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Ten years ago, workplaces were all about tangible perks. But now workers want something different from their employers.

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You can tailor programs and policies to fit your employees’ needs.

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For remote teams, remote communication is both a challenge and a priority - and it will remain so long after the present pandemic has ended. The authors present new research that suggests remote communication is most effective when teams coordinate to communicate in rapid-fire bursts, followed by periods of uninterrupted "deep work time"; when they exchange a broad diversity of information; and when they align their schedules to communicate synchronously rather than asynchronously.

With the Covid-19 pandemic ongoing, the move to an online workplace has become widespread and may well endure. But, as many organizations are learning, managing the flow of communication among remote teams is tricky.

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Successful Remote Teams Communicate in Bursts

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For remote teams, remote communication is both a challenge and a priority - and it will remain so long after the present pandemic has ended. The authors present new research that suggests remote communication is most effective when teams coordinate to communicate in rapid-fire bursts, followed by periods of uninterrupted "deep work time"; when they exchange a broad diversity of information; and when they align their schedules to communicate synchronously rather than asynchronously.

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Remote Work Can Be Better for Innovation Than In-Person Meetings

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Seven steps for more inclusive and productive virtual brainstorming

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Cryptocurrency company Koda Finance has a peculiar work culture. James Gale, the company's CEO, says his 40-strong team treats the office as both a workplace and a lifestyle choice. "We are a very social bunch in and out the office. The Koda Whatsapp groups never sleep," he says. When the team started splitting their time between working at home and the office in May, some of his colleagues go into the office once or twice a week, others five. But they quickly realised that some people could end up never seeing each other again. Already the company has started offering team lunches and football tournaments over fears that some people in the team may feel left out.

Like Koda, many office-based companies are moving to a hybrid model. In the US, research shows that around 70 per cent of firms, from small businesses to giant corporations like Google, Citi, and HSBC, plan to ask employees to come into the office regularly. Nine out of ten industry executives told McKinsey & Company earlier this year that their organisations will be combining remote and onsite working. However, 68 per cent of organisations have no detailed plan as to how they'll actually do it.

Failure to prepare brings all manner of problems. Key staff become unhappy, burnt out, and leave. But the strategy of many companies to let people choose their preferred days in the office, to coincide with people they want to see in person, is also problematic. The splitting of the office in siloed days means that it also enforces a classic office trope: the workplace clique.

Once, cliques were formed at desks, split between different departments and evidenced at Christmas parties and after work drinks. Now, the causes of cliques are a little more convoluted as staff are divided between the office and home, as well as those who only work certain days of the week.

"Work tribes aren't a new thing," says Amy Butterworth, a psychologist and principal consultant at Timewise, a workplace consultancy. "We tend to gravitate to those with similar lives and experiences to us."

Cliques can lead to "groupthink" and a loss of creativity, says Butterworth, but they can also open up "influence gaps" between office-based in-crowds and their more remote-based peers. These gaps can have a negative effect on diversity and inclusion, especially for carers, people with health issues, introverts, or anyone more likely to work from home. "It's essential their voices are heard just as strongly," says Butterworth.

A return to the office campaign can also disproportionately affect part-time workers, too. In June, Timewise published a report which found that during lockdown, half the UK's part-time workforce either had their hours reduced or were recorded as being 'temporarily away from work' (furloughed). For full-time staff, it was a third. If their allocated schedules do not match with the people coming into the office, they could find themselves in a worse position still.

Timewise predicts that many part-time workers will face redundancy. "We are warning that those with caring responsibilities - predominantly women - will be forced into difficult choices between unemployment or taking jobs with longer hours they cannot sustain," says Butterworth.

Another big challenge with cliques is that there is a danger of creating what Dr Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at BT, calls a 'two speed organisation': a disjointed workforce who fail to collaborate. "To quote Frankie Goes to Hollywood, we know that two tribes can very easily go to war," says Millard.

The office tribe, explains Millard, tends to operate to a fixed block of time of 9-5, copes with more friction - commuting, desk-based collaboration - and forges relationships face-to-face.

The remote tribe, meanwhile, works in a mode Millard describes as "time confetti". They generally start earlier, finish later, work frictionlessly and take more breaks, but their social ties tend to be weaker because the majority have been formed online. "One casualty might be the office romance, but tribalism and distrust of 'out groups' can cause serious damage to people's willingness and ability to collaborate with others," says Millard. "This is why the ability to network - both in digital and physical space - is a skill that we all need in a hybrid workplace."

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Hybrid office tribes are here, and they're a problem

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Cryptocurrency company Koda Finance has a peculiar work culture. James Gale, the company's CEO, says his 40-strong team treats the office as both a workplace and a lifestyle choice. "We are a very social bunch in and out the office. The Koda Whatsapp groups never sleep," he says.

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How to Gameplan Your Office Days: An Overachiever’s Guide to Hybrid Work

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Thursday may be the new Monday when it comes to strategizing what days in the office will get you the most face time with senior leaders

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The global pandemic has created new challenges and opportunities in almost every industry, and as the economy reopens competition will be intense. Winners will be those who most clearly understand their customer's needs, collaborate to identify multiple solutions, prototype, iterate and bring new ideas to market. Those behaviors will only happen when people come together in the new, modern workplace.

By all indications the future of work is hybrid: 52% of U.S. workers would prefer a mix of working from home and the office, saying it has a positive impact on their ability to be creative, solve problems and build relationships. Global research tells us 72% of corporate leaders plan to offer a hybrid model, and only 13% say they expect to decrease their real estate footprint in the next year, suggesting that organizations will continue to leverage their workplaces within a hybrid work future.

But getting hybrid right will be hard. Deciding who works from the office and how often is a complex issue, and it will be different for every organization. If not done well it could threaten culture, collaboration, and innovation. Conversely, a well-executed hybrid workplace can be a magnet that brings people together and helps us work better than ever before.

Organizations who will win know that workplaces designed for people and the resiliency of their organizations will help them move forward, learn, and remain competitive. To start, more than 50% of U.S. companies plan to pilot new spaces as part of their return to the office this year, for example, repurposing a café into a high-energy social and collaboration space that better supports new hybrid work patterns.

As architects and office-furniture designers serving the world's largest organizations, we recommend leaders think through four design approaches as you consider your hybrid strategy.

Braid the Digital and Physical Experience

As leaders of global teams, we know that bridging the gap between in-person and remote participants is hard, and hybrid work means there will inevitably be someone who is remote, regardless of well teams coordinate their in-office days. Remote colleagues can feel frustrated and unable to participate equally, becoming less engaged. This is especially true for creative and innovative work, such as brainstorming, which often use analog whiteboards or other physical products that are difficult for people on the other side of the camera to fully experience.

The solution is to integrate physical spaces and technology with three key concepts in mind: equity, engagement, and ease.

For example, currently, many conference rooms consist of a long table with a monitor at the end. In-person attendees sit around the table while remote participants are featured in a grid of tiny boxes, often on the same screen as any shared content.

One way to create more equity is to give each participant their own screen, placing monitors on rolling carts that can easily be moved around. Teams can pull a remote colleague into a breakout session or up to the table. Many software systems now let you split people and content onto separate displays.

To be fully engaged, people need clear sightlines to one another and to the content. Designing for employee engagement in digital-to-physical space means thinking like a movie director - lights, camera, audio, content. Some solutions we're seeing are angled or mobile tables, additional lighting, extra speakers, in room microphones, and easy-to-move markerboards and displays.

In addition, research tells us more people will connect to a meeting on their individual devices as well as the technology in the room. Ample power supplies, whiteboards, and a variety of software solutions will contribute to an easier, more seamless hybrid collaboration experience for people.

Flip Enclosed and Open Spaces

It is time to rethink the open plan. For decades, individual workstations have become more open with ever-increasing density, while meetings are held in enclosed conference rooms. As people return to the office, these spaces will begin to shift. Meetings will happen more often in open spaces with movable boundaries, and individual focus work will happen in enclosed spaces like pods or small enclaves.

Open collaboration spaces are inherently more flexible because they don't require fixed features in their design, so they can morph and change as new work patterns emerge. Innovation, problem-solving, and co-creation often use agile approaches - for example, quick stand-up meetings which require visible, persistent content which can be hosted in open spaces, defined by flexible furniture, easy-to-access tech, and other design elements.

Meanwhile, individual spaces will need more enclosure to provide different levels of visual and acoustical privacy that people have come to expect while working at home. Video calls will happen everywhere, so enclosures - screens, panels, pods - will give people places to focus and mitigate disruptions.

Shift from Fixed to Fluid

Buildings are built for permanence, meanwhile the pace of business and change continues to accelerate. We can see the tensions between slow and fast emerge in the rise of pop-ups and coworking models with demand for shorter lease terms. Most companies who have real estate are asking, how much space do we need?

The hybrid future solves for a more fluid workplace that can flex as needs change. Not only does this accelerate innovation and advance the culture of the organization, it can ensure real estate is always optimized. At Steelcase, we've optimized our own space by designing an open area that supports hybrid meetings in the morning, becomes the café at lunch, hosts a town hall in the afternoon, and can be rented for an evening event.

Balance "We" and "Me" Work

The pandemic has caused us to rethink the purpose and meaning of the office and many leaders have come to the conclusion that the office is a place for collaborative work. Gensler's Research Institute, conducted amid the height of the pandemic, shows full-time work-from-home employees saw a drop of 37% in average collaboration time. As a result, leaders are rightfully focused on boosting collaboration, and Steelcase research shows that nearly two-thirds of leaders want to increase spaces for both in-person and hybrid forms of collaboration.

But collaboration is not just about group work, it actually requires solitude too. Effective collaboration happens when there's an ebb and flow of people coming together to work as a team and then moving apart to focus individually, process their ideas and follow up on assigned tasks. Too much together time, without enough individual focus time can result in groupthink, so it's important that the pendulum not swing too far by designing offices that are all about the "we" and not balance the need for "me" spaces.

The jury is still out on whether working from home is more productive or not, but in the past year, employees report higher levels of productivity when their home allows them to work without interruption. We must provide places with appropriate privacy at the office, too, and employees should be able to easily move from one type of work to another without trekking across campus or getting hung up with complicated technology.

The office we return to must offer people a better experience than what they have at home and that means giving employees the right mix of spaces for the types of work that need to get done. Organizations that choose a "wait and see" approach risk frustrating their employees who find that the old office doesn't support the new ways they - jeopardizing the competitive advantages of bringing people together. People whose organizations move forward and create workplaces that adapt, flex and thrive will attract and retain the best talent and benefit from innovation and growth. The future office will be a competitive advantage for organizations who take advantage of this moment in time.

When we're all back in the office, it won't be the same, and that's a good thing.

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4 Strategies for Building a Hybrid Workplace that Works

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The global pandemic has created new challenges and opportunities in almost every industry, and as the economy reopens competition will be intense. Winners will be those who most clearly understand their customer's needs, collaborate to identify multiple solutions, prototype, iterate and bring new ideas to market.

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In early July, after more than a decade working for a French bank, Marie could see no other option but to resign from her Paris-based role.

The mother of two, whose surname is being withheld for professional reasons, enjoyed her job in the firm's wealth-management division. But in June, her bosses determined that, given the global pandemic continued to show signs of easing, everyone in the team would soon be ordered back to the office full time.

Marie's husband had recently been offered a lucrative job in London. When he accepted, the prospect of the young parents holding down careers in two different countries looked unproblematic, because of the workplace changes that Covid-19 had triggered. Marie had been enthusiastic about the prospect of moving to London and catching the Eurostar train to Paris a few times a month for work, but as her employer started to insist on a return to in-person working, it became obvious that something would have to give.

"I'd just spent well over 12 months proving that I was able to do my job entirely remotely, so being told that there was no longer any flexibility at all in terms of my physical location was extremely frustrating," she says. "I tried for several weeks to come up with a solution, but in the end, I could see no other option than to quit. I loved working in finance, but my priority now is to find a new job that works for me and my family," she adds. "And that may well be in a different industry."

As vaccination rates around the world tick up, giving employers like Marie's the impetus to recall people to the office, businesses are confronting an uncomfortable reality: employees' needs and preferences have changed. Many are no longer prepared to return to the way of working that was conventional before the pandemic. If pressed to do exactly that, millions are choosing to quit instead.

This trend has gathered so much momentum that academics are now speaking of a fundamental shift in power dynamics away from employers and toward workers. If businesses want to retain the loyal talent they need to stay competitive, experts argue they must listen to the needs of the labour market and adapt quickly.

The lessons from loss

Almuth McDowall, professor and assistant dean of the department of organisational psychology at London's Birkbeck University, explains that losses during the last 18 months have proven transformational.

"We've all experienced loss... losing loved ones, losing our freedom, losing human contact," she says. "Many of us also had to juggle home-working with full-time caring, as children were off school."

These life events felt so significant, says McDowall, that they caused us to revisit our priorities and sent many of us on a quest for work that feels purposeful - for a job that comes with some greater form of meaning.

After a year of remote work, some are challenging pre-pandemic work conventions, like the need to be present in offices (Credit: Getty)

Simultaneously, having seen what is possible under extreme circumstances, many workers feel more prepared now than ever before to challenge assumptions around what an ideal worker looks like, and what the parameters and norms of the working world should be.

The effects of this momentous rethink are starting to show. In a survey of more than 2,000 people in the UK and Ireland conducted in March, more than a third of respondents said they were looking to change roles in the next six to 12 months, or once the economy had strengthened. The researchers concluded businesses not actively catering to the evolving needs and demands of employees risked "sleepwalking towards a talent exodus".

In the US, meanwhile, data indicate that such an exodus is already under way. A record 4 million people quit their jobs in April alone. Since then, the resignation rate has eased, but remains elevated.

A loyalty inflection point

Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School, coined the term " Great Resignation " in May. Observing that there​​ were close to 6 million fewer resignations in the US during 2020 than there were in 2019, Klotz correctly predicted that, as the pandemic subsides, the "would-be quitters" who "sheltered in place" in 2020 were likely to act on their plans to leave their employers.

"What we're seeing now is a clear decrease in organisational commitment due to a confluence of factors," he says. Echoing McDowall, he says that employees have gained a new perspective on what's truly important to them - "the pandemic brought death to our doorstep and that causes people to reflect" - but there are also other important reasons why loyalties have wavered.

"Work takes up a huge part of who we are. During the pandemic, identities changed. People spent more time with their families, some might've thought more about entrepreneurial ventures, side hustles or other pastimes away from their day job," he says. "It's quite possible that many people no longer define themselves as much through their jobs as they used to." That, Klotz elaborates, "means that they are less emotionally attached to their employer".

Flexibility over finance?

Another element contributing to employees' dwindling commitment is the decision by some companies to require workers to return to the office in person, as in Marie's case. In particular, the finance sector has come under fire for ordering workers back.

In May, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., which is America's largest bank, sparked a backlash when he said that working from home simply does not work for those who want "to hustle". And in June, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said that if most employees were not back to work at the bank's Manhattan headquarters in September, he would be "very disappointed".

Globally, the culture of banking is still rooted in face time and presenteeism. Most financial organisations champion the value of in-person meetings to pitch for business and hash out deals, meaning that remote arrangements were always only going to be temporary. But in light of employees becoming more discerning, this might have to change too.

Workers gained flexibility during the pandemic - and some are reluctant to abandon patterns that worked for them (Credit: Getty)

Regardless of the sectors, explains Klotz, companies that are ordering staff back into the office full time with no exceptions are going to have to find a way to "pitch that in an appealing way". To stay competitive, businesses like banks and tech companies - some of which have adopted a remote culture indefinitely but many of which have not - must understand that, while digital nomadism and remote work were not widely available before the pandemic, they will be from now on.

Neither Klotz nor Almuth McDowall necessarily anticipate an industry-wide talent drain to materialise - mostly because there is such a broad spectrum of how individual organisations look to be structuring their post-pandemic workplaces in any given sector - but they both agree that businesses will lose good employees if they are not careful.

"Work arrangements is a brand new and important criteria that [employees] will care about going forward," says Klotz. "People will want to choose the work arrangement that is best for whatever stage of life they're in, and companies will have to take that into account when determining how they operate."

A recent PwC survey found that employees increasingly want to be compensated for their work not just with money, but with flexibility. "[We've also] found that younger workers are more likely than older employees to accept smaller pay increases for non-monetary benefits, including extensive mental health benefits, unlimited sick time, flexible work hours and remote work options," says Bhushan Sethi, who jointly leads PwC's global people and organisation practice. In the wake of the pandemic, he adds, "these incentives can be the difference between a candidate accepting the job or not".

The empowered employee

Stories like Marie's cast a grim light on the process of readjusting to a post-pandemic work world, but there is overarching evidence that Covid-19 has been a catalyst for good when it comes to the power that employees in the labour market can yield.

