Building a hybrid future that works for everyone

COVID might not have defined hybrid working or created the need for distributed teams but the virus certainly accelerated changes in how organisations function, think about themselves and define their key relationships.

Take the office as an example. Bricks and mortar or steel and glass, the office was once an immutable force in organisational life. The office had gravity, pulling in commuting workers and enforcing an orbit around desks, corridors and meeting rooms. Hopefully it had gravitas too, telling a good story about the firm’s history, durability and style.  

But that’s all changed and the situation continues to change. Indeed, do we still need offices when business-as-usual can be conducted over Teams and Zoom? Take a stroll around any town centre and central business district and the number of ‘to let’ signs are certainly indicative of changing and challenging times.

The RICS, in its 2020 UK Commercial Property Market reports said in its headline summary ‘occupier and investor demand continues to sink across the retail and office sectors…. Overall, 78% of respondents nationally see the market in a downturn phase.’

‘The office’s job was to act as a central location,’ explains Margaret Ross, MBE, Emeritus Professor of Software Quality at Southampton Solent University. The office, she says, existed to ‘manage work, employees and client contacts.’

But recent history tells us we can do all of these things – and more – without the need for the office to exert its gravitational pull on people.

‘We very much see the purpose of the office now as somewhere for teams to come together and try to put time aside to collaborate,’ explains Lisa Emery FBCS, Chief Information Officer at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. ‘We're trying to plan schedules to allow this, as otherwise there is a danger of coming into the office, only to sit in front of Teams or Zoom calls all day.’

Indeed, the days of the monolithic, marble-clad HQ might be numbered. ‘Large offices could be replaced with smaller offices,’ says Ross. ‘These might have meeting rooms and hot desks, using local university or hotel facilities, hired by the day for larger meetings and providing possibly accommodation for, say, training courses, which could in itself encourage networking opportunities between employees.’

Different kinds of offices

However, the hybrid future is shaped, Emery remains positive about the concept: ‘We have learned that, for many job roles, it is possible to deliver at pace and scale, whilst working remotely. I took over 90% of my digital team to remote working almost right away and they were still able to deliver and support the on-the-ground teams… Things like technical projects, enabling working from home tools and remote desktop support.’

Shared office spaces and rent-per-hour boardrooms aren’t new but the business sector has been gaining momentum. It's projected, the number of coworking spaces worldwide, will reach over 40,000 by 2024. Due to the pandemic, the industry saw slower growth in 2020, but  activity is rebounding, with a yearly growth rate of 21.3% for 2021.

Illustrative of the office’s changing identity is the recent move by the electronics retailer Currys. Working with WeWork, Currys equipped over 1,000 corporate workers with access passes, enabling them to visit and work from 50 WeWork locations spread across the UK.

Currys took a consultative approach in designing this new policy, with an emphasis on what people want and what their concerns are with returning to pre-pandemic working.

Alex Baldock, Group Chief Executive Officer, Currys, said: ‘Our workspace of the future embraces what genuine hybrid working means, not just where you work, but how you work. We want to bring our people together again, but in a way that works for them.’

Redesign towns around the office

Beyond drop-in workspaces, other organisations are teaming up to reinvent and reshape more than just the office. Cheltenham’s proposed Golden Valley development targets redeveloping a large swathe of the spa town. The plan is to create a community which integrates high-tech business, academia, residential living and also leisure facilities – all with GCHQ at the magnetic epicentre. The plan, which focuses on cementing the town’s place as a leading technology hub, is founded on creating a flexible place where academia, large organisations, start-ups and commercial ventures can all work together. And, of course, the scheme provides houses and flats for workers.

Beyond convenience, having teams of workers commute long distances to the office also poses other key questions for organisations: particularly those who take their carbon footprint seriously. Private transport is, after all, one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gasses.

‘With the increasing uncertainty of extreme weather due to climate change, the hybrid or distributed office is a wise option to minimise future risks.’ says Ross.

These risks and some possible mitigations are explored in the F-TAG authored paper 'The sustainability challenges facing digital transformation'. It argues for a broad definition of sustainability, a definition that has been shifted and informed by both COVID and climate change.

Along with reducing the risk of problems resulting from climate change, hybrid working also has the potential to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses from commuters’ cars. The International Energy Agency reported that: ‘By analysing commuter trends and labour market data, we found that if everybody able to work from home worldwide were to do so for just one day a week, it would save around 1% of global oil consumption for road passenger transport per year.’

However, the same report found that homeworking isn’t an automatic win for the climate. Working from home, the IEA discovered, is likely to reduce workers’ carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint if their journey to work is greater than about 6 kilometres. However, for short car commutes or those done by public transport, working from home could increase CO2 emissions due to extra residential energy consumption.

More than just the tech

It is, of course, easy to focus on hybrid working as a purely technical challenge – one simply about laptops, monitors, network and collaboration tools.

‘Initially, there was a huge need to get the tech and tools out there to ensure that people could switch to working from home,’ recalls Emery. ‘We made time to have 'remote catch ups' in order to stay connected with colleagues. In the last 6 months or so, we are addressing the people and culture side more from the perspective of trying to strike a balance; people are becoming weary of working fully remote, in some cases, and are missing the in-person contact that made them feel connected. There is definitely a balance that can be struck here.’

Echoing these ideas, Ross says: ‘[Organisations] need to create a culture of goal-oriented activities and introduce an agreed time period when home workers can be contacted. Other contacts for online meetings could normally be arranged well in advance.’

For you

BCS members can read the very latest F-TAG technical briefings and reports.

‘For me,’ Emery says, ‘this is about being sensitive to balancing the delivery requirements of your organisation, with the team and individual's personal circumstances and dynamics. Working through COVID has reinforced for me that needing to be 'seen' in the office, or micromanaging time is not the answer. Creating an environment of trust while setting sensible boundaries absolutely delivers results.’

The case for a hybrid future is then strong but, as we’ve seen, the story is developing. Indeed, what hybrid means in practical terms differs greatly cross organisations. Even at the functional level, a report from PWC shows how ideas, policies and plans differ. PCW found that 19% of the firms it spoke to planned to remain all-remote, 22% propose to be entirely office based and around 17% expect 3 remote days.

The RISC’s 2021 UK Commercial Property Market Survey found that the office, despite taking a demand side drubbing in 2020, has staged a comeback. In the final quart of the year, the surveyors’ governing body found that ‘66% of survey participants still feel office space is essential for a company to operate successfully.’ Of course, how that office might be used is an open question.