Apr. 11, 2022 "Employees are 'in the driver’s seat': How employers are trying to lure people back to the office": Today I found this article by Joseph Brean on the Financial Post/ National Post:
Imagine you were building an office tower when the pandemic hit and Canada’s offices were frozen in time. Heck, imagine you were building two of them in the middle of downtown Toronto, proper trophy towers for a big bank, and then for a while at least, nobody went to offices at all.
They weren’t even allowed to. And then office workers started saying they might not want to ever go back, not like before anyway. What would you do? What might you change for the new normal?
Spring has sprung at the post-pandemic office. All across North America, big corporate offices are like dry riverbeds after the rain. Last week it was Google. This week it will be Apple. TD just announced plans.
The mood is vibrant but tense, with one recent poll showing 81 per cent of Toronto area office workers posted to their homes are happier that way.
More than half say they would be comfortable returning to the office in some way, but they are not terribly keen on it, and everyone seems to agree that the old ways of office attendance are gone like the snows of yesteryear.
The first Toronto office tower to open post lockdown, CIBC Square on Bay Street across from the Scotiabank Arena, is very nice, the kind of place you might like to spend a day, even a whole work week.
The National Post spent a morning there to see plenty of reasons why, all chosen and designed with care, and then rethought and fine-tuned under the wild pressure of a global pandemic that threatened the very concept of the office itself.
The pandemic sparked a “massive forced experiment,” said Jonathan Pearce, executive vice president of leasing and development at Ivanhoé Cambridge,
which broke ground on this first CIBC Square tower in 2017,
and is now building the second nearby across the railway tracks to the north.
This experiment, about what an office tower should be like after a pandemic, demonstrated what Pearce calls a “fusion of asset classes.”
Just as retail merges with logistics,
so too does office space merge with hospitality.
So the basic strategy was to make these new office towers more pleasant to be in.
Pearce said they tried to pivot their offerings to focus more on the office experience, “on what you don’t have at home.”
“I don’t think people are going to come in to sit on Zoom calls. Companies and landlords are naive if they expect that to happen,” Pearce said.
“We were headed the right way, but the pandemic forced us to amplify those services,
more focused on hospitality,
and more focused on what people don’t have.”
The effort is to return time to the employee, to make the commute worthwhile rather than strictly necessary. “It becomes a third place,” Pearce said, after work and home.
One early focus that declined in importance as the pandemic went on was the goal of not touching things.
Some elements remain in the design, like
the building app that sends guests a QR code to scan at entry gates
and also programs the elevator to take them to the right floor, with no button pushing at all.
But the science on pandemic safety found this was not a main vector of viral spread. So there are door knobs. Some things have buttons. Some things don’t change permanently.
“Our conviction from a cultural standpoint was that people wanted to be around other people and this vision of permanently working from home will not come to pass,” said Avi Tesciuba, Canada country head at Hines, a real estate firm that partnered with Ivanoé Cambridge in the CIBC Square project.
So there is a tenants-only fourth floor “canopy” deck with harvest tables and a concierge station and places to sit and gather.
Meals are similarly prioritized, with offerings modelled on the idea of food trucks, where vendors can cycle in and out of smaller stations,
and chairs and stools and benches that are not bolted to the floor, as in the typical franchised basement food court.
A white table cloth restaurant from an established name is in the works but not yet announced.
Across downtown on Duncan Street, media conglomerate Thomson Reuters is soon to open its Toronto Technology Centre, where construction started in 2017.
A final interior design was ready by early 2020, but the lockdown inspired major changes on the fly.
These changes, in turn, will serve as a real-life test of the company’s plans for five new floors in a 57-floor tower to be built above the existing five.
The building is heritage designated, the old Southam Press Building, built in 1908, four years after fire wrecked Toronto’s downtown.
The project is to design a modern office into an old warehouse that still stands as a relic of a mighty Canadian company long since gone,
but with newspaper titles that continue, including this one,
which is curious because Thomson Reuters is majority owned by the Thomson family, which also owns The Globe and Mail.
Here near the theatres, the office real estate vibe is a little more bohemian. They do not need to reproduce any food truck vibes. Their employees can just step outside. Here, the most promising lunch is not at that harvest table on the private mezzanine above the marble-clad lobby, but across the street at a casual basement noodle bar run by Toronto’s best loved Thai restaurateurs.
But the corporate dynamics of the disrupted office are similar. Thomson Reuters’ initial plan called for
70 per cent of the space to be devoted to “focus” on private work,
and 15 per cent each to collaboration and connection.
The pandemic revised plan drastically revised that,
cut focus space in half,
and boosted collaboration to fully 45 per cent of the space.