Indeed, Klotz argues that we are actually in the process of witnessing the dawn of the "era of the empowered employee".

In the US, the number of unemployed people has comfortably exceeded the number of available jobs for most of the last two decades, but currently the two measures are almost at level pegging, something that economists describe as an exceptionally tight labour market.

"Honestly, I can hardly recall a time when the job market was so much in the employee's favour and that's definitely a good thing," says Klotz. "Wages have to go up. Companies have to adapt. But it may well be a slow period of experimentation."

"As an organisation, you don't just want to capture people's bodies, but you want to capture their hearts too. And it's that bit that's going to prove tough."

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Why worker loyalty is at a breaking point

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In early July, after more than a decade working for a French bank, Marie could see no other option but to resign from her Paris-based role. The mother of two, whose surname is being withheld for professional reasons, enjoyed her job in the firm's wealth-management division.

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Once in a generation (if that), we have the opportunity to reimagine how we work. In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution moved many in Europe and the United States from fields to factories. In the 1940s, World War II brought women into the workforce (if not the C-suite) at unprecedented rates. In the 1990s, the explosion of PCs and email drove a rapid increase in productivity and the speed of decision making, ushering in the digital age as we know it today. And in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drove employees out of offices to work from home. Thanks to the development and wide distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, 2021 presents another such opportunity. The return to the workplace is a chance to create a new, more effective operating model that works for companies and people navigating a world of increasing uncertainty. There is, however, one big catch: employers must confront the broadening disconnect between how they and their employees see the future.

Employees don't know what they want and are reevaluating their relationships with work

More than three-quarters of C-suite executives recently surveyed by McKinsey report that they expected the typical "core" employee to be back in the office three or more days a week (Exhibit 1). While they realize that the great work-from-home experiment was surprisingly effective, they also believe that it hurt organizational culture and belonging. They are hungry for employees to be back in the office and for a new normal that's somewhat more flexible but not dramatically different from the one we left behind.

In stark contrast, nearly three-quarters of around 5,000 employees McKinsey queried globally would like to work from home for two or more days per week, and more than half want at least three days of remote work (Exhibit 2). But their message is a bit convoluted. Many employees also report that working from home through the stress of the pandemic has driven fatigue, difficulty in disconnecting from work, deterioration of their social networks, and weakening of their sense of belonging.

When employers have small-group conversations to understand such survey results in greater detail, they discover that neither they nor large swathes of their workforces really know what employees want. This isn't surprising. Workers have been through a lot in the past year. Many experienced unprecedented uncertainty and anxiety. They saw life-expectancy rates in their communities decrease. They managed difficult personal situations, from the loss of people close to them to their own physical- and mental-health struggles. Yet the experience wasn't all negative. Pushed to shelter at home, many rediscovered a connection to their home and family in ways that changed them. Many workers became wealthier (because of the strong global market rebound in share prices, as well as government stimulus), giving them more confidence to reaffirm their paths through life-or choose new ones.

This increase in optionality, combined with a greater disconnect between personal lives and work obligations, is driving workers to reevaluate their relationships with their employers, as well as with their work. Today, this process of reevaluation is surfacing discordant views on returning to work. Tomorrow, it may well surface reduced engagement, greater unwillingness to work longer hours, and attrition.

Employers are underestimating the disconnect and failing to realize that the 'finish line' is a mirage

Many employers, keen to establish some sense of normalcy quickly, are focused on answering simple logistical questions that give them a sense of control. These questions typically focus on the number of days that employees will be in the office, collaboration tools they will use, and policies on pay levels and norms for meeting behaviors. While the answers to them can help employees who are seeking a measure of pragmatism for what comes next, they are typically accompanied by a message that the "finish line" is in sight and that we will soon enter a period of normalcy that will be the standard for many years to come.

In the enthusiasm about the return from remote working, business leaders run the risk of actually increasing the disconnect between themselves and their people. The idea that we will cross a finish line and suddenly be done with all the hard stuff seems to exist only in the minds of senior leaders.

At best, the rosy messaging of a grand return to the office is falling flat. At worst, the tone deafness of the messaging may also be accelerating what's already shaping up to be the "great attrition" of 2021 (and 2022 and even 2023). At companies across the globe, workers are leaving at much higher rates than normal. Recent surveys found that 26 percent of workers in the United States are already preparing to look for new employment opportunities and 40 percent of workers globally are considering leaving their current employers by the end of the year.

Recent surveys found that 40 percent of workers globally are considering leaving their current employers by the end of the year.

Communicating that some magical finish line is just around the corner isn't going to eliminate the disconnect that some employees feel between themselves and their employers-it will simply make it deeper. When people with that impression get back to the office and find that they aren't fully reenergized, that they still feel tired, and that they still carry uncertainty and unresolved grief, they will disconnect emotionally even further from their organizations and leaders. The "finish-line effect" could drive more attrition, making things even worse for companies whose leaders are raring to go. In fact, executives who don't expect more waves of attrition may well be kidding themselves.

Instead of directing a rah-rah return to the office, leaders would be wise to focus on deeper listening and meeting their workforces where they are today. It will be important for leaders to acknowledge, for instance, that they don't have all the answers-as their companies transition to hybrid working models, they will still be trying to discover what the right longer-term working model (the one that works for most employees) will be. It will also be important for leaders to signal that they hope to make their employees partners in designing the future of how their companies work.

Watch

A McKinsey Live event on 'The Great Attrition or the Great Attraction: What will it be for you?'

Companies don't know what comes next

Some organizations and their people are beginning to exit a grand experiment in remote working. They've learned many things, including how to be more productive in an operating model that was jerry rigged in a rush to meet the constant challenges and uncertainty of the COVID-19 crisis. Employers couldn't stem the human tragedy of the pandemic, of course. But many worked with their people to figure out ingenious ways to keep their companies productive while caring for their workforces.

But the lessons learned during the pandemic only go so far in helping leaders address the next great experiment: hybrid working. A hybrid model is more complicated than is a fully remote one. At scale, using it will be an unprecedented event in which all kinds of norms that have been accepted practice for decades will be put to the test. Leaders are a long way from knowing how it will work.

A hybrid model is more complicated than a fully remote one. At scale, using it will be an unprecedented event in which all kinds of norms will be put to the test.

The question of how many days in office per week are best is the most obvious one to answer, but it isn't the only question, and it may not even be the right one to answer first. There will likely be a bevy of questions to address: What work is better done in person than virtually, and vice versa? How will meetings work best? How can influence and experience be balanced between those who work on site and those who don't? How can you avoid a two-tier system in which people working in the office are valued and rewarded more than are those working more from home? Should teams physically gather in a single place while tackling a project, and if so, how often? Can leadership communication to off-site workers be as effective as it is to workers in the office?

Those who are no longer working remotely must accept that they are returning to the office without clear, solid answers to such questions. We'll get there, eventually. But policies, practices, working norms, collaboration technologies, and more will need to change and evolve as we test and learn. After emerging from the pandemic, we will be just starting a new and difficult journey.

So what should employers do to reduce the disconnect as they consider the return to in-person work? We suggest three actions.

Be clear that fixing the next operating model will take years and is a separate effort from the near-term return to the office

Many employers we talk to spend far too little time acknowledging that building the muscles for a truly effective hybrid operating model could take years, not least because they are still learning what actually works in such environments. At a time when much of the workforce is experiencing significant discontent and overwhelming exhaustion, few employees see a return to an office-centric working model as a path to improvement, and given the success of remote working in the past year, employers will be asked to justify their decisions to change the arrangement. However, if leaders are willing to start from scratch, question everything, and make intentional decisions with a clear, evidence-based rationale, the current disconnect between them and their employees could serve as the creative tension point that will power a customer-focused, employee-led operating model designed for today-and tomorrow.

Consider all the research showing that building new relationships is better done in person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 39 percent of employees struggled to maintain a strong connection with colleagues as informal social networks weakened and people leaned in heavily to the people and groups with whom they most identified. Anchored in facts such as that, leaders have a concrete reason for why some amount of face time is critical. That's also one of the reasons a company should invest in figuring out how hybrid social networks work best, along with other ways to help employees establish high-quality relationships, strengthen connections, and bolster trust. By joining employees' search for why, leaders can begin to assemble the building blocks of a shared and nimble future-oriented culture.

Don't just repeat what the workforce says explicitly, empathize with what they are trying to convey implicitly

Many organizations today are playing back select results of employee surveys to their workforces, partly to justify their choices about a physical return to the office. This is fine, but it fails to signal that the organization understands and appreciates the altered postpandemic relationship between employees and employers. Meeting employees where they are means signaling awareness that there is a deeper undercurrent of beliefs that will take time to surface and understand, accompanied by a clear commitment that the organization will continue to listen for, process, and act on those signals.

Doing so will mean complementing traditional listening mechanisms (such as pulse checks) with true listening, as well as intentionally creating forums and space to enable sharing. Top leaders must lead by example in showing that feedback and expressions of vulnerability are welcomed. Listening tours, fireside chats, ask-me-anything sessions, reverse town halls, and the sharing of personal stories can help build a safe environment for employees to share as well.

Team leaders must also follow through with sharing, listening, and hearing the needs of their team members. Without true partnership at that level, top leaders' talk about partnering with employees is just that-talk.

Done right, listening at the individual level is a kind of early intervention that may head off deeper morale issues down the line. As companies move from the chaos of the pandemic to the uncertainty of the return to the office, listening to employees will continue to be more critical than ever.

Be sincere about experimenting and learning from the outcomes of your experiments

Without a road map or playbook for what the next normal should look like, people must collectively adopt a test-and-learn mindset. Organizations can try out different working models and norms, physical-space layouts, and tools to create a future that balances individual productivity with innovation-driving creativity, personal flexibility with team collaboration, and the office with the home. That means experimenting and piloting as individuals, teams, business units, offices, and organizations.

For example, the design of office space plays a key role in positive collaboration and connection, but traditional offices typically dedicate more than two-thirds of their space to individual, heads-down workspaces, such as desks and cubicles. What new designs and technologies could be piloted to provide flexibility and collaboration? One top tech company is developing an array of sensors and movable walls to allow for ongoing and real-time adjustments based on employee needs and patterns of work. A global financial-services leader is trying out a fully open floor plan with "hot desks" where management will share space with workers.

Similarly, the norms surrounding meetings are ripe for refreshing. Who needs to attend which meetings, for how long, and in what format? How can meetings be redesigned in a way that maximizes efficiency, accelerates effective decision making, and builds connectivity and social cohesion? The answers aren't clear yet, but companies will figure them out by trial and error-by testing and learning.

Letting experiments play out will be a challenge for many leaders. As we mentioned previously, the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic froze some leaders as it took away their sense of control. Embracing a test-and-learn culture will entail a real mindset shift for some leaders. They will need to get comfortable with the fact that a clear solution may not be immediately apparent-the big answers may not emerge for years. And they will have to help their employees adapt by providing a set of guiding principles and criteria for evaluating solutions and ideas. (For more on what leaders can do, see " Return as a muscle: How lessons from COVID-19 can shape a robust operating model for hybrid and beyond.")

Embracing a test-and-learn culture will entail a real mindset shift for some leaders. The big answers may not emerge for years.

Denying the disconnect is no strategy at all

It would be nice if employees were jumping for joy at the prospect of a full return to the office. And it would be nice if the future turns out to be as glorious and stable as we sometimes imagine the past to have been. But those are fantasies built on nostalgia. They are anything but a solid foundation for building a future-ready company.

Right now, a lot of wishful thinking is guiding the return from remote working. With notable and heartbreaking exceptions, many leaders were insulated from the COVID-19 pandemic. They think it's both easy and desirable for companies to move on quickly. But their people aren't begging to disagree. They are voting with their feet.

If leaders don't accept the fact that they don't know the shape of the future of hybrid working, their talent will keep walking out the door. But leaders can make a choice. They can continue to believe that they will deliver in the future because they have always delivered in the past. Or they can embrace this singular opportunity for change and work with their people-closely and transparently, with curiosity, respect, and a willingness to learn together instead of mandating-to discover a new and better way to work.

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It’s time for leaders to get real about hybrid

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Once in a generation (if that), we have the opportunity to reimagine how we work. In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution moved many in Europe and the United States from fields to factories. In the 1940s, World War II brought women into the workforce (if not the C-suite) at unprecedented rates.

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Why the worst parts of work can’t easily change

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The pandemic was a golden opportunity to fix the most toxic parts of work culture – yet we made many worse. Why?

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Remote working has impacted the lifestyle of the desk-based professional in the last year and prompted a comparison of the extremes; a nine to five office job and a fully remote work life. The debate around what happens next is anchored in middle ground and balance. Whether we loved or hated the experience of working from home in the pandemic, distributed work post lockdown promises to be a very different thing; a society now experienced at remote working within cities open for business.

There are many facets to the discussion about the new workplace, yet the nucleus is the non-negotiable office desk. No matter what the job is, it's hard to get away from the workstation's basic requirements; a desk, a chair, a power socket, a little circulation. All in all, a rectangular block of two to three square metres.

This component moved overnight from its base at the office to the home as if by flying carpet. The real estate requirement hadn't gone anywhere. It carved out a slice of domestic space. Work may have landed on the kitchen table or in the bedroom corner. The lines between work and home became a tangled mess. And yet, evidence has now gathered to suggest that the model has numerous benefits.

The gains aren't just practical such as the lack of commute, but psychological. The pressure to be seen to be working, and even presenteeism, has been removed. This opens up the potential for increased trust. Feeling trusted to deliver is good for self-confidence and builds better relationships. It also can help organisations to be more effective.

'A trust-based work culture has two major benefits: One, which people may not suspect, is productivity. As long as everyone is clear on the vision, people can be left to get on with their work. Tasks are not doubled up on through micromanagement. The second benefit is speed because everyone doesn't have to be involved with everything. Together, the increased productivity and speed that come out of a trust culture mean that organisations can get so much more done.' Matthew Phelan, Author of Freedom To Be Happy: The Business Case For Happiness. In personal communication.

With employers having gathered evidence that workers can deliver remotely, the typical working week is under review. Many organisations move to a hybrid model, with remote working offered at least part of the week. The task organisations face is balancing the advantages of remote working with the challenges.

"The counterweight to increased flexibility and freedom is lost focus, missed opportunities for collaboration and, most insidiously, the risk of isolation." Future of The Office Report.The Melting Pot, Edinburgh.

As options other than one's own home become available, workers may ask themselves, 'If I can work from anywhere, then where do I want to work?' We turn to co-working spaces to provide remote, non-domestic workspace. Up until now, these venues have primarily scooped up free-lancers and small companies. This time around, digital nomads of large organisations. This option brings the flexibility of location and a sense of freedom to choose the environment that works best for the individual. It also creates networking opportunities, expanding social connections, which sounds exhilarating after a year at home.

Even the term co-working space becomes increasingly expansive. The purpose-built co-working offices that have steadily grown in the last decade may grow and reshape themselves in some way. Both civic and commercial spaces absorb the activity of work, with hospitality venues not only accommodating people who wish to work but inviting them. CitizenM Glasgow offers day passes for remote working for £15 per day. BrewDog innovated during the lockdown, offering a WFH desk booking service for £7 per hour, including free coffee.

As well as having an effect on public spaces, distributed work has a ripple effect on infrastructure on a large scale. In a Financial Times Future Forum webinar Micheal Power, strategist at Ninety One, described how WFH may change the role of cities, with around 40 per cent of office space likely to be released.
"Living in cities is going to become an altogether different proposition. And I think that, depending on to some extent what happens to property prices, and that's a critical consideration in all of this, the conversion of office space to residential space is something that's going to take place in a number of the big cities of the world"
In personal communication Michael added: "..released office space if properly packaged into not-too-big residential units will provide a perfect entry point for the younger generation seeking to get onto the bottom rung of the property ladder, which is currently out-of-reach for many of them"

This paints a dynamic picture of city centres as more youthful and energetic spaces.

Rural areas could also change as a result of this movement. The Irish government have laid plans to create a network of 400 remote working hubs across the country. The project intends to improve the regional distribution of jobs and offer a better quality of life by reducing commuting. The intention is to repopulate rural areas.

With this wave of changes across the world, what happens to the office? Is there even an office? The conversation is mainly going in the direction of Yes, probably, but with a different emphasis.

With workers sharing physical space less often, the redefined office has a crucial role in keeping communication flowing and encouraging teamwork.
"Workplaces are being reimagined for activities benefiting from face-to-face interaction, including collaboration on projects and employee training, as a way to promote a company's culture and identity." Here Come Hot Desks and Zoom Rooms. And Holograms? NY Times, March 30 2021.
More fluid and social spaces are looking likely. The workstation footprint will be cut down dramatically, and permanent desks give way to hotdesking. This will require careful planning of logistics to get the capacity well matched to the number of available spaces. Storage of personal items needs to be catered for.

