_The office will (for many) become a personal choice, not a professional obligation

It has been widely recognised that these challenges have fostered faster corporate decision making (out of sheer necessity), a greater agility to business operations, and a heightened level of innovation either to keep the wheels of business turning or to re-purpose business activity to support with front-line responses to the pandemic. Business leaders have acted with pace to build operational resilience, essentially through the rapid adoption of new technology platforms, and, thereafter, financial resilience in order to ride out what is still an indefinite period of crisis. They have also adapted to an operating environment that was initially devoid of formal offices.

Inevitably, this led to the re-emergence of the ‘death of the office’ narrative within the broadsheet press, coupled with an enthusiastic new narrative about the real benefits of working from home. Many weeks on these arguments do appear extreme. The death of the office has again been overstated, but, quite rightly, the future form and function of the office is open to renewed scrutiny and re-evaluation. Initial focus on the perceived productivity benefits of working from home have given way to growing concerns about the impacts of extended isolation on mental well-being, the difficulty of truly innovating via virtual meetings, and the wider personal and professional benefits of social interaction within a common place of work. The pendulum of the debate has swung back to adopt a position that points to a more rapid evolution of the office rather than outright revolution.

What is clear is that the binary thinking that typically characterised much of the workplace debate precrisis must now be called into question. The genie is out of the bottle in terms of working from home. Technology and managerial culture are no longer valid constraints. That is the learning of recent months. Working from home has a clear place in the future world of work. But that place does not come at the cost of the office. Instead, the future of work and the future workplace is a bleeding of two previous extremes and one in which people are increasingly empowered to select the workplace that works best for them and the task that preoccupies them at any particular moment in time. The ‘f’ word of real estate – flexibility – now extends well beyond lease arrangements to encompass more flexibility in the where and why of work.

This will become even more evident in the coming weeks as we move through Phase 2 of the great global workplace experiment: the phase whereby some workers return to offices of reduced capacity while many others continue to work remotely. In our view, this diverse and distributed workstyle will have greater influence on the longer-term re-imagining of the workplace than the enforced working from home seen during the lockdown period.

As companies adapt to, and rework their HR policies for, more flexible workstyles, the office will, for many, become a personal choice rather than a professional obligation. This has strong evolutionary consequences for the office.

First, it heightens the flight to quality office space that has been evident in major global markets for the last few years. The future office has to be a compelling proposition capable of attracting those workers now empowered to choose where they work. The office needs to fully represent the accretive qualities it can bring to peoples work – the ability to connect people in a meaningful and productive way, the ability to drive enhanced and rapid innovation, the ability to interact with new or long-standing clients or the ability to support career development, training and education. In short, the office needs to give people a reason to invest in their commute.

Second, the strength of that office proposition will be determined by the delivery of a strong and alluring workplace experience – supported by greater services and amenities. The office of the future is much more than just the physical environment it presents. Best in class offices extend beyond welldesigned bricks and mortar, to create buzz and vibrancy that adds value to people’s lives. The office will become more human, more interactive, more dynamic and much less driven by a need to deliver
functional efficiency.

Third, the creation and curation of this more compelling workplace environment and experience will derive from greater partnership between occupier and landlord. The former will act in order to engage and retain staff. The latter will act in order to retain customers and, hence, income. Although the pandemic has brought tension to the relationship between landlord and tenant, those who have entered into constructive dialogue to develop mutual understanding and co-create solutions will be long-term beneficiaries. COVID-19 will serve to turbo-charge the customer-centricity of the real estate industry. In so doing it will support the transition of real estate away from a simple product and towards a business service that can add strategic value and competitive advantage to those who utilise it.

Knight Frank Australia recently hosted a webinar on People Performance: A revelation for real estate strategy, during which our panel of experts delved into what people are telling us about performance and how to utilise the power of this knowledge, key considerations employers need to take when preparing a workplace for people performance, what more landlords and developers must do to accommodate for this shift in focus, and how we become performance resilient. You can watch the webinar on demand here or get in touch with a member of the team for more information.