“Everybody is trying to figure out what the future of work looks like. There is no playbook,” said
Mary-Alice Vuicic, chief people officer at Thomson Reuters, in an interview on the first day of the company’s new hybrid back-to-work policy.
Employees are newly “in the driver’s seat,” she said, and employers are realizing that, in general,
they need less real estate
and must use what they have differently.
“You have to be much more purposeful as an employer about how you use time in the office,” Vuicic said.
“People don’t want to come in to sit at a screen.”
Some of the solutions are
ingenious,
inventive,
technological
and aim to minimize the use of rented office space.
In Montreal, for example, X2O Media markets an “immersive collaboration technology” that sets up a room to remotely recreate
a theatre,
or musical stage,
or conference room,
classroom,
boardroom
or “situation room,”
so finely tuned that each screen has a dedicated camera for true eye contact.
Some solutions are behavioural, but stay in the old spaces of office blocks, like the
hybrid model of a reduced in-person work week
or hot-desking, where work stations are shared day to day.
And some solutions just give up on the old ways altogether,
and seek reinvention beyond the pandemic’s disruption.
After two years of Zoom meetings and soft pants, the office is back, baby, and it’s not just a desk anymore.
* * *
Back in the 1990s, when coffee shop culture was all the rage and Friends was set in Central Perk, Starbucks capitalized by pursuing a corporate vision borrowed from sociology.
The cafe would aim to be a “third place,” after home and work,
that would foster connection and community,
and drive the value of the whole enterprise.
Just selling coffee at your coffee shop was like just doing work at the office. It is a waste of space.
You should also get people to
eat there,
think there,
meet there,
reflect there,
hang out there,
live there.
This is almost exactly the pitch some of Canada’s big office employers and landlords give for the new office of the post-pandemic future.
Tesciuba of Hines, for example, offers the image of an office worker on a hybrid attendance policy considering whether to go in to the office on any given morning, perhaps wondering why he should bother if he can work just as well at home.
In Tesciuba’s vision, the answer would no longer be “because them’s the rules.” It would be because the office is a place of many and diverse attractions,
from more efficiently collaborative work
to lunch
and exercise,
drinks and parties,
friendships and romances.
Office workers can escape the drudgery of home into an urban universe of possibility, dressed up for the occasion in ironed shirts and leather soled shoes.
The office is theatre, too. People want to see and be seen.
The idea is that the post-pandemic office should offer many things, not just a desk, a restroom, a printer and a nearby reasonably priced egg salad on rye.
Like Starbucks’s “third place” goal, this vision is a reaction to sociological research showing that, at the very least, people need some convincing about all this “back to the office” business.
“There’s a sense that the workplace has profoundly and irrevocably changed,” said John Wright, executive vice president of Maru Public Opinion, in a recent presentation to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. “While 57 per cent say they would be comfortable returning, only 17 per cent are fully good with that now.”
In his survey of almost 800 office workers in the Toronto area who were posted to their home to work during the pandemic, four out of five said their work situation will not return to the way it was.
This is not some vain or selfish declaration of intent, but a reflection of where people are today.
Well over half said that, given all the adaptation that has already been required by the pandemic,
it would be “very difficult” to return to the office full time if that was the order.
Nearly 40 per cent said such an order would get them looking for another job,
and 24 per cent said they would simply quit.
The office has already changed. Remnants of an office culture that demanded 40-hour weeks in the same desk, like staplers or desk phones, appear today like archeological discoveries. Paper files that you have not consulted in two years have proven that you just don’t need them anymore. Your kids do not look like they do in those pictures anymore. You probably shouldn’t risk that Advil or that gum. The old office is a museum.
In the 1980s, George Mazzei, former editor of Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine, published The New Office Etiquette. Today, it might as well be Jane Austen.
It is comprehensible, but it is about a different world of different social manners. It also offers a revealing perspective on just
how much the etiquette,
even the purpose of the office has changed.
In Mazzei’s view, for example, it is “rudeness in the extreme to drop in on someone unannounced at his office and have the receptionist call through.”
Today, that sort of impromptu get together is literally designed into the infrastructure. CIBC Square explicitly aims for something closer to hotel lobby than airport terminal.
Another outdated view is not thinking of your office space as your own: “We all have to share work space. That is the nature of a company, of a working area. The only thing that endures there is the work itself; the workers are transitory,” Mazzei wrote.
“It is never a good idea to view an office as being your own, even though you may decorate it and make it as personal a statement as you can…. The only thing to remember is this: Don’t expend all your creative energies trying to get comfortable.”