Vitra has captured the redefinition with The Club Office concept, a model they have already established in their organisation. This three-tiered system 'inverts the traditional focus of the physical office - from being a place of productivity, the office becomes a place of belonging and social identification.'

Workplaces may borrow the language of other interiors more in the coming months, such as bars and hotels, to make offices feel sociable and domestic interiors to make them feel comfortable. Yet, the definition of workplace needs to be carefully maintained if we are still to feel we're at work. Innovation in the design of hybrid online and IRL meeting rooms is likely to flourish. Booths for video conferencing offer a chance for creative expression and could even become the signature of an organisation.

The changes offer an opportunity to scrutinise the interior, checking the alignment of the intended activity with the interior. For example, is the primary purpose of a given space concentration and quiet work or conversation and social engagement?

David Dewane's Eudaimonia (Human Flourishing) machine, an experimental laboratory space in which spaces are defined intensely by the intended activity. 'Social Galleries' are offset by 'Deep Work Chambers'.

Whilst it's prudent to develop spaces for better output, let's not forget that the workplace isn't only about productivity. At least not in a directly measurable form. The development of individuals and organisations also comes from the serendipitous.
"Not being able to work in the studio, bounce off each other, have those chance discussions and interactions that lead to creative ideas developing can be challenging. Meeting with other colleagues in the studio kitchen to get a coffee or looking over someone's shoulder as you pass them, finding interesting materials and samples. All these things are missed." Roisin Reilly, Associate, B3 Designers.
These incidental aspects of the working day help explain why there may be a mixed bag of emotions in losing the established office culture. It may not have been perfect; at times mundane and at times restrictive. But the workplace holds us together, giving the organisations we are part of some definable form. It can even provide refuge when other aspects of life are in disarray.

The redefinition of workplace culture and the spaces we work in is bound to be a steep learning curve. As things settle into a new shape, we may have more precise models of success, a blueprint of where to draw the line between structure and flexibility.

The first day in a new job could have a very different feel. Where typically you are shown to your desk, and from there you learn how to adapt to the new environment. Instead, you are at liberty to figure out what environment best fits you, at least for some of the time. The working week is becoming more personally tailored.

As we move into a new era for workplace culture and consequently redesign, the choices opening up to people are exciting. They offer empowerment to the individual and could well spark eudaimonia - or at the very least, a little more wellness in the working day.

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Remote working has impacted the lifestyle of the desk-based professional in the last year and prompted a comparison of the extremes; a nine to five office job and a fully remote work life. The debate around what happens next is anchored in middle ground and balance.

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Combative, provocative and engaging live debate chaired by Michael Buerk. With Giles Fraser, Ash Sarkar, Tim Stanley and Ella Whelan. #moralmaze

Is it time to rethink our attitude to work? Nearly half of employees care less about their careers since Covid, according to a survey this week of 2000 staff of large companies. Four in ten said they are concerned about work-related burnout and a quarter of women said the pandemic has had a negative impact on their work-life balance. The lockdown has disrupted long-existing patterns of work for some and exposed the work-based inequalities of others. As we're about to unlock, many believe this is the moment to re-negotiate the role of work in our lives. Some believe that employers should be more adaptable to the individual circumstances of their employees, seeking as far as possible to eradicate work-related stress for the sake of their mental health. Others think greater flexibility based on people's lifestyles could foster a culture of entitlement and we should accept that a certain amount of stress is inseparable from productivity and creativity. What about the value of work itself? For some, the goal should be to do less and less of it. Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were described as an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours. Radical advocates of leisure time defend the 'right to be lazy' and view idleness as central to creativity. While others believe that work is intrinsic to a person's sense of purpose and dignity. Is there a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' work in an economy that has seen billionaires get richer while some families have struggled to put food on the table during the pandemic? Should we work to live or live to work? With Philip Booth, Matthew Garrahan, Will Stronge and Otegha Uwagba.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

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BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Future of Work

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Combative, provocative and engaging live debate chaired by Michael Buerk. With Giles Fraser, Ash Sarkar, Tim Stanley and Ella Whelan. #moralmaze Is it time to rethink our attitude to work? Nearly half of employees care less about their careers since Covid, according to a survey this week of 2000 staff of large companies.

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Leaders' love of offices is based on an outdated fantasy

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Sign up to myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about Management news. The writer is a professor in the management of professional services and author of 'Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas' Depending on who you listen to, the pandemic-inspired shift to hybrid working is either a fundamental threat to how professional firms do business, or an exciting opportunity to address profound problems within the professional sector.

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Working from home updates

Sign up to myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about Working from home news.

I have a confession. No matter where I happen to be, I like to fit my work around a 9.30am to 6.30pm-ish structure. Horribly old fashioned in these times, I know.

After our great remote working experiment during the pandemic, however, many workers do not want to return to such rigidity.

The jargon-y word for the flexibility to work on our own time is "asynchronous work". There has been much talk about the concept, some of it overly complex, but it boils down to doing your work "when" you want.

Asynchronous working allows employees to carry out their work without having to be available at specific times, most obviously during the old nine-to-five day.

"Synchronous" work is when people collaborate with each other at the same time, such as in meetings. But the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Some synchronous work will always be necessary. For example, following a day in the office working with colleagues on a project, you can then work at home at times that best suit you.

There is nothing new about asynchronous working. Teams, particularly in global organisations that operate across time zones, have worked asynchronously for years - a group in one part of the world winds down for the day, while another picks up the mantle.

However, we are swiftly moving into territory where these staggered working practices apply at an individual level. This is where things could get tricky because organisations have to consider many dynamics: the size of a company, the roles within it and what digital tools they need to provide. Most companies will need to undergo significant cultural change if they want to make the most of asynchronicity.

Firstly, it requires trust. We need to ditch the idea that "being unavailable is tantamount to the person not working," says Allan Christensen, chief operating officer at tech company Doist, which has a fully remote team.

Unsurprisingly, such change needs to come from the top, and Christensen advises that any strategy which involves new tools and working practices be introduced slowly.

Software company GitLab also operates a fully remote team. Its head of remote Darren Murph says asynchronous work is not easy to achieve without a structured "road map" and quarterly changes so that "teams can gradually acclimate to new tools and messaging and how to best utilise them".

Many businesses will already have some of the tech in place and engage in some asynchronous working, but allowing people the autonomy to work in a new way is very different.

The upsides of asynchronous work are that it gives employees more freedom and can form part of an attractive flexible working offer.

It also allows people to tackle deep tasks without interruptions and, as Christensen points out by emailing his responses to my questions, more time to reflect on things before providing an answer. But, he adds, it can also slow things down at first and any problems can take longer to surface.

Asynchronous work allows people to tackle deep tasks without interruptions

Compromises will need to be made when teams arrange meetings, or days in the office. Friction may also arise in organisations where workers are unable to work from home.

It is also important to recognise that breaking daily routines might not be productive for everyone, says Murph. There are always going to be people like me, who prefer to continue to work around a "traditional" structure.

So if employers are serious about providing a flexible work offer that allows for some asynchronous work, it is going to take time, effort and, in some cases, a total overhaul.

"Organisations are underestimating the tsunami change in the nature of work," says Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Some will have to upskill their entire workforce, she adds. But it appears companies are unprepared, as many of those who expect to move to a more flexible model have yet to implement more detailed plans.

Over the coming months we will see whether those who want total freedom are prepared to leave old-school businesses for a more asynchronous employer. Traditionalists such as me might once more find ourselves alone in the morning team meeting.
janina.conboye@ft.com Pilita Clark is away

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We are not ready for the asynchronous future

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Working from home updates Sign up to myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about Working from home news. I have a confession. No matter where I happen to be, I like to fit my work around a 9.30am to 6.30pm-ish structure. Horribly old fashioned in these times, I know.

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Before we rush headlong into yet another evolution of work, let's make sure we're set up to succeed.

5-second summary

61 percent of executives are keen to completely reimagine how work gets done at their companies

Hybrid work models that combine at-home and in-office work offer some promising solutions, but it'll be easier to get them wrong than to get them right.

For hybrid to succeed, companies need to strengthen communications channels, re-evaluate how they measure performance, and take a flexible approach that considers the needs and circumstances of all employees individually.

Some suggest that the pandemic is a storm everyone experiences equally. That is utter B.S. Yes, the storm has hit the whole world, but everyone is in a different boat. Some are in super yachts. Some are on inflatable rafts. Some are in their boats alone. Others have an entire family in there. And all this, during the forced experiment of working from whatever boat we find ourselves in.

The past year has shaken up everything and everyone - including CEOs and senior leaders who were already trying to transform the way their companies worked back in the Before Times . Now, there's a whale-sized appetite among executives to make dramatic changes as part of transitioning out of remote-only mode. But will reimagined workplaces be the rising tide that lifts all ships or the Leviathan that swallows us whole?

The case for a hybrid work model

Like most other aspects of the pandemic, working from home hasn't been equal for everyone. In fact, for many, it's been a year of sleeping at work, not working from home. A study from last fall showed that one in four U.S. women was thinking of leaving the workforce. Many cited the losing game of trying to be an engaged employee and an engaged parent simultaneously, saying it's just not worth the stress of failing at both. And the fun doesn't stop there.

Not only has the pandemic affected us differently, but we also have different preferences as to what a reimagined workplace looks like. According to a poll we conducted on LinkedIn, 62 percent of office workers want the flexibility to mix in-office and at-home work - what is often called a hybrid work model. 32 percent preferred to work from home and seven percent wanted to return to the office. Research from Slack also found similar gaps in employee preferences.

These unequal experiences and preferences come into play when we start talking about building balanced teams, and balanced teams matter (even outside the fairness and equity factor). Companies with a diverse workforce outperform their more homogenous competitors. They generate 130 percent higher cash flow per employee. They bring in 19 percent more revenue from innovation. They adapt 80 percent faster to address challenges or pursue opportunities. We cannot build these kinds of companies if we don't create a new normal where women, people of color, people with disabilities, and people from different generations can thrive. Full stop.

Deloitte asked over 3,500 senior leaders what they plan to do about it, and 61 percent said they're focused on reimagining work. Not optimizing it, not making a few tweaks here and there as they'd been saying in previous years. No: they are throwing everything into the air and fully reimagining the outcomes they want, and the combinations of people and technology it will take to achieve them.

This. Is. Huge.

How hybrid could go wrong (and what to try instead)

Finding that new, yet more familiar, version of "normal" won't happen automatically. Most companies are planning for some kind of hybrid work model that combines in-office and remote work. Many of them are sailing into uncharted waters. (Here there be dragons! )) And any company runs the risk of designing its hybrid work model based solely on what the majority wants, which isn't necessarily inclusive and will have negative effects in the long term.

With that in mind, we stepped through a thought exercise called a " premortem " - much like a post-mortem, except nothing has actually died yet. Because now is the time to imagine all the ways hybrid work models could fail. Now, while we can still do something about it.

Failure #1: allow collaboration to favor the co-located

Before the pandemic, most teams that had some people in-office and some remote, creating a two-tiered system when it came to synchronous collaboration (a.k.a., meetings). People in the room tended to dominate, while people dialing in struggled to express their ideas. We need to be more inclusive than that.

Instead of always sharing info and ideas in real-time, let's embrace asynchronous collaboration. If I put my idea on a page in Confluence and share that with my team, everyone has an equal chance to take it in, mull it over, and help improve on it. Then we can meet briefly to discuss live.

Failure #2: allow flexibility on location but not on schedules

There's no real reason to think that juggling work and personal schedules will magically become easy this year (or next year, or the year after). Caregivers still have elderly parents to make breakfast for and kids to pick up from school. Anyone struggling with mental health or chronic physical issues still has regular appointments to fit in. Not to mention the "pandemic puppies" that need to be walked. These kinds of things have always been a challenge with coming into the office.

But working from home isn't a solution in and of itself. Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers in June 2020, many of whom reported that trying to be a teammate and a caregiver at the same time made them feel like they were crap at both.

Failure #3: only look at employees' needs in the aggregate

People's preferences around where they work are based on different factors. Maybe you get too distracted at home, or too lonely, or your kitchen table makes a lousy workstation, and your heart cries out for the office. Maybe you have a health condition that makes office life tricky, or you love the focus you can achieve by working at home, or you want to ditch your commute.

Failure #4: ignore the value of relationships

Nobody is the same person they were a year ago. Plus, team membership has changed. Most companies now have employees who have never been to a company office or met their teammates in person. If we don't make a point to build strong relationships, work will start to feel transactional, degrading both morale and productivity. (For some, that's already happening.)

Failure #5: "lift and shift" your existing practices into a new environment

When we went remote a year ago, we learned the folly of assuming our office-based practices would be just as effective. Similarly, it would be folly to assume we can simply teleport our remote practices into a hybrid model.

Failure #6: allow performance reviews to create a two-tier system

Performance assessments have traditionally been rooted in presenteeism: I can see Maria here, in the office, at her desk; therefore I form a baseline impression of her as a dedicated employee. Raj, however, works at home most days. He might be nose-to-the-grindstone, but my default is to suspect he's slacking off because I have no visual confirmation that he's working.

So guess what? Maria will be evaluated higher than Raj, regardless of the results they achieve, because humans have a cognitive bias around preferring that which we can see. This, of course, is utter bollocks. Thankfully, we mostly unlearned that during a year of lockdown.

Failure #7: treat communication as a one-way street

Our habit of broadcasting information en masse has become more entrenched over the past year. We used to broadcast in person during status meetings and town halls. Now we're doing it through email, chat, and video conferencing. And we're using that technology to measure the wrong things. We're measuring how many people opened the email or tuned into a virtual town hall, which misses the point entirely. Communication isn't about what you've said, it's about what the other person has heard and understood.

We're gonna need a little humility

Hybrid work models will fail if leaders act like they can predict the future. If they don't continuously assess and adapt. The best leaders right now are those who are empathetic and courageous enough to throw their hands up and say, "I don't know what's going to happen. But here's what I think we should try. Come along with me and let's be open with each other about what's working and what's not."

That's a massively authentic (and risky) thing to say. But it's what we need for the foreseeable future - and probably beyond.

By adapting the "where" of work, we can build more congruent links between technology, practices, and people. But an iteration on the old way isn't going to cut it. We need a full reimagining. We need to unlearn a bunch of cruft from the past year, and even more of the cruft we carry with us from the Before Times. We don't know how we get there, but we know it's important.

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7 ways a hybrid work model could fail (and how to avoid them) - Work Life by Atlassian

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Before we rush headlong into yet another evolution of work, let's make sure we're set up to succeed. 5-second summary 61 percent of executives are keen to completely reimagine how work gets done at their companies Hybrid work models that combine at-home and in-office work offer some promising solutions, but it'll be easier to get them wrong than to get them right.

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Even as more people are logging onto popular video chat platforms to connect with colleagues, family and friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford researchers have a warning for you: Those video calls are likely tiring you out.

Prompted by the recent boom in videoconferencing, communication Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. Just as "Googling" is something akin to any web search, the term "Zooming" has become ubiquitous and a generic verb to replace videoconferencing. Virtual meetings have skyrocketed, with hundreds of millions happening daily, as social distancing protocols have kept people apart physically.

In the first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior on Feb. 23, Bailenson has taken the medium apart and assessed Zoom on its individual technical aspects. He has identified four consequences of prolonged video chats that he says contribute to the feeling commonly known as "Zoom fatigue."

Bailenson stressed that his goal is not to vilify any particular videoconferencing platform - he appreciates and uses tools like Zoom regularly - but to highlight how current implementations of videoconferencing technologies are exhausting and to suggest interface changes, many of which are simple to implement. Moreover, he provides suggestions for consumers and organizations on how to leverage the current features on videoconferences to decrease fatigue.

"Videoconferencing is a good thing for remote communication, but just think about the medium - just because you can use video doesn't mean you have to," Bailenson said.

Below are four primary reasons why video chats fatigue humans, according to the study. Readers are also invited to participate in a research study aimed at developing a Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale (ZEF) Scale.

Four reasons why
1) Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.
Both the amount of eye contact we engage in on video chats, as well as the size of faces on screens is unnatural.

In a normal meeting, people will variously be looking at the speaker, taking notes or looking elsewhere. But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time. A listener is treated nonverbally like a speaker, so even if you don't speak once in a meeting, you are still looking at faces staring at you. The amount of eye contact is dramatically increased. "Social anxiety of public speaking is one of the biggest phobias that exists in our population," Bailenson said. "When you're standing up there and everybody's staring at you, that's a stressful experience."

