year to require more in-person work,
while 17 per cent plan to do that in the coming year.
Overall, service firms would prefer more than three-quarters of their workers to be fully on-site — nine percentage points higher than the current share.
Remote work is also changing the physical environment of the workplace.
About one in eight service firms has reduced their office space over the past year, with an average reduction of 41 per cent.
Aug. 22, 2023 "More than one-third of office desks globally sit empty all week long": Today I found this article by Matthew Boyle on the Financial Post:
More than one-third of desks in offices around the globe are unoccupied all week, according to a new report, raising questions about how well workplaces are currently designed as companies struggle to get employees back into them.
The report, from Australian workplace sensor provider XY Sense, found that 36 per cent of so-called workpoints — cubicles and desks — are never occupied, “indicating a general oversupply.”
Of those that are used, 29 per cent were for three hours or less on a given day.
Just 14 per cent were occupied for five or more hours, according to the study that tracked 24,855 unique work areas in nine regions including the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Among the spaces used the most are meeting rooms for two or three people, which are 90 per cent full on average.
Overall, office utilization is stuck at about 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.
The findings illustrate the challenges faced by organizations as they assess office-space needs.
Workers and managers both say they should be on site at least one-third of the time, according to research from Boston Consulting Group, but much of that in-person time is no longer spent tethered to a desk.
Spaces for
small, private huddles,
more open collaboration,
and soundproof enclosures for individual head-down work are all more relevant today compared with old-fashioned cubicles.
Yet 80 per cent of total floor space is taken up by individual workstations,
with just 20 per cent left for collaboration, XY Sense found.
“It’s time to rethink the humble desk,” said Alex Birch, co-founder and chief executive of XY Sense. “They dominate space in our offices, they’re expensive and we’re just not using them the way we were pre-pandemic.
Companies just need less of them now that people do the majority of their focus work at home.
Companies should either
redeploy that desk space for better workplace experiences
or pocket the savings,
but they can’t ignore the waste that’s going on.”
Other data support the shift away from desks. Research from office-furniture maker Haworth found that
85 per cent of employees had their own individual workstations before 2020,
yet less than half do now.
Following years where companies simply crammed as many employees as they could into static cubicle farms, or long rows of workstations, some see the changes wrought by remote work as long overdue.
“For far too long we designed offices as if we’re potted plants,” said Kay Sargent, director of the workplace practice at architecture and design company HOK.
“Are you really inviting people back to the office to have them sit at a desk all day?
Or do you want to encourage them to
connect,
mentor
and innovate?”
The dearth of desk usage could also prompt employers to rethink their real estate needs.
More than nine out of 10 big organizations reported low office utilization rates in a survey by CBRE Group Inc.,
and more than half expect to reduce their real-estate footprints over the next three years.
According to XY Sense’s data, office utilization didn’t change much between the first and second quarters of 2023.
But about one million US desk workers face mandates to return to offices more often by the end of the year, according to brokerage JLL.
“We need to address the fact that we’ve accidentally created call centre environments with the acres of large open workstations that are a feature of most offices these days,” Domino Risch, a principal and co-leader of the workplace and commercial sector at architect Hassell, said in the report.
“The sea of repetitive banks of open plan workstations that typical knowledge-based organizations have just aren’t fit for purpose anymore.”
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