That advice is so 1980s it’s got shoulder pads. It just does not work that way anymore. Workers are transitory? Don’t get comfortable? That vision is as stale as a Rolodex.
This is the era of the employee. As Vuicic put it, they are “in the driver’s seat.” That is why CIBC Square does not have a sparse gym in the basement, lit like a bus station, but a fitness centre with towel service and a view of the city skyline, soon to be dominated by its partner tower. It looks like proof the office is here to stay, even if it has to change.
It is possible to overstate the cultural significance of a few amenities. This is downtown Toronto real estate, after all. At this price point it should be nice. But the amenities at CIBC make a novel pitch of a new way of work life, from the 35th floor tenants-only lounge with a view of the Toronto Islands to the private park. What’s that you say? Office towers don’t come with parks? That’s pre-pandemic thinking right there.
Post-pandemic, CIBC Square has its own park, artfully landscaped overtop the railway tracks, publicly accessible but privately owned and controlled, with plans for both a winter skating loop and summer garden parties. You know, summer garden parties at the office, just like old times.
This new hospitality-heavy vision of the modern office might not last. Real estate trends eventually turn around. Starbucks tried sticking with its “third place” vision at the beginning of the pandemic, but moved away from it with delivery and drive-thru.
Offices, likewise, might slip back into the old ways of just being offices, mere arrangements of desks, and some things about work life might never change.
Going back to the office after a two-year pandemic is going back to the future.
It feels familiar, but you’ve never done it before.
There are 31 comments:
Dec. 27, 2024: I checked the article, and there are now 103 comments.
The problem being.... over the past 2 years there was a pandemic so there was very little ground to base any performance statistics on. People made claims that there was no loss in employee performance, but had nothing to base that on. Now, employers can use stats from pre pandemic times to do analysis on employee performance from home versus the office..... and I can pretty much guarantee that most employers are going to be wanting employees back in the office as performance stats will show massive drops in productivity.
On the employee side, employment standards have taken generations to get to where they were prior to the pandemic. Unions worked hard to ensure 8 hour work days and 40 hour work weeks. People were trying to legislation enacted so they could 'unplug' from the office..... and then people started working from home which throws all of that out the window and will put employers in the position of being able to pay people on performance and accomplishments rather than just by the hour, week or month.....
Be careful what you wish for.......
Apr. 19, 2022 "Bosses are ordering staff back to the office — but those rules don't apply to them": Today I found this article by Ryan Cavataro on the Financial Post:
Bosses are hell-bent on getting their staff back into the office. It’s just that the rules don’t necessarily apply to them.
While 35 per cent of non-executive employees are in the office five days a week,
just 19 per cent of executives can say the same,
according to a survey by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by messaging channel Slack.
Of the share of employees who are making the commute,
more than half say they’d like at least some flexibility,
and non-executives broadly report having a much worse work-life balance than their bosses.
Furthermore, the disparity is growing.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, non-executives were about 1.3 times as likely as their bosses to be fully in office.
Now it’s nearly twice as likely, and the share of non-executives who are in five days a week is the highest since the survey began in June 2020, according to the more than 10,000 white-collar workers polled in the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K.
Future Forum’s definition of “executives” includes those with a title of president or partner or anything in the C-suite.
The gap points to a double standard in return-to-office messaging —
executives from Bank of America Corp. to Alphabet Inc.’s Google are prodding their workers to return in part to boost in-person collaboration,
but bosses themselves are somewhat exempt.
Companies are also trying to justify long-term office leases or state-of-the-art headquarters like Apple Park in Cupertino, California.
Employees aren’t having it. According to the survey, workers who are unsatisfied with their flexibility are now three times as likely to say they will “definitely” look for a new job in the coming year.
It also showed a feeling of work-life balance fell twice as much for full-time office workers compared to those with location flexibility.
“Top down mandates just generally don’t work,” said Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum.
In addition to improving workers’ mental health, offering more options can move the needle on diversity, equity and inclusion, too.
Some 82 per cent of Asian/Asian American
and 79 per cent of Black respondents
would prefer a hybrid or fully remote work arrangement,
compared to 77 per cent of white respondents.
Women and working mothers expressed a desire for location flexibility more than ever as child-care costs continue to rise.
As the debate on return-to-office policies evolves, Future Forum recommends
schedule
and location flexibility
in order to retain top talent,
even if it means
breaking cultural traditions
and developing new workflows.
“People being in the office gives you the illusion of control, but it’s just an illusion,” Elliot said.
“It doesn’t mean they are being productive.”
Bosses are ordering staff back to the office — but those rules don't apply to them | Financial Post
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