Another source of stress is that, depending on your monitor size and whether you're using an external monitor, faces on videoconferencing calls can appear too large for comfort. "In general, for most setups, if it's a one-on-one conversation when you're with coworkers or even strangers on video, you're seeing their face at a size which simulates a personal space that you normally experience when you're with somebody intimately," Bailenson said.

When someone's face is that close to ours in real life, our brains interpret it as an intense situation that is either going to lead to mating or to conflict. "What's happening, in effect, when you're using Zoom for many, many hours is you're in this hyper-aroused state," Bailenson said.

Solution: Until the platforms change their interface, Bailenson recommends taking Zoom out of the full-screen option and reducing the size of the Zoom window relative to the monitor to minimize face size, and to use an external keyboard to allow an increase in the personal space bubble between oneself and the grid.

2) Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.

Most video platforms show a square of what you look like on camera during a chat. But that's unnatural, Bailenson said. "In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly - so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback - you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. No one would ever consider that," he added.

Bailenson cited studies showing that when you see a reflection of yourself, you are more critical of yourself. Many of us are now seeing ourselves on video chats for many hours every day. "It's taxing on us. It's stressful. And there's lots of research showing that there are negative emotional consequences to seeing yourself in a mirror."

Solution: Bailenson recommends that platforms change the default practice of beaming the video to both self and others, when it only needs to be sent to others. In the meantime, users should use the "hide self-view" button, which one can access by right-clicking their own photo, once they see their face is framed properly in the video.

3) Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.

In-person and audio phone conversations allow humans to walk around and move. But with videoconferencing, most cameras have a set field of view, meaning a person has to generally stay in the same spot. Movement is limited in ways that are not natural. "There's a growing research now that says when people are moving, they're performing better cognitively," Bailenson said.

Solution: Bailenson recommends people think more about the room they're videoconferencing in, where the camera is positioned and whether things like an external keyboard can help create distance or flexibility. For example, an external camera farther away from the screen will allow you to pace and doodle in virtual meetings just like we do in real ones. And of course, turning one's video off periodically during meetings is a good ground rule to set for groups, just to give oneself a brief nonverbal rest.

4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.

Bailenson notes that in regular face-to-face interaction, nonverbal communication is quite natural and each of us naturally makes and interprets gestures and nonverbal cues subconsciously. But in video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive signals.

In effect, Bailenson said, humans have taken one of the most natural things in the world - an in-person conversation - and transformed it into something that involves a lot of thought: "You've got to make sure that your head is framed within the center of the video. If you want to show someone that you are agreeing with them, you have to do an exaggerated nod or put your thumbs up. That adds cognitive load as you're using mental calories in order to communicate."

Gestures could also mean different things in a video meeting context. A sidelong glance to someone during an in-person meeting means something very different than a person on a video chat grid looking off-screen to their child who just walked into their home office.

Solution: During long stretches of meetings, give yourself an "audio only" break. "This is not simply you turning off your camera to take a break from having to be nonverbally active, but also turning your body away from the screen," Bailenson said, "so that for a few minutes you are not smothered with gestures that are perceptually realistic but socially meaningless."

ZEF Scale

Many organizations - including schools, large companies and government entities - have reached out to Stanford communication researchers to better understand how to create best practices for their particular videoconferencing setup and how to come up with institutional guidelines. Bailenson - along with Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab; Géraldine Fauville, former postdoctoral researcher at the VHIL; Mufan Luo; graduate student at Stanford; and Anna Queiroz, postdoc at VHIL - responded by devising the Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale, or ZEF Scale, to help measure how much fatigue people are experiencing in the workplace from videoconferencing.

The scale, detailed in a recent, not yet peer-reviewed paper published on the preprint website SSRN, advances research on how to measure fatigue from interpersonal technology, as well as what causes the fatigue. The scale is a 15-item questionnaire, which is freely available, and has been tested now across five separate studies over the past year with over 500 participants. It asks questions about a person's general fatigue, physical fatigue, social fatigue, emotional fatigue and motivational fatigue. Some sample questions include:

How exhausted do you feel after videoconferencing?

How irritated do your eyes feel after videoconferencing?

How much do you tend to avoid social situations after videoconferencing?

How emotionally drained do you feel after videoconferencing?

How often do you feel too tired to do other things after videoconferencing?

Hancock said results from the scale can help change the technology so the stressors are reduced.

He notes that humans have been here before. "When we first had elevators, we didn't know whether we should stare at each other or not in that space. More recently, ridesharing has brought up questions about whether you talk to the driver or not, or whether to get in the back seat or the passenger seat," Hancock explained. "We had to evolve ways to make it work for us. We're in that era now with videoconferencing, and understanding the mechanisms will help us understand the optimal way to do things for different settings, different organizations and different kinds of meetings."

"Hopefully, our work will contribute to uncovering the roots of this problem and help people adapt their videoconference practices to alleviate 'Zoom fatigue,'" added Fauville, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. "This could also inform videoconference platform designers to challenge and rethink some of the paradigm videoconferences have been built on."

If you are interested in measuring your own Zoom fatigue, you can take the survey here and participate in the research project.

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Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' and their solutions | Stanford News

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It's not just Zoom. Popular video chat platforms have design flaws that exhaust the human mind and body. But there are easy ways to mitigate their effects.

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DT: ...So do you hold with the notion then that there will be a new generation of 'third spaces', as it were? Places that aren't quite in the centre, but are places where people can escape the home? Remind me of your quip about the person who said they wanted to go back to the office for the sake of their health...

ZS: Oh yes! I happened for a personal reason to call a government department the other day and I just had the feeling that the guy answered by referencing material in the office. So I said: 'are you actually in a physical office?', and he said 'yes, I have been since last week. I had to be working here for mental health reasons! I just cannot stand working at home anymore!'

ZS: And you know that chimes with me absolutely, because in the teens I did this big study which I called Why place still matters in the digital age - the report is still downloadable from our website - and it is definitive. It was based on a massive online sample but also close to 90 face-to-face interviews in the UK, Paris, New York, Hong Kong and Mumbai. The driver of the pitch was: what was going on around the periphery of big conurbations where you have the kind of extreme commuting factor that we've all known in London. I knew that places already existed like workplace hubs in Watford, Chelmsford, whatever, as well as in places like London Bridge. And so we did all of these interviews and we found that people really wanted to be close to home or closer to home, but they couldn't work at home; they needed to get over the psychological barrier of moving from pyjamas to a kind of work mindset.

That was very, very clear, even then. And that applies as well to people choosing the kind of space they want to go to. Since then, we've had this massive efflorescence, an explosion of spaces where people can work on a paid-for or free basis. I think the interesting thing will be what happens to the municipal spaces that have been freely offered, like the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican etc, as these institutions are going to be facing such short-term financial hurdles. There's a question: are they going to try to monetise that civic benefit? I have felt so proud to live in a city where it's been so wonderfully bestowed. The British Library were absolute pioneers in saying: come and use this as workspace.

DT: Maybe they will charge for Wi-Fi access; maybe that's the way they'll do it.

ZS: Well, interestingly, I think that Wi-Fi access is just going to very quickly become a ubiquitous freebie

ZS: Because I think that the inequality surrounding broadband access for poorer families during COVID has had such a pronounced impact, and I think something has to be done about it. It's been quite publicised in the press, so I think that cities that have wanted to get ahead have offered free broadband for a long time. The marginal cost of the city doing it I think is so small for the benefit

DT: So: last question, because we're just about out of time, but it's a hard one, this. Do you have a timeline prediction for the city going forward in terms of office occupation and general life? What are your thoughts about the next year? Have you got a tentative notional timeline in your mind?

ZS: I do. I think that there are people who are raring to get back, and as we saw in that interval between the first lockdown and the Tier 3 for London, it became very buzzy, very quickly. I think there will be a period where musical chairs are taking place and where, very heartbreakingly, some businesses will not be able to resuscitate, particularly in the service economy; you know, the sandwich shops and the dry cleaners, and many of them family-owned businesses.

But there will be other entrants and the exciting reality about times of disruption is that there are always opportunities for other entrants. It's winners and losers, and my heart goes out to all the people who going to be losers. I think if it hits you at a certain stage in your business or personal life cycle, you'll probably never come back - but there are all of these people who are percolating ideas and enthusiasm and energy, and they will populate these spaces. So I feel that there will be a change of faces and there will be some retention of faces. I think we will get a new mix, but I think that, once we're allowed to re-populate our city, I would say that in a year to 18 months, we will have a thriving situation.

DT: Good! That's a really optimistic note to end on - and I hope you're right!

ZS: I hope I'm right too! I mean, I walked around St Pancras station one day this week and it broke my heart. Apart from it being like a ghost town, there were clear signs of evident permanent closures. But, you know, occupancy costs have been very high, and if it creates entry opportunities for other participants, that's very exciting.

We just have to move forward - and it's really interesting how the sentiment can change quite fast. I think it's interesting how the sentiment towards the UK and government has changed over the weekend, because of the vaccine ''tennis match'. We all have a role, and actually I think this is a really good note to end on. I think we all have a role in leading market sentiment positively, because it does make a difference. You can give people the courage to participate and the enthusiasm to participate or when they are feeling doubtful you can reinforce it. And it's just not my way. I think there is a lot of rosy prospect, and I hope that collectively we can all help shape it.

DT: Lovely! thanks Ziona. it's great to speak to you again, and I'll speak to you soon cheers

ZS: Okay, cheers David. Bye!

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Ziona Strelitz interview with David Taylor

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DT: ...So do you hold with the notion then that there will be a new generation of 'third spaces', as it were? Places that aren't quite in the centre, but are places where people can escape the home? Remind me of your quip about the person who said they wanted to go back to the office for the sake of their health...

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Editor's note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

M OST PEOPLE associate the office with routine and conformity, but it is fast becoming a source of economic uncertainty and heated dispute. Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the office is obsolete-and are coming to radically different conclusions (see article). Some 84% of French office workers are back at their desks, but less than 40% of British ones are. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, says the company's staff can work from home "forever" but Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, says home-working is "a pure negative". As firms dither, the $30trn global commercial-property market is stalked by fears of a deeper slump. And while some workers dream of a Panglossian future without commutes and Pret A Manger, others wonder about the threat to promotions, pay and job security.

The disagreement reflects uncertainty about how effective social distancing will be and how long it will take before a covid-19 vaccine is widely available. But it is about more than that: the pandemic has revealed just how many offices were being run as relics of the 20th century, even as it triggered the mass-adoption of technologies that can transform white-collar work. As a result the covid calamity will prompt a long-overdue phase of technological and social experimentation, neither business as usual nor a fatal blow to the office. This era holds promise but also brings threats, not least to companies' cultures. Instead of resisting change, governments need to update antiquated employment laws and begin reimagining city centres.

Two hundred years ago steam power brought workers to factories where they could use new machines. As corporate giants emerged in the late 19th century, staff were needed to administer them. They held planning meetings and circulated memos, invoices and other paperwork to record what they had done. All this required workers to be close together and created the pattern of people commuting by car or train in order to meet in a central office.

This system always had glaring shortcomings, some of which have become worse over time. Most people hate the hassle and expense of commuting, which eats up over four hours a week for the average American worker. Some dislike the noise and formality of offices, or suffer from discrimination within them. Office-bound workers find it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.

You might think that new technologies would have shaken up this unsatisfactory status quo. After all, the PDF electronic document was born in 1991, the cost of bandwidth collapsed in the 2000s, and Zoom and Slack, two firms whose technology powers remote working, are both nearly a decade old. Yet inertia has allowed the office to escape serious disruption. Before covid-19 struck, for example, flexible-office companies (including the troubled WeWork) had a tiny global market share of under 5%. Most businesses were unwilling to switch wholesale to remote-working technologies before their clients did; or to write off sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.

Covid-19 has upended all this. Before the pandemic only 3% of Americans worked from home regularly; now a huge number have tried it. Even Xerox, a firm synonymous with office printers spewing unread pages, has many of its staff working from home. As more people adopt remote-working technologies there is a powerful network effect, with each new customer making the service more useful. Together Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex now have well over 300m users. Bureaucratic hurdles to remote work have been blasted out of the way. Civil courts are operating remotely. Notaries have gone online and some banks have eliminated the need for new customers to enter a branch to confirm their identity and open an account.

How much of this change will stick when a vaccine arrives? The best available guide is from countries where the virus is under control. There the picture is of an "optional office", which people attend, but less frequently. In Germany, for example, 74% of office workers now go to their place of work, but only half of them are there five days a week, according to surveys by Morgan Stanley. The exact balance will depend on the industry and city. In places with easy commutes more workers will go to the office; megacities with long, expensive journeys may see fewer.

Companies will have to adapt to this pattern of sporadic attendance in which the office is a hub, not a second home. There is a risk that over time a firm's social capital erodes, creativity flags, hierarchies ossify and team spirit fades, as Mr Hastings fears (see article). The answer is more targeted staff interactions, with groups gathering at specific times to refresh friendships and swap information. New technologies that "gamify" online interactions to prompt spontaneity may eventually supersede the stilted world of Zoom. As they retool their cultures firms will need to rejig their property: sober investors expect a reduction of at least 10% in the stock of office space in big cities. With the typical corporate lease lasting at least half a decade, this will take time to play out.

For governments the temptation is to turn the clock back to limit the economic damage, from the collapse of city-centre cafés to the $16bn budget shortfall that New York's subway system faces. Britain's government has tried to cajole workers back to the office. But rather than resist technological change, it is far better to anticipate its consequences. Two priorities stand out.

First, a vast corpus of employment law will need to be modernised. Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new prickly questions about workers' rights and responsibilities loom: can firms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest of the workforce.

The second priority is city centres. For a century they have been dominated by towers filled with swivel chairs and tonnes of yellowing paper. Now complex urban-planning rules will need a systematic overhaul to allow buildings and districts to be redeveloped for new uses, including flats and recreation. If you step back into the office this month, sit down and log on to your computer-but don't get too comfortable.■

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Office politics"

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Editor's note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub M OST PEOPLE associate the office with routine and conformity, but it is fast becoming a source of economic uncertainty and heated dispute.

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The pandemic has brought the commercial real estate market in San Francisco to a new low, with work-from-home policies and office closures slowing Silicon Valley-driven business expansion to numbers not seen in at least three decades.

New office-leasing activity in 2020 dropped a staggering 71% compared with the year before, according to the real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, from 7.7m to 2.2m sq ft - the lowest since the early 1990s. Tenant demand also halved during the pandemic, from 6.6m sq ft to 3.3m sq ft.

"Vacancies have obviously climbed substantially," said Robert Sammons, Cushman & Wakefield's senior director of Bay Area research, adding that more than half of the rise was driven by sublease vacancy, a common commercial space practice in San Francisco in which subleasers lease from a tenant, not a property manager. "That has never happened before in San Francisco," he said.

The numbers emerge as the tech companies that fueled the office real-estate boom in the city - a boom that has contributed to the state's affordable housing and construction crisis - re-evaluate the future of office culture and working from home.

Google will keep its employees home at least until July, while Pinterest paid nearly $90m to break a lease on an unbuilt, 500,000-sq ft office it no longer needs. Facebook has stated that it expects at least half of its employees will work remotely for the next five to 10 years, while Twitter announced it would let employees who wish to do so work from home "for ever".

In September, Twitter listed nearly 105,000 sq ft of its Mid-Market neighborhood headquarters for sublease.

What this all means for San Francisco and its future as a capital for the tech industry is still unclear. A survey of thousands of tech workers in May found that two out of three employees would consider moving out of the Bay Area if given the opportunity to work remotely indefinitely. But Sammons said it was too soon to say if the pandemic had made any lasting changes to the tech industry or the fabric of office life in San Francisco.

Rental prices are down for office spaces and residences, which could draw people back to the city, Robert Sammons says. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

When coronavirus vaccines began to be distributed, Sammons found that tenant demand in San Francisco had risen again to 4m sq ft. "We're beginning to see a change, a mental change, if you will," he said. "Now that vaccines are being rolled out, people can see the end. They realize they may want to reoccupy their spaces and continue to grow. They have more hope that this will be behind us toward the end of this year."

Further sweetening the pot is that rental prices are now down for both office spaces and residences. Sammons believes that will draw people back to San Francisco and back to their offices.

"It's about work culture," Sammons said. "It's about working around people who do the same thing you do. Will that pull exist when this is all behind us and the offices are back open, to be in that competitive mode again and to create that environment where they have to work with others? It's a tricky question to answer. But I still think there's still that desire and still that competition."

The city has had a complicated relationship with Silicon Valley, with the abundant wealth coming in from tech deepening stark racial and societal inequities that existed well before the second dotcom boom. But the departure of this much wealth - during a time when San Francisco is projecting a $653.2m budget deficit - could be catastrophic as well.

Sammons doesn't see it happening anytime soon. Venture capital funding hit record highs in the Bay Area this year, he pointed out. "There's still a huge contingent of tech workers in the Bay Area," he said. "The major tech players are and still will be headquartered here. That feeling that there are still so many tech players here, big or small, that if you don't like it at Company A, you can move to Company B, or you can start your own company - that feeling is still there, that your opportunities are greater here in San Francisco than in other markets.

"It's going to take a while to come out of this for San Francisco," Sammons said. "But we're still a tech market. We will remain one of the tech capitals of the world. There's still a lot of churn as far as money goes in this market, and that will continue to be the case."

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San Francisco office market in collapse as tech workers stay home

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The pandemic has brought the commercial real estate market in San Francisco to a new low, with work-from-home policies and office closures slowing Silicon Valley-driven business expansion to numbers not seen in at least three decades.

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I read this book twice. It really impacted the way I do work. I read this book twice. It really impacted the way I do work. Anthony Kim

I am a medical physicist, with responsibilities in the clinic as well academically. After I read this book I stacked all of my rote clinical duties into two-week piles and plowed through them, leaving months to focus on my academic work as well as clinical projects that meant a lot to me.

I also have applied this at home with my writing, and likewise got way more productive.

It's a pretty good book. I view it as a wake-up call to a distracted world: just focus on one thing at a time and you'll be a happier, more productive person.(less)
I am a medical physicist, with responsibilities in the clinic as well academically. Afte ...more

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I read this book twice. It really impacted the way I do work. I read this book twice. It really impacted the way I do work. Anthony Kim I am a medical physicist, with responsibilities in the clinic as well academically.

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Haworth white papers: working styles are changing, but ergonomic design is stuck in the days of the "cubicle farm" and not evolving quickly enough to support more mobile employees, according to US furniture giant Haworth.

"The very nature of work is changing," says Haworth in its white paper Active Ergonomics for the Emerging Workplace. "Technology has freed people to work anywhere, and a growing proportion of that work is collaborative and social."

"But traditional office ergonomics does not address group work or spaces. These emerging space types are being created with no ergonomic guidance," it warns. "Organisations that fail to apply a 'big picture' approach to office ergonomics are missing the opportunity to provide a safe and high-performing workplace for their employees."

Collaborative work now accounts for as much time in the average office worker's day as individual computer work, according to the white paper - meaning that employees are more likely to be moving between a variety of formal and informal spaces.

Younger workers in particular expect a wide range of interactions rather than just heads-down desk work, according to Michael O'Neill, Haworth's head of global workplace research, and author of the white paper.

"That change is well established, it's just the thinking around the spaces that is lagging," he said.

Ergonomics is a design discipline that focuses on creating products, processes and environments that physically support the people that use them while working.

Classic ergonomics concentrates on individual workstations, with the assumption that an employee stays in one place throughout the day.

It focuses on the employee's seated posture at their workstation, with factors including the distance of the screen from their eyes, the position of the hands and wrists over the keyboard and desk, and the height of the desk.

Correct posture has been proven to improve productivity as well as worker health, with poor posture associated with problems like repetitive strain injury and back pain.

But standing desks, casual sofas, hot-desking, informal meeting areas and quiet spaces for short bursts of focused work within noisier, more collaborative open-plan offices are becoming increasingly common in the modern workplace.

Sensor technology can improve office design and create happier employees, says Haworth

And moving more can significantly reduce the risk of premature death among office workers, according to recent studies.

"If you look back not that many years, you still see these diagrams of people sitting at a computer keyboard trying to get 90-degree angles at the knees and the waist and the elbows, and neutral posture in the wrist," said Jeff Reuschel, Haworth's global director of design and innovation.

"There really was very little thought about changing that posture, and we certainly didn't talk about movement through a building."

This means that the discipline of ergonomics - in terms of design regulation and education as well as implementation - needs to be rethought.

Haworth suggests replacing classic ergonomics with what it is calling Active Ergonomics - an approach to office design that applies a wide range of ergonomic principles to the whole environment.

"Active Ergonomics is the application of sound ergonomic thinking to the entire vocabulary of space in today's office, as opposed to simply the spaces developed for individual work," explained O'Neill.

"The ergonomic design of a space will have a huge impact on people's performance, and the value that you're getting out of your workforce in terms of their individual and group performance."

Haworth's Active Ergonomics concept is based around three key areas. The first is anthropometrics - or how the body relates to its immediate environment - which is essentially classic ergonomics.

The second is ambients, which relates to environmental conditions like the quality of light and air, noise and temperature.

The final area is movement, which can cover anything from moving from one space to another, to a person being able to adjust their posture to suit the task they're working on.

"Seated collaborative work may involve many quick postural changes, such as turning to hand a document to someone while seated," says the white paper. "In a meeting, lounge, or cafe space with casual furnishings, the furniture and accessories need to support these movements and the use of portable technology."

The white paper outlines a number of examples where the principles of Active Ergonomics can be applied to workspace design.

It says "legibility" - or how easy a space is to understand and navigate - is key to supporting workers as they move through an office space to complete different tasks.

A properly legible layout should offer a stark contrast to an old-fashioned "cubicle farm", where floor plans are monotonously regular in their layout. This latter approach can create a "disorienting maze" for workers.

"Poor legibility of floor plan and spaces has been linked to negative health impacts," says the white paper.

"Legibility is a fundamental part of Active Ergonomics because it puts people's needs first- it is intended to create a positive work experience that makes it easy to locate the type of space needed, and quickly and effectively use each space type," it adds.

"The layout of the office should set up a predictable rhythm that makes it easy for people to learn, or guess, where a desired space type might be found."

This approach should create an office that offers variety through furniture, texture, signage and architectural features that double as landmarks to help workers create a "mental map" of the space.

All of these elements can be used to indicate quiet spaces for focused working, more relaxed collaborative spaces and private areas for more formal meetings.

According to Carlo Shayeb, industrial designer at German design studio ITO Design, good ergonomic office design and Active Ergonomics can "definitely" make people happier in the workplace.

ITO Design specialises in creating ergonomic chairs for a wide variety of design brands. It has been collaborating with Haworth for more than 10 years, and worked with Haworth's internal design team on its newly launched task chair Fern.

The chair features an unusually tall backrest with a central frame made up of multiple bow-like structures - each designed to support a different part of the back - and can be adjusted for "perched" or reclining sitting styles.

"The classic office still exists, but people now want to be able to have multiple ways of sitting," said Shayeb. "It's definitely made ergonomics a bit more open."

"Some of our research is looking at happiness, and if you define happiness as a sense of wellbeing and feeling relaxed at work and comfortable, ergonomics absolutely can create a happier workforce," agreed O'Neill.

"It's so fundamental to the work experience. Physical comfort and functional usefulness has to happen, before you try to achieve the other sorts or performance characteristics that you might want in a workspace."
series of articles produced by Dezeen in collaboration with Haworth, based on the company's white paper research documents. It is based on Haworth's white paper, Active Ergonomics for the Emerging Workplace.
Illustrations are by Stephen Cheetham.

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Ergonomics is not evolving quickly enough for the modern workplace, says Haworth

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Haworth white papers: working styles are changing, but ergonomic design is stuck in the days of the "cubicle farm" and not evolving quickly enough to support more mobile employees, according to US furniture giant Haworth. "The very nature of work is changing," says Haworth in its white paper Active Ergonomics for the Emerging Workplace.

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Krenek's proposals include Small Group Teaming with curvilinear screens around desks

Offices after coronavirus should be designed for meetings and socialising while focused work should take place at home, says Perkins and Will interior designer Meena Krenek, who has developed proposals to rethink the purpose of the workplace.

Krenek, who is interior design director of the architecture firm's Los Angeles office, led a team to create the conceptual Meeting Space project in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which she said has seen many companies enjoy the advantages of working from home.
"Does the traditional one-workstation-per-person ratio still make sense?"
"Our collective work-from-home experience has been a forced experiment for all of us, giving us insight into what we need to work most effectively," Krenek told Dezeen.

"In a future de-densified, post-Covid-19 world, does the traditional one-workstation-per-person ratio still make sense?"

"Perhaps the office relinquishes its function as a provider of private workstations and instead leans into its role of a 'meeting space' - that is, one designed to support collaboration and connection," she added.

Krenek believes post-pandemic offices should be spaces that give employees the opportunity to meet up in conjunction with home offices. Instead of individual desks and private offices, the schemes in her project focus on providing spaces for these meetings and large gatherings.
"Hybrid model of post-Covid-19 office encourages fluid work environment"
"A balance of physical and virtual work experiences will become the norm for many organisations," Krenek told Dezeen. "A fluid work experience allows employees to make the decision whether to work from home or to meet and connect with coworkers in a physical office meeting room."

There are three schematic diagrams in the project, Pop-Up Meeting Space, Fluid Work Experience and Small Group Teaming. Areas are designed with details like privacy curtains that can open and close off certain zone, furniture on wheels and screens for Zoom calls so they can be easily adapted to different uses.

"This new hybrid model of the future post-Covid-19 office encourages a fluid work environment, allowing employees to quickly re-configure their workspace as much as they want to suit their needs, which these days can often change hour-by-hour," Krenek said.

"True mobility is offered via demountable walls, furniture on wheels, mobile writable surfaces, and a well-integrated and -distributed electrical and audio-visual infrastructure," she added. "These tools enable true, highly flexible environments."
Offices will be flexible for different uses
Pop-up Meeting Space has a series of small rooms for meetings, while Small Group Teaming comprises curvilinear screens that wrap around desks to encourage "balanced meeting and focus". Demountable walls allow zones to be created, depending on the number of employees.

"A space could be set up for a brief, four-person strategy meeting for 9 a.m., then be re-adjusted to accommodate a 10-person collaborative brainstorm at noon the same day," Krenek explained.

Another detail is Host Bar, which has a long counter and a large, open area for hosting events. Aspects like reserving rooms in advance, touchless technology and sinks are also considered.

Krenek's project follows a number of proposals for how working lifestyles will change following the pandemic.

"Offices are going to get much smaller" after pandemic says Sevil Peach

Dezeen editor Tom Ravenscroft predicted in an Opinion column that "remote working will no longer be unusual" and British interior designer Sevil Peach has forecasted that offices will get smaller.

Global firm Woods Bagot has also created diagrams of workplaces during coronavirus that merge working from home and office, while Form4 Architecture co-founder Paul Fero believes that cubicles will become more prevalent.

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Offices will balance physical and virtual work says Perkins and Will director

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Offices after coronavirus should be designed for meetings and socialising while focused work should take place at home, says Perkins and Will interior designer Meena Krenek, who has developed proposals to rethink the purpose of the workplace.

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We no longer need desks, say designers Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby, because the office of the future is more of a meeting place than a work environment.

Speaking in a talk at the Vitra showroom in London, the Barber and Osgerby founders said that the office is still relevant, but the desk is not and designers need to be responding to this.

"The desk is a place that you're invisibly chained to, where you're producing widgets for the man," said Osgerby. "It's a remnant of the industrial revolution."

"You don't need to spend 20 grand a year to have a desk that has a photo of your dog on it anymore, but at the same time people still need to come together and have moments of interaction."
People need "moments of intimacy and sociability"
Osgerby said that the office of the future is more a space of collaboration, so its furniture needs to be more casual.

"The office now and in the future will only be a place where people come together, a meeting place," he said. "People now need to move around and sit down and come together, to have moments of intimacy and sociability."

Barber added: "This is why we say that the desk is dead, and not the office is dead."

The big advantage of the office, according to Barber, is that technology is unlikely get in the way of productivity.

"While we endeavour to use technology like Skype for group calls as much as possible, it's disjointed and inevitably always fucks up," said Barber. "So we end up travelling a lot to actually speak face to face to the people we need to talk to."

"Things work very quickly and easily that way, whereas when there's a layer of technology, there's always a problem," he added.
Companies favour hospitality areas over desk space
The talk took place to mark the UK launch of Soft Work, a modular seating system that the duo designed for Vitra, which also doubles as a work station.

First unveiled at the Orgatec 2018 office furniture fair, it is among a number of new products designed to suit to more flexible workplaces.

10 office furniture designs that prove "the desk has had its day"

The pair were accompanied by Raphael Gielgen, head of research and trend scouting at Vitra, who explained that fewer companies are investing in the classic typology of the workplace.

According to Gielgen, firms are increasingly dedicating more floor space to hospitality areas in a bid to "stay relevant in our current climate" and "create value beyond the revenue".

"You have to bring people together and create serendipitous moments, and this happens in hospitality areas as water-cooler moments," he explained.

In Gielgen's opinion, people are looking for more from their workplace than the traditional office can give them.

"A lot of people commute into London to spend five or six hours at a desk in front of a screen, and it makes no sense anymore," said Gielgen.

"In this super fast world, people are really searching for rituals," he continued. "Cooking or eating together is one of the strongest rituals in every culture, and you can embed this into the public space and the workspace."
Freelance culture fuelled the trend
Osgerby said that the idea for Soft Work was born when he and Barber designed the interiors for the Ace Hotel Shoreditch, in east London. The duo designed a central table in the lobby for guests to use their laptops and smart devices at.

Within days of the hotel opening, the lobby became a communal space for freelance workers. Every seat was taken up by people on laptops and smartphones, most of whom were not hotel guests.

This trend for freelance working emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crash, when workers didn't want to commit to long-term rental contracts. This, coupled with the rise of the smartphone, meant that people could effectively work from anywhere.

"But most people don't want to be isolated the whole time, so that's why they end up going to places like the Ace Hotel lobby, because they are looking for a community," said Osgerby.

"So we thought, let's design a piece of furniture that's actually appropriate and ergonomic, which has a place you can plug your device in to charge, that has surfaces where you can rest your laptop. Something that is formal but also casual and flexible," he continued.

Soft Work's features include pivoting tables and power sockets located between the seat cushions, which enable diverse seating and working positions. Partition screens can also be used to divide zones and create privacy.

Barber and Osgerby founded their studio in 1996, and are famous for designs including the London 2012 Olympic Torch and the Tip Ton chair.

They are not the only designers aiming to transform the idea of traditional office furniture.

Jaime Hayon's Plenum collection for Danish furniture brand Republic of Fritz Hansen is made up of a one, two and a three-seater sofa, to make people "feel at home" when working.

Similarly, designer Lucy Kurrein designed a modular sofa for Offecct that incorporates moveable table tops for laptops and hangers for storing coats to cater to modern working environments such as hotel lobbies.

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The office of the future "will only be a place where people come together" say Barber and Osgerby

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We no longer need desks, say designers Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby, because the office of the future is more of a meeting place than a work environment. Speaking in a talk at the Vitra showroom in London, the Barber and Osgerby founders said that the office is still relevant, but the desk is not and designers need to be responding to this.

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Meetings are the bane of modern-day business. Is there any way to make them not so long, boring and unproductive?

First of all, exchange the donuts and soda for something much healthier, like water and protein bars. The sugar rush, followed by the mid-afternoon sugar crash, helps no one.

Why do people attend meetings? It's a nice alternative to doing actual work, technology makes it possible, we confuse "efficient" and "effective", and we forget that there is an alternative.

Looking at the anatomy...more

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Meetings are the bane of modern-day business. Is there any way to make them not so long, boring and unproductive? First of all, exchange the donuts and soda for something much healthier, like water and protein bars. The sugar rush, followed by the mid-afternoon sugar crash, helps no one.

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New London Architecture's annual awards have huge traction in attracting a rich pool of submissions that showcase completed and future projects. As previously, Ziona Strelitz was invited as Expert Assessor of Workplaces. Covering a mix of typologies and locations, the submissions offers a valuable window on workplace design - from premium quality new build, through substantial adaptive re-use, to light touch interventions. As we work to re-galvanise economic activity and address Covid's impact, these projects pose important questions on design strategies for resilience and lasting success. Congratulations to all the teams behind all NLA's shortlisted projects - glimpses of the shortlisted Built Workplaces shown here, and to the Jury's choice of Poplar Works - a new workplace for East London's fashion economy, transforming under-used garages adjacent to the A12 into low-cost workshops, a public café, and manufacturing and training facilities - as winner. Ziona described her role as "identifying the strengths of every project, without prioritising between different typologies - an unfettered professional pleasure."

ZZA works actively in the university sector, carrying out briefing research and post occupancy evaluation on campus environments and individual buildings. Much of this involves the beneficial stock of new accommodation that academic institutions have delivered in recent years. Now - with the disruption to student travel, associated drop in university budgets, the increase in online teaching, and decrease in physical presence - the hot questions relate to next steps for higher education estates development. Drawing on her deep knowledge of both the commercial and academic sectors, and their shared objectives, Ziona sets out her view in her newly published Knowledge Exchange and Social Connection.

Following our successive Post Occupancy studies for Make Architects, the studio has published this conversation on what makes our research distinctive and the way it informs their practice in its 2020 Yearbook.

Ongoing projects always jostle with time and space for critical reflection. There's not been a time in the tech-enabled / tech-driven world when our modes of working and learning have not been evolving, but crises accelerate the speed of change. With the dramatic urgency of the 'needs must' response to Covid 19, our modal landscape has transformed with a reach and intensity that would have not occurred without this burning platform. The question of the role face-to-face plays versus virtual connection has not had the immediate testing ground we are now experiencing. Now is an highly important time - to note, assess and predict. If ever there was a time to interrogate and analyse, to give the prominence needed to social, economic, emotional and security concerns in thinking about future functionality and spaces to support it, this is it. Watch this space.

Building design is a complex process involving myriad elements and decisions, and once on course, design development typically follows its established trajectory, layering refinements on previous decisions. Marching forward. But critical appraisal with fresh expert eyes - at the design stage before schemes are built - is a unique time to hone the proposition that will be realised. Seeing the value in this, an ambitious and searching client have commissioned ZZA to leverage our deep knowledge and insight on user experience to 'pre-evaluate' their major schemes while there's still scope to flex them. We are currently undertaking such a thorough user-centric review of design proposals for a block-wide, mixed use scheme encompassing live, work, rest and public realm. Marching forward with open eyes!

ZZA looks forward to sharing our empirical perspectives on workplace and wellness at MIPIM 2020, Cannes

Unsolicited endorsements are always heartening. So touched to have memorable teaching remembered way down the line.

It's not just buildings that matter - the spaces between and around them are now recognised to count for more than ever before. Ziona Strelitz's book, 'Buildings that Feel Good', looked at their context alongside the exemplar buildings themselves. Now, enlarging our repertoire of studies on these important settings, ZZA is researching user experience of an inner London campus, to register and understand the effects of physical enhancements as well as changing user expectations.

The London School of Economics has been delivering an ambitious programme of development, upscaling the quality of its estate and the built environment for use by its community. The improvements also benefit the public. The latest building to be completed and opened is in the physical heart of the LSE. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour, Centre Buildings provides new teaching space, new workspace for academics and administrators, and an extensive open access Learning Commons - a step change in available facilities outside the School's central library. ZZA is undertaking a Post Occupancy Evaluation of Centre Buildings in use.

Ziona Strelitz joins leading thinkers on Beautiful Business, with thoughts on inspiring, illuminating places.

Ziona Strelitz draws from her record of work on tall buildings to ask how these live up to the promise. 'Building Tall', Architecture Today conference, Building Centre London, 14 November

We hear continuously of buildings being designed to promote chance encounters and interaction. The presumptions are that this will happen, that collaboration will flow from it, and that value will result. Whilst almost every organisation across all sectors prizes knowledge exchange, little is known of the actual conditions that encourage and assist this. Extending ZZA's already rich empirical evidence on the realities of buildings in use, we are currently undertaking research in an academic building that has been developed for teaching and learning, focussing on the design's facilitation of this fundamental objective in the project's brief.

Further expressing ZZA's unique research and insight on user experience of built settings - so much of it across a wide range of workplaces - we've now added the registered mark UX:WORKPLACE® alongside our mark UX:SPACE®

Delighted to put our approach out there, in The Business of Research, new volume of Architectural Design, May / June 2019. Essay by Ziona Strelitz: 'How is it for you? Building Design as Experienced by Users and Makers'.

ZZA specialises in evaluating new buildings before and after they're built. Once completed, we research how buildings work for their users. Before they're built, we focus on briefs and design development. But how design is delivered is critical to what clients will get and users will inhabit. Recognising the importance of this, the LSE have commissioned ZZA to review the process of delivering the School's significant new Centre Buildings Redevelopment at the heart of the campus. Designed br Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, this thirteen-storey building for academic, teaching and informal workspace and gathering space will open later this year.

Ziona has been appointed to the Design Review Panel in the diverse and dynamic London Borough of Newham.

Adding to the multiple sectors and building types covered by ZZA's assignments, railway arches have now come to the fore. Working on functional strategies for arches space on a central London site, we're helping the leaseholder to populate this asset as a lively, thriving hub.

Welcome to our new website. It's structured to make it easy to visit what makes ZZA special - our vision, our scope, our approach, samples of our work, and the range of topics we cover. We hope it works for you. Feedback always appreciated.

Whereas tech business got the criticality of user experience in the sector's infancy, the much older property sector is just catching on how much users matter to successful business performance. But ZZA is distinctive - user experience has always been our focus. Our new tagline - UX:SPACE® - now signals this key differentiator of our long term focus on users as key to project success.

ZZA is invited to input at this year's Cannes conference, presenting on Workspace: New Ways of Occupying, and moderating the sessions on Mixed Use: The New Normal? and Workplaces of the Future. All three are topics at the core of ZZA's domain.

It's always heartening when good work's judged to stand the test of time, and we're delighted that Routledge are reprinting a foundational book on Leisure and the Family Life Cycle. With the emergence of AI and increased longevity, it's highly relevant to refocus on leisure now. Ziona's new introduction characterises the key changes of the industrial and cultural revolution we're living through, and the parallel important shifts in demography since the book's original publication.

Available knowledge is one thing, but 'getting it' is another. Continuing its ambitious development programme, the London School of Economics has instituted LSE Life - a new centre to support students in academic, professional and personal development. An innovative student service in a newly provided space. ZZA is researching the effectiveness of this extensive facility. ZZA's evaluation outputs are used both to inform future development as well as to optimise the space researched.

The increasing number of new tower buildings is fuelling concern across cities like London + New York, especially where tall structures stray from existing clusters and disrupt familiar views. ZZA has a strong grounding on these issues, from our earlier research with Londoners' to inform city policy on tall buildings + panoramas, and 'Tall Buildings: Strategic Design Guide' (BCO / RIBA) edited by Ziona Strelitz. Our newest take, ' From Guidance to Action ', reviews the emerging reality of London's skyline against the starter propositions.

Concepts get embedded in what the supply chain provides, with applications often lifted + shifted between projects. Targeting relevance + strong alignment, ZZA is working with a big government department to forge strategic principles for smart- er working suited to its operations + culture.

Since Ziona Strelitz's book, Buildings that Feel Good, ZZA has championed good adaptive reuse, and our user research features numerous adapted buildings. Ziona judges this sector of entries again in this year's World Architecture News Awards.

ZZA is delighted once again to share perspectives on the changing workplace + its changing context with built environment professionals in Helsinki.

Ziona discusses the trajectory over the past two decades with the Urban Design Group.

The endless discourse on building productivity assumes that architecture can do it all. But settings need curation to achieve the outcomes we want: ZZA is working with the occupant of a fine new building to drive user benefits.

ZZA's thinking on the evolving nature of the preferred workplace reads the cultural tea-leaves. Our international study on hub environments was ahead of the curve. Why Place Still Matters in the Digital Age lays the ground for this sector of the workplace market, describing its traction with users + suppliers. Our empirical research report on workplace transformation, Improved Productivity at Lower Cost critiques the died in the wool business case for workplace consolidation, presenting an evidence-based proposition for smaller, more distributed workplaces that chime with users. Ziona Strelitz is speaking to these hot tops in panel session on offices + workplace design at the London Real Estate Forum.

We are recognised for our thorough approach to Post Occupancy Evaluation. But drawing on deep knowledge of building use before construction helps to optimise built outcomes. ZZA is continuing our work in holistic pre-evaluation, with the most recent project reviewed a forthcoming wharfside building in Paddington.

ZZA has deep roots in research on how we live + work, and how these change with shifts in demographics, technology and culture. Ziona Strelitz has distilled this rich evidence base in a new critique, focused on aspects of the physical workplace that really matter to users now, including the influence of austerity.

ZZA has a record of research on Londoners' opinions of tall buildings. Given current concern about the increased concentration of new tall buildings, we're asked if the skyline has evolved as Ziona Strelitz envisaged when she edited 'Tall Buildings: A Strategic Design Guide'. Not exactly!

The irony of innovation that brings negative states and new words to describe them: obesogenic! Contributing to rising interest in healthy cities, ZZA's presentation on 'Active by Design' at the Reform Club's symposium: 'Building the Walkable and Healthy City'.

'The future of work and workplace...' November brings the 10th anniversary conference of this influential programme to the British Museum. Ziona Strelitz will be presenting critical industry challenges on 'Great workplace buildings: who needs them?'

The Leadenhall Building - aka the Cheesegrater - is under construction at a pivotal location between London's new tall buildings. ZZA is working on a strategy for public use at the building's base.

The spaces around and between buildings are a vital part of effective places. ZZA is currently researching user views of facilities and external realm at Regent's Place.

Ziona Strelitz, in a Better Bankside debate with Roger Zogolovitch and William Murray, at The Lake, Union Street. Tickets from vb@betterbankside.co.uk

More than low-e components and desk sharing. Ziona Strelitz invited to present the urbanistic, real estate and social capital perspectives at the NewWow Symposium, Oslo.

The Greater London Council's report represents a searching review of planning, architecture and urban management, offering a range of practical action points. Ziona Strelitz of ZZA was invited as an expert witness to input knowledge of changing urban uses and third places.

The winners of the New London Architecture Awards represent numerous typologies. Ziona Strelitz was the Expert Assessor for Office Interiors. From a highly varied shortlist of big and small projects, the office interiors winner is Bennetts Associates' office, 326 Downstairs, EC1.

Presentation by Ziona Strelitz at The Science and Economics of Wellbeing in Interiors at The Building Centre, 5 July

The distinctive building at 32 Lincolns Inn Fields was only occupied by the Land Registry till 2011. Now taken over by the London School of Economics, ZZA is evaluating the effectiveness of the accommodation as adapted for academia.

What is cities' level of resource use, and can we assess how changes will impact? ZZA has written the presentation of the findings for a study commissioned by TSB from the Ecological Sequestration Trust, undertaken with Imperial College and the Institute of Integrated Economic Research.

The office vs home is last century's either-or. Today's activities are distributed, with productive work in convenient locations + motivating spaces - often third places. See our Guardian comment.

Ziona Strelitz in panel discussion at New London Architecture.

More people are getting that work's an activity, not a place. Anywhere Working event, London, 22 March. Venue: Aldwych Tube Station! Ziona Strelitz in Pecha Kucha.

ZZA's ongoing user research + cross-comparison are delivering continuous improvement + added value.

A key strand of ZZA research is living + working in large metro areas. Ziona Strelitz invited input to Greater London Assembly Planning Committee on London's Town Centres. Webcast + discussion.

Significant momentum on the EcoSequestTrust integrated urban modelling. ZZA is leading on social value.

ZZA's POE of the LSE's newest accommodation, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, demonstrates great effectiveness in adapting this heritage building for academic use. LSE Estates excels in its actions for continuous improvement.

Report on ZZA + others in lively Guardian roundtable at White Collar Factory, London

Distributed working is growing apace. Ziona Strelitz reviews this rapidly changing field in FM World

'Intelligent buildings: Design, Management and Operation' now in 2nd edition. Ziona Strelitz's chapter on 'The Changing Culture of Living and Working: Physical and Virtual Modalities' captures the scale of change since the 2004 edition. Available as e-chapter or e-book

Ziona Strelitz's book, 'Energy People Place: Sustainable Urban Paradigm', available from amazon.co.uk as well as RIBA. Case-study of Kings Place + rich portrayal of sustainable building use.

Progressing Eco-city Policies into Mainstream Chinese Practice report. ZZA co-authored section on Urban Planning + Design

ZZA is continuing our empirical research on Birmingham City Council's major achievement in contracting its portfolio of Central Administration Buildings, leveraging workplace agility.

Should London maintain its centralising impetus, with areas becoming increasingly mono-functional through site consolidation for larger scale development? An Edge debate considers implications + scope for a more distributed spatial strategy. Ziona Strelitz, ZZA; Michael Edwards, UCL + Ben Rogers, Demos, with Nicky Gavron, former Deputy Mayor, at City Hall. Info: sf@architectspractice.com

The pace of global urbanisation is galvanising urgent attention. ZZA involved in research + strategy in UK, Europe, USA, China + India.

Launch of the Ecological Sequestration Trust's pioneering environmental demonstrator project in the city of Surat. ZZA proud to facilitate at stakeholder workshop.

ZZA's workplace transformation research unpacks long standing assumptions in the workplace supply chain. Out in August.

The real eco story is not about greenfield sites - it's right in central London, with the burst of life at Kings Cross Central. ZZA engaging with Central St Martins in Unlocking the Public Realm

New advisory on ZZA international research.

Ziona Strelitz as panellist addressing 'What to measure, How to measure', at 2012 IFMA Workplace Strategy Summit on Research in Action, at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

ZZA's work with students and professional staff in two universities is informing the optimisation of study and library space.

ZZA's rich bank of systematic data on building use now incorporates the results from our 2011-2012 POEs.

The FCO funded UK-China Eco-cities project involves collaboration at municipal level. ZZA is participating in collaborations in Beijing, Shiyan and Anji.

'Why place still matters in the digital age'
Published findings of ZZA's global study on third place working close to home, based on nearly 80,000 survey responses from over 60 countries, plus a large suite of qualitative interviews in Greater London, New York, Paris, Mumbai and Hong Kong.

ZZA continues our research on the changing workplace, with further evaluations on the new wave of police stations, studying how effectively these perform for personnel as both operational space and their workplace.

Following significant development, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is funding collaborative work by the UK-China Eco-cities & Green Building Group, working with the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) and the Chinese Society of Urban Studies on an action-research project to develop and implement eco-city policies across a range of Chinese cities. ZZA is on the Project Steering Group.

ZZA's research leads to better buildings. Now Neil Usher, General Manager, Group Property, Rio Tinto has converted our 2010 ' Liveable lives' report to lyrics and Doug Shaw's put it to song.

Straightened times highlight scope to eradicate waste. The pressure is on to save on superfluous space and building servicing; the 'prize' is significant and measurable. But the art is to realise efficiencies without compromising occupier performance. ZZA is working with one of our key clients to assemble rounded indices of benefit, including systematic evidence on the occupier perspective. We'll be reporting on our transformation studies in the private and public sector at central and local government level.

The value of high quality research is the learning. The outputs are commercially relevant. Planning consent has been obtained for the Mayfair office redevelopment, shaped to meet ZZA's occupier agenda.

'The Third Way', focus on ZZA's Founder Director, Ziona Strelitz, in FMX Magazine, September 2011.

Presentations by Ziona Strelitz at global events: Workplace Trends 2011, Royal College of Physicians, London, 20 October, University of Chongqing, 28-31 October + Corenet Summit Atlanta, 7 November.

Article from ZZA: 'Tall building design and sustainable urbanism: London as crucible' in new issue of Intelligent Buildings International.

A notable ZZA strength is engagement with built environment use at all spatial scales. Our current projects involve empirical research across the spectrum.

Our international study on third place working is in the analysis phase. Based on a powerful set of user data, the report is due for publication this autumn.

Using our up to date knowledge from post occupancy evaluation, ZZA has been informing front end strategy, providing user vision and iterative review of proposals for new buildings for the commercial office and police sectors.

Context is highly significant in the experience of building use. ZZA has been researching perceptions of campus and building quality in the higher education sector.

ZZA presentation: 'The Outer London network: realigning lives, expanding choice', at London's Workplaces: Remaining Competitive in a Changing World, New London Architecture.

ZZA's international study of third place working is actively underway, with the US, UK and European sectors of this research now complete. Next stop Asia. This exciting qualitative research has an associated large scale survey component covering over 60 countries.

With every new user study, ZZA's knowledge of effective building design is expanded. Our newly completed research on a new police building adds to our data and insight on custody and general workspace facilities.

ZZA presentations on its research perspectives at key international events:
Hong Kong, 'Local Business Hubs: Strategic Answer to Sustainable Working', at Corenet Global Summit, themed 'Social dynamics: Growing cities, evolving workstyles and global influences'

Beijing, 'Integrated Greening - Learning from Experience', at 7th International Conference of Green and Energy Efficient Buildings: "Reduce Carbon, Increase Quality - Green Buildings Improve City Life"

Nottingham, UK, 'Getting Real about Third Space Working: Issues for Workspace Providers', at Th!nk FM, 'Delivering Value in Facilities management'

ZZA's Regus report on 'Liveable lives' has struck an industry
chord - FM World rated it 'far the best presentation of the day' at Worktech. ZZA is now researching how third spaces work for
their users.

ZZA has actively supported design optimisation of police buildings through Post Occupancy Evaluation and Design Review. This work stream is now involving an evaluation of innovative custodial facilities for a UK force.

Joined up not just multidiscipline is a ZZA credo! We are contributing to UK infrastructure optimisation, through Ziona Strelitz's membership of the Government's Engineering Interdependency Expert Group.

Ziona Strelitz has been appointed Visiting Professor at Reading's distinguished School of Construction Management & Engineering.

In the early 2000s, ZZA supported PwC on evolving its working environment. This resulted in the award-winning Cornwall Court and generated a template for further PwC space. With the speed of cultural change impinging on work, ZZA is again collaborating with PwC, researching their Future Working Environment.

ZZA's rich research perspective is contributing to key events:
"Workspace-people: Employee steer to sustainable performance"
at Corenet's 2010 Global London Summit,
"Liveable lives: addressing dysfunction in 21st Century work"
at Worktech 2010 at the British Library,
"Changing culture: responsive office design", at
On Location in the City, convened by New London Architecture
and the City of London Corporation at the Guildhall, and
"Life cycle performance delivery", at the international
Future City conference, Mermaid Theatre, London.

ZZA's experience continues to be shared in teaching on the
MSc in Intelligent Buildings at University of Reading. This year's students represent a cosmopolitan international cohort.

ZZA's focus through our 21 years is "building use meets building design", the theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale.

London is a progressive environment for legal workspace. ZZA is currently reviewing the range of exemplar concepts and practice.

ZZA shared the results and learning from our Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Devon and Cornwall Police Authority's Strategic Operational Hub in Bodmin, with Police Property Services Managers at their recent Conference in the building. The POE results validate positive scope for sustainable design.

Ziona Strelitz drew on ZZA's extensive research in a presentation at the Designing for Happiness Seminar at Imperial College. The event underscored the importance of skilled listening to and learning from building users, coupled with responsive and inspired design.

ZZA contributed its multi-scalar perspective to the UK-Sino "Towards Sustainable Cities" seminar convened at China's first carbon-neutral hotel in Shanghai.

ZZA continues to share perspectives with colleagues in Asia. Invited by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers and Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in PR China, Ziona Strelitz presented its approach to user-focused design in Hong Kong and Beijing.

ZZA has tracked work-life issues over our 21 year life. Our latest report, Liveable lives, leverages this research, offering instructive strategies to promote work-life alignment, highlighting scope for distributed workspace. Enlisting strong international interest published by Regus.

The new SKA Rating tool facilitates greener fit-outs. ZZA has contributed as Development Partner. SKA has been endorsed by Corenet and adopted by RICS.

ZZA have a valuable database of findings. Recent evaluations show users wanting simpler, greener buildings. Our latest POE of a low-e building shows that this can be achieved. More information to follow after our post-summer check.

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New London Architecture's annual awards have huge traction in attracting a rich pool of submissions that showcase completed and future projects. As previously, Ziona Strelitz was invited as Expert Assessor of Workplaces. Covering a mix of typologies and locations, the submissions offers a valuable window on workplace design - from premium quality new build, through substantial adaptive re-use, to light touch interventions.

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ith the City of London deserted once more, its streets only populated by the occasional Deliveroo driver or tumbleweed-seeking photographer, it seems a strange time to be completing the largest office building the capital has ever seen, not least because the very future of the workplace is now in question.

But, rising far above the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, dwarfing the now fun-sized Gherkin and boasting the floor area of almost all three combined, 22 Bishopsgate stands as the mother of all office towers. It is the City's menacing final boss, a glacial hulk that fills its plot to the very edges and rises directly up until it hits the flight path of passing jets. The building muscles into every panorama of London, its broad girth dominating the centre of the skyline and congealing the Square Mile's distinctive individual silhouettes into one great, grey lump.

It is the absurdist conclusion of three decades of steroidal growth, the final product of superheated land values stretching loose planning rules to breaking point. And, just as the building is being handed over to its first tenants to fit out, it feels like a monument from another epoch. Remember when we used to commute to the office?

"Twenty-two Bishopsgate reminds me of a catchphrase from the 1960s sitcom, The Rag Trade," says Peter Rees, former chief planner of the City of London. "Never mind the quality, feel the width!" Rees oversaw the transformation of the City from the mid-1980s until 2014, summoning ever-larger structures into being, but he left his post shortly before this tower was granted permission. "I wasn't responsible for that one," he says. "Thankfully, I think it marks the end of an era of buildings of that intensity, the idea that more is better." Certainly, post-Covid, the big question seems to be: will people want to commute to a mega-building and jostle for the lifts with 12,000 others?

The beast of Bishopsgate, nicknamed The Wodge by one critic, may be the last gasp of this generation of inflated totems, but it is by no means alone. It heralds a flood of new office space at a time when it could hardly look less needed. Across London, some of the biggest corporate HQs ever built in the UK are under construction, from Google's sprawling, ground-scraping Goliath in King's Cross, to Apple's gargantuan new home inside the zombified cadaver of Battersea Power Station. And those are just the giants. According to a recent report by Deloitte, over 15 million square feet of office space is on the way in central London. That's the equivalent of 30 Gherkins, a peak of activity last reached in 2008, just as the bubble burst.

Twenty million people can get to our building within an hour - and many are yearning to get back to the office

The City bounced back from the financial crisis, but this tidal wave comes as the country is facing the worst economic recession for 300 years - along with speculation that the nature of work might have changed for ever. Google itself has extended home-working until at least July, while investment bank Morgan Stanley has predicted that the number of people working from home will more than double to 30% by 2030.

Deloitte's research also found that, compared to other European countries, UK employees are the least willing to return to their offices, with 72% saying they will work remotely more often in the future. The market is reflecting this uncertainty: central London office take-up plummeted in the six months to September, with the latest quarter the lowest on record. Just as factories and mills were converted into luxury lofts, and postwar offices converted into grim bedsits, might today's glass office towers be the high-rise homes of tomorrow?

"City-centre offices are the product of a 10,000-year trend," says Harry Badham of AXA IM Real Assets, the firm behind 22 Bishopsgate, which is already around 60% pre-let. "We are a long-term investor, so we take the long view. People work better together. That's how cities were created and we don't think that's going to change overnight. Twenty million people can get to our building within an hour, and many are yearning to get back to the office."

With 1.3m sq ft of space and a whopping 60 lifts, the tower's first occupants will at least have enough room to be socially distanced, whether they're relaxing in the nail bar on the 41st floor or scaling the precipitous " climbing window " on the 25th. But the prospect of being trapped inside this "vertical village" - with restaurants, bars, gym and even a GP's surgery - might not be quite the draw it once was. Do you want your work life to be permanently "coached and curated"? Are all these communal facilities - such as Google HQ's swimming pool, massage rooms, basketball court and nap pods - really the future?

Rees believes that - having survived the Black Death, the Great Fire and the Blitz - the Square Mile will bounce back

"Giant buildings that try to internalise the place are making a big mistake," says Rees, now professor of planning at University College London. "The most important places in the City are outdoors and the pandemic has certainly taught us that. People need to get out of the office to get the gossip and bring it back to the beehive. That proximity, and those face-to-face encounters, have been the foundation of doing business here since medieval times." Rees thinks that, having survived the Black Death, the Great Fire, the Blitz and the banking crashes, the Square Mile will soon bounce back even stronger from the impact of Covid-19. "The City has always been adapting and reforming," he says. "Its only constant is change."

Ziona Strelitz, a social anthropologist and veteran workplace consultant, thinks the pandemic will provide a wake-up call for businesses, forcing them to reconsider how they use their costly premises. And this may bring a welcome end to wasteful interior fads. "The last decade," she says, "has seen an explosion in so-called 'new ways of working', with offices equipped with informal meeting spaces, chill-out rooms, libraries and coffee bars. These settings were a huge liberation for interior designers: they could stop doing serried rows of desks and introduce some photogenic funk. But there wasn't the correlate reduction in the number of desks elsewhere. As a result, offices are vastly underoccupied most of the time - about 50% occupancy or less, pre-pandemic. Now it's even lower."

She mentions a large telecoms provider she worked with, whose staff moved from a huge, award-winning, grade-A office building to a series of smaller, converted former technical spaces - and they were happier as a result. "They knew everyone on their floor and were no longer rattling around in the Mary Celeste," she says. "They could actually walk over and speak to someone."

Strelitz thinks the biggest impact of Covid-19 will be that companies contract their holdings and use space more efficiently, a view echoed by Deloitte's prediction of a 15% reduction in demand. "It's not the death of the office," she says, "but it's hopefully the end of offices growing exponentially." And the fate of the collaborative beer-tap-ping-pong-bean-bag-lounge? "It's all a bit of a nonsense. These spaces don't bear a relationship to how people actually choose to work. Collaboration happens in the immediacy of a horizontal surface and two bums."

She agrees with Rees that a hybrid new space is likely to emerge, somewhere between the home and the office, where you can escape from the kitchen table laptop grind, without enduring the daily commute. We are likely to see a rise in shared neighbourhood offices, perhaps taking over vacant shop units on the high street or former department stores, which would be no bad thing. "People want the buzz of work around them," says Rees, "the chance to network with individuals doing something very different. That's why even large corporations started taking space in co-working buildings like WeWork. They realised they could eavesdrop on a lot of other people's creative ideas."

Across London, many of the big landlords have been following WeWork's lead, leasing space to smaller outfits on a more flexible basis, rather than looking for major anchor tenants. Despite hawking the biggest office in the capital, Harry Badham admits that the future of the workplace is smaller tenants leasing smaller spaces. "We've always said we want to be the only landlord in London to lease you less space," he says. "We're providing the communal facilities for the whole building so you don't have to."

The pandemic has severely tested the co-working business model, though, given how tightly desks are usually packed in, but the fall in demand has also been offset by businesses looking for temporary accommodation as a result of the uncertainty. Despite its financial troubles, WeWork remains the biggest office occupier in both London and New York.

For all the talk about a remote-working future, the death of the office, the freedom of moving to the country, or even working from a roaming van, there remains a huge generational divide in the experience of working from home. A recent study by ISG found that millennials and generation Z (people born since the early 1980s) were least happy and suffering the most, with a third saying productivity had fallen and almost two-thirds complaining of poor home-working conditions.

Meanwhile, in the City, confidence is already bubbling back. In November, the City of London Corporation received more planning applications than the same month last year, meaning incoming proposals are now exceeding pre-pandemic levels. "Ever since I started directing City planning in the 1980s," says Rees, "journalists were telling me that most people will be working from home within 10 years, thanks to the telephone, fax and then the internet. But the more that technology invaded people's jobs, the more they wanted to come face to face to bounce ideas off each other, or learn if they could trust one other." As the pandemic has shown, you can't really gossip on a group Zoom.

It looks like those predicting the implosion of the office might have to cancel their dreams of squatting the City, co-opting Canary Wharf, and turning all these gleaming glass towers into high-rise greenhouses. Once the vaccine is dispensed, they will be back in action, and very much here to stay.

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The Wodge: can London's tallest new skyscraper survive the Covid era?

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ith the City of London deserted once more, its streets only populated by the occasional Deliveroo driver or tumbleweed-seeking photographer, it seems a strange time to be completing the largest office building the capital has ever seen, not least because the very future of the workplace is now in question.

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hen offices in the UK closed in mid-March and companies instructed their staff to work from home - without access to their usual materials and tools, their physical workspace or to many of their colleagues - people already sensed that this was an unprecedented experiment. No one was prepared for this, not even the banks, with their elaborate business-continuity plans focused on terrorist attacks but not on completely avoiding human contact. Against all odds, working from home was more successful than anyone would have predicted, with many people reporting their productivity had increased during the first two months of lockdown.

Months later, most office workers have not returned to their shared workplaces, and those that have come back are finding themselves catapulted into a strange new world of plastic dividers, distancing, mask-wearing and hand sanitising. Amid the turbulence of second waves and local lockdowns, the best that employers can do right now is offer a phased and flexible return to the office, closely evaluating risks as they go.

The much more interesting debate is about what kind of office we would like to return to. Now is exactly the right time to think ahead, and understanding history is instructive. Two particularly pioneering ideas of the past on the spatial organisation of workplaces offer valuable lessons.

In 1968, designer Robert Propst carried out studies of people's working processes and came to the conclusion that the typical office " saps vitality, blocks talent [and] frustrates accomplishment ". On this basis, he developed his ideas of the "action office", a modular furniture system allowing flexible configurations and changes in the degree of privacy and community, mainly through movable partitions. Almost two decades later, the architect Robert Luchetti defined a series of different locations that office workers could use for various activities, thus creating the foundation for what later became known as "activity-based working".

Both of these concepts were human-centric and idealistic, aiming to improve office work for people. They also suffered a similar fate of becoming distorted and misunderstood over time. Propst's action office was meant to liberate office work, but soon it got reduced to the idea of partitioning, and thus the cubicle was born, creating dense, almost factory-like, conditions. Workers battled with the worst of all worlds: being distracted by endless noise while being denied the community-building aspects of seeing and being seen. In fact, cubicles turned into the worst-rated setting in workplace satisfaction surveys. Activity-based working did not fare much better: it became synonymous with the dreaded hotdesking, a cost-saving exercise whereby office workers shared desks but did not benefit from alternative work settings being provided.

What can we learn from these two episodes for the post-pandemic office? That space is not neutral. Spatial design always has consequences. It gives rise to a pattern of opportunities: how often we see others, who we see on the way in and out, where we bump into people, how easy it is to strike up conversations with colleagues from different departments - all of these occurrences emerge from workplace design. Whether an office makes people lonely or inspires solidarity and a sense of togetherness,is often due to a combination of spatial structures and organisational cultures. Moreover, space is not neutral because it doesn't just happen - it is human-made, based on purposeful decisions.

In the same way that the ideas of Propst and Luchetti ended up in workplace miseries, we might experience a cost-driven crush on offices when we emerge out of the pandemic, exactly at a point when everyone is vaccinated and eager to meet again in person. The tech giants seem to be leading the way. Having built massive cathedrals of innovation before the pandemic, they seem to have made a strategic U-turn, with physical workspaces declared unnecessary overnight, so that everyone is asked to work from home for longer. This is even more puzzling because their previous approach which celebrated co-presence with fancy office design, from slides to beanbags, ping-pong tables and ice cream chefs on site, does at least side with academic research on the importance of encounters for creativity and innovation. Research suggests that unplanned face-to-face interactions are important drivers of new ideas, an effect often known as the "strength of weak ties". In fact, research has shown that weak-tie interactions have suffered disproportionately during the working-from-home period.

Therefore, we should not give up on the idea of a shared workspace for everyone in the future. Not only is it impractical to suggest working from home as a standard response during a housing crisis, where many may lack the opportunity to set up a permanent and adequately equipped workstation. Being together and sharing experiences is fundamental for both individual and organisational health and wellbeing. In the long term, getting rid of the office completely may even harm an organisation's bottom line, as good ideas dry up, onboarding of new staff becomes tricky and teams begin disintegrating. We can surely make it through more months or years until we have a Covid vaccine, but we should not sacrifice the idea that we will all meet again regularly in a space, a space that provides the best design possible for people to share a sense of togetherness and purpose.

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Covid will force us to reimagine the office. Let's get it right this time | Kerstin Sailer

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hen offices in the UK closed in mid-March and companies instructed their staff to work from home - without access to their usual materials and tools, their physical workspace or to many of their colleagues - people already sensed that this was an unprecedented experiment.

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A thoughtful middle-aged white man gazes across ranks of designers. For most of my career, this has been the image of a successful architect. Now, the pandemic, the climate emergency and the Black Lives Matter movement have fused to force a revolution in architectural thinking and practice. This may, in turn, change the way homes, work and public spaces are designed and constructed.

While the trend to work from home accelerates, architects worldwide are experimenting with ideas and concepts for a more integrated, resilient and Covid-proof workplaces.

Two decades into the 21st century, the successful architect's office is akin to the image of a 19th-century factory, with banks of screens instead of machines. A dollop of modernist creativity is added, by way of primary colours in fixtures and fittings - lime green carpets, yellow feature walls and orange swivel chairs. Architects and assistants converse in hushed tones, only moving when necessary. Some have further "googlified" their design studios, with hot desks, kitchens and even the occasional pool table. But these are suspected to be ill-disguised devices to keep low-paid younger assistants working long hours in the office.

Emblems of success include displays of project models, awards and photos. The contemporary version is usually open plan, with a female receptionist, smiling brightly. Most architecture practices are predominantly white. According to a recent survey of the profession by the Architects' Journal in June 2020: "The latest survey reveals that more than a quarter (27 per cent) of Bame respondents said they had been victims of racism at their place of work. This proportion has gone up from 24 per cent in the earlier 2018 survey."

Alan Vallance, chief executive of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has stated that lack of diversity in the architectural profession is a real concern. "We have not given adequate attention, resource or action to tackling injustice, systemic racism and discrimination . . . Architecture should be equally open to all, regardless of background or circumstance. But it is not," he says.

The survey results also show how widely architects have adjusted to working from home. More than a third of respondents (35 per cent) said all their colleagues were working from home. A quarter said most employees were based remotely and a further quarter said "some" were embracing it.

The home has become the centre of architectural operations. Long vilified as the option chosen by women, sole practitioners and the semi-retired, working from home is the new normal for delivering buildings. From client briefings to design team meetings, we discovered the creativity and efficiency embedded in our profession.

But the demographic hierarchy of construction means that key decisions about design are made by teams led by men - for whom the space at home has been mostly a place for rest and recreation. It remains to be seen if the "different normal" will bring a Damascene conversion as CEOs and construction industry leaders awake to the necessity of home schooling, social distancing and pandemic protocols.

In the public realm, the car has become a pariah. Many cities, including Bogotá, Madrid, New York and London have been transformed into places for walking, cycling and child-friendly outdoor spaces. While this has created some local tensions, a new awareness of the primacy of pedestrians seems to have been welcomed by most people, from Athens to Dublin and Sydney.

With the acceptance that Covid-19 and its successors may be here to stay, architects have the opportunity to rise to the challenge of our collective experiences.

After lockdown measures end, architecture must not return to "business as usual". We can take this enforced furlough as a chance to see visions and dream dreams of a new profession based on equality, diversity and social justice.

Small and medium-sized and micro-practices, long excluded from mainstream architecture, can leapfrog from the 19th-century hierarchical factory model to the 21st-century all-day pyjama-wearing lifestyle.

The post-second world war emergency housebuilding programme was championed by Winston Churchill. The great architect Jane Drew (1911-1996) played a leading role in the design and build of prefabricated housing. When I met her in the 1990s, she talked of her own practice and the importance of employing Jewish refugees who had fled Nazism and faced discrimination in their adopted country.

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Her global leadership on housing design and construction in the UK, India and Africa provide us with lessons on the challenges and opportunities of the current crisis. She encouraged the then government to deploy aeroplane factories and technologies to meet the emergency. With so many manufacturers mothballing their factories today, perhaps we can follow her example and employ redundant aircraft workers to make much-needed homes in the UK and overseas.

Inspired by Drew's postwar example, I believe our professional teams of architects, engineers and artists are well-placed to design greener communities. These innovative schemes can be resilient and protect disadvantaged groups. Together, we can minimise the health and social risks of Covid-19 and future pandemics, while boosting the UK's economy through resulting programmes of jobs, education and training.
The author is Principal, Elsie Owusu Architects

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How better design will improve the spaces where we work and live | Free to Read

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A thoughtful middle-aged white man gazes across ranks of designers. For most of my career, this has been the image of a successful architect. Now, the pandemic, the climate emergency and the Black Lives Matter movement have fused to force a revolution in architectural thinking and practice.

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Even before the coronavirus pandemic made homeworking commonplace, Automattic's 1,277-workforce was entirely remote, with perks that include reimbursing expenses to set up workers' home offices.

Yet despite its remote ethos, the group, which owns and operates publishing platform WordPress, does not expect its employees to work in isolation every day. It offers a monthly stipend to be used towards co-working spaces (day passes or ongoing membership) or coffee shops (WiFi costs, coffees). The social highlight of the year is the GM - or Grand Meet-up - where staff from 76 countries speaking 95 different languages, get together for a week of keynote sessions, workshops, team sessions, socialising focused on strategy, learning and team bonding. Employees are encouraged to eat with different colleagues every night to meet people outside their teams.

"It's still important to meet face-to-face - just not every day, in the same office," says Megan Marcel, head of global events. The GM is a chance "to get to know the people behind the Slack avatars and build relationships that can carry us through the other 51 weeks of the year." Coronavirus cancelled this year's gathering, but the company did hold some virtual sessions. Nonetheless it could not match the GM, which the company will reinstate when travelling is safe.

Automattic's ideas about social interaction for distributed workforces show one possible blueprint for work in the post-pandemic world. Overnight, lockdowns demonstrated that large swaths of workers could do their jobs at home. The experience has made companies rethink working patterns - yet few are prepared, for now, to recreate Automattic's remote model. Rather, in an attempt to reduce their office space and accommodate employees' desire for flexibility, they are mixing remote and office work - or hybrid working.

Difficulties with new models

But a hybrid model brings challenges. Workers currently split between home and office are already finding it can be hard to manage and it reinforces divisions between the in-crowd and at-home crowd. "It's easier to have a team of 20 all being remote rather than 15 people in a room and five remote. With everyone on an equal footing it's relatively easy," says Jesper Frederiksen, UK vice-president of Okta, a software group.

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Job van der Voort, co-founder and chief executive of Remote.com, which provides payroll and incentives to distributed workforces, says the hybrid model is the hardest one to achieve and can lead to a two-tier workforce. "The threshold for asking a colleague something when walking by - and not ever documenting it [or] sharing it in a way that becomes accessible to those working remotely is very low." Moreover, it is easy to grab a drink with a colleague when working together in an office.

Some measures to overcome this might include sending agendas in advance of meetings and inviting written contributions as well as inviting everyone to speak.

Not everyone wants to work at home. Bill Nankivell, chief executive at B+H Architects, says that its Chinese division has been resistant to new working patterns so as an experiment to change culture, the Shanghai office made it mandatory to work from home one day a week. "Ninety per cent saw some element as a benefit. On the other hand, we also learnt that not everyone was comfortable working from home. Living arrangements in major Chinese cities can be cramped."

When to plan

It may be unwise to commit to permanent plans about work patterns on current circumstances. After all, notes Monica Parker, founder of Hatch, an analytics company, many countries are still in "a triage phase". "This isn't genuine remote working in that it has removed autonomy of choosing when to work from home versus when to work from the office - autonomy being a key success factor to remote working."

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Managers should take advantage where possible to experiment with new work arrangements and assess the impact on employee attitudes and performance. Eric Anicich, assistant professor of management and organisation at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, says: "Without data, managers may make inaccurate assumptions about employee preferences and broader policy impact. The goal for organisational leaders should be to determine, but not necessarily be in a rush to implement, the most viable and effective long-term work arrangement." He advises testing hybrid policies one department at a time and revising them.

Meeting

Hybrid work models require clarity about job roles to decide which tasks are best suited to home (writing a report) or the office (brainstorming). It is an opportunity for rethinking some of these tasks, Prof Anicich says. He takes the example of a team creating a new advertising campaign. Rather than get a working party together at the start of the project, employees could generate ideas remotely and share them anonymously, reducing the pressure to conform to group think. Later, the team could come together physically to evaluate the pool of ideas.

It also requires greater planning. David D'Souza, membership director at the CIPD, the body for HR professionals, says administrative staff are often the first to be cut in a downturn yet the changing rules on social distancing and workplaces, as well as future hybrid models, demand a great deal of co-ordination between workplace facilities management and human resources. After all, a sparsely populated office might reinforce isolation, reduce serendipitous conversations and risk siloing teams.

Kristi Hummel, senior vice-partner of talent and culture at Dell Technologies, says the company has "amped up our management training" to support flexible work. Hybrid working could transform performance reviews, according to Steve Collinson, UK head of HR for Zurich, the insurance group. "If teams are largely working from home, a very simple way of getting people together is to spread performance discussions [to every month instead of quarterly] to talk about goals."

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Technology is evolving to support new working methods. Nicole Herskowitz, general manager for Microsoft Teams, says that the company has recently updated its videoconferencing to include speaker attribution to help hybrid working. "If there are five people in the meeting room and five people at home, I might struggle if at home" to know who is talking.

One of the challenges in a hybrid model is socialising, an aspect of corporate life that homeworkers say they miss. Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, says "companies are asking what can we do apart, and what can we do together. [Perhaps] we do our work virtually but do our play together?" Liz Burow, workplace strategy and design researcher, formerly at WeWork, says the danger with focusing on socialising is that it can become stilted rather than serendipitous or conversely make gatherings revolve around happy hours, creating a "bro culture". "If you are shy and introverted it might be very stressful." She suggests forging connections through related projects, such as hackathons, which could be held remotely or in-person.

Hub and spoke

One model that might suit hybrid work is the hub and spoke, whereby a company has a main office and satellite ones, allowing workers to meet up closer to home.

Peter Bacevice, director of research at HLW, a global architecture and design firm, says "neighbourhood hubs" where clusters of employees live would reduce commuting time and "assimilate a cross-section of workers from various roles, giving them a chance to build community based on the common experience of where they live. This would be a great way to break traditional role-based silos." Another benefit might be to populate unused spaces such as vacant storefronts "bringing new life and new uses to neighbourhoods and street life".
This article has been amended to reflect that Wordpress is a publishing platform, not a web design company

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How to make the hybrid workforce model work

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Even before the coronavirus pandemic made homeworking commonplace, Automattic's 1,277-workforce was entirely remote, with perks that include reimbursing expenses to set up workers' home offices. Yet despite its remote ethos, the group, which owns and operates publishing platform WordPress, does not expect its employees to work in isolation every day.

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Video conferencing company Zoom continued to ride the boom in working and learning from home as Covid-19 infection rates rebounded in recent weeks, lifting its revenue more than fourfold in the latest quarter.

The San Francisco-based company said on Monday that demand for video conferencing drove its revenue to $777m in the three months to the end of October, up from $167m a year ago and far above the $693m Wall Street had expected.

Zoom shares fell as much as 7 per cent in after-hours trading, however, having already retreated 16 per cent from the high last month. Its stock price is still up seven-fold on the year, valuing the company at about $136bn, or two-thirds as much as the communications group AT&T.

After Zoom became one of the biggest corporate beneficiaries of the pandemic, Wall Street has been struggling to understand how the company will be affected by a potential return to more normal conditions next year.

Kelly Steckelberg, chief financial officer, suggested that changes in infection rates were reflected quickly in demand for Zoom services, with growth in Europe slowing early in the third quarter as health conditions improved, only to reverse later on.

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The third-quarter revenue growth of 367 per cent represented an acceleration from the 270 per cent rate in the first quarter, as the pandemic hit, and 355 per cent in the three months to the end of July.

Zoom projected fourth-quarter revenue of between $806m and $811m, which even at the top end of the range would be a slower year-on-year growth rate of 331 per cent.

In another sign of the pandemic's mixed benefits for Zoom's business model, the company said its pro forma gross profit margin fell to 68.2 per cent in the latest quarter, down 14.7 percentage points from the year before. Ms Steckelberg put the deterioration down to a jump in the number of free users, particularly for homeschooling, as well as the higher costs of handling the booming video traffic.

Ms Steckelberg said Zoom was optimistic that some remote working habits would prove lasting and that many offices would operate in a hybrid style, creating demand for services that connect groups of workers in the office with those at home.

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The company's churn rate, or the percentage of customers who fail to renew contracts, had been lower than expected this quarter, she said, adding to its confidence about holding on to new customers it had gained this year.

Churn has become a bigger concern for investors partly because of Zoom's growing reliance on smaller customers, who tend to pay from month to month rather than buying annual contracts. These customers accounted for 38 per cent of revenue in the latest quarter.

During the third quarter, Zoom reported that it had continued to add to its base of large customers. It said it now had 433,700 customers with more than 10 employees - up 485 per cent from the 74,100 it reported a year ago and 17 per cent from the end of July. Of those, 1,289 customers are paying more than $100,000 each, a 136 per cent increase from a year ago.

In the latest quarter, pro forma earnings per share - excluding stock compensation and some other costs - rose to 99 cents, up from 9 cents a year ago. Based on formal accounting rules, net income rose to $198.4m, from $2.2m a year before.

Wall Street had been expecting pro forma earnings per share of 76 cents for the quarter.

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Zoom sales up fourfold as Covid outbreaks keep workers at home

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Video conferencing company Zoom continued to ride the boom in working and learning from home as Covid-19 infection rates rebounded in recent weeks, lifting its revenue more than fourfold in the latest quarter.

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As coronavirus spread around the world in the early spring, many workers were forced to adapt to working from home. Some changes will outlive the pandemic; others may come to symbolise this tumultuous moment in history. What do you think should change for good? Join the discussion in the comments below this article.
The meeting room vs the Zoom call

Of the many existential questions raised by the pandemic, one that has not yet been answered is: what are meetings, and meeting rooms, for? Zoom's revenues quadrupled in its latest quarter. Whether it survives growing competition from Microsoft Teams or a vaccine-induced return of workers to the physical workplace, its name will live on as a synonym for "to videocall".

Even so, the endless Zooming provoked unlikely nostalgia for face-to-face meetings, particularly those serendipitous moments at the beginning, before the chatter congeals into formal discussion and, at the end, as participants leave the meeting room with a casual "oh, one last thing" that may trigger the most important interaction of the day. Neither Zoom, nor any of its rivals, has found a way to soften the abrupt exit from a virtual conference into silence.

As offices reopen, building owners and interior designers stand ready to convert traditional conference rooms into attractive, bookable "ideas spaces". The big challenge for 2021 is not Zoom versus the meeting room, though: it is how to provide hybrid workers - some remote, some in-office - with a place that strikes the right balance between online and offline, social distance and creative proximity.

Work jackets vs jogging bottoms

As with so many areas of life, the pandemic accelerated pre-existing trends. Last year, Goldman Sachs issued a relaxed dress code for bankers, while suggesting that "casual dress is not appropriate every day and for every interaction". Only a few months later, "Zoom casual" had become the order of every day, for almost every interaction. Fashion houses devoted themselves to waist-up demand; sportswear companies catered to the bottom half. This look was summed up by a New Yorker cover depicting a video-dating young woman with immaculate hair and hoop earrings at screen level, while below-screen was a mess.

This enthusiasm for tracksuit trousers and yoga leggings showed a desire for comfort, allowed room for waistlines expanded by all-day grazing and enabled those away from the office to nip outside for government-sanctioned exercise.

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It proved to be devastating for dry cleaners used to servicing white-collar workers and retailers offering corporate attire. In July, Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Others tried to adapt to the new workplace. LK Bennett, for example, a brand popular among female office-workers, posted on Instagram in April, "The beauty of the moment is that every day is like the weekend".

Some predict this era will be the end of formal workwear, others expect office returners will relish dressing up for work. If the future really is hybrid, the truth is probably both.

What do you think?

Are you for the work jacket or tracksuit bottoms? We would like to hear from you. Join the discussion in the comments below this article.

The commute vs the park walk

Lockdown was not a walk in the park for many, but for those lucky enough to have access to open space, a park walk became a welcome replacement for a sometimes harrowing commute. In the US, according to figures analysed by academics David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds, each worker could save on average 225 hours a year spent commuting. Those working from home reaped benefits in money saved on costly season tickets and in fresh air and exercise. Mass transit systems, conversely, suffered.

During a sunny northern hemisphere spring, the park walk was balm for stressed homeworkers. The canny among them managed to combine it with walking meetings, an innovation beloved of the late Steve Jobs. What works in California all year round, however, proved less sustainable in a drizzly northern Europe winter as time freed up by not commuting was gobbled up by screen-work.

Only 5 per cent of workers surveyed in October by Morgan Stanley in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where the commute averages 39 minutes each way, said it was their main reason they were working from home. Some 56 per cent said it was either their employers' decision or their office was closed. If and when the office ban lifts, a few may even welcome a half-hour in commuter limbo to demarcate the blurred boundaries between work and home.

The office chair vs the kitchen bench

In the age of coronavirus, the ergonomic chair was a status symbol, denoting homeworking privilege for those tapping at their laptop from a dedicated home-office, while less fortunate peers perched on kitchen benches or the side of the bed. No surprise then that just a few weeks after lockdown was introduced in the UK, the Institute for Employment Studies found a "significant increase in musculoskeletal complaints" among employees, especially in the neck, shoulder and back. Only 57 per cent of homeworkers around the world were satisfied with their chair, according to Leesman, the workplace research group.

These aches and pains fuelled demand for comfier chairs for home-workers. Some companies, such as Twitter, footed the bill, as the furniture stipend became the new home-work perk. For those without the luxury of a spare room to work in, the demand for 2020 was for softer fabrics in warmer colours to fit with domestic interiors, says James Lawrence, senior strategist in the workplace consulting studio, Gensler London. In a hybrid office-home work future, furniture will need to adapt. The race is on, says Mr Lawrence, to find a "simplified home-office chair which will be more in keeping with the home aesthetic and adaptable".

The Pret sandwich vs the home-made sarnie

Since the Earl of Sandwich first ordered a snack in the 18th century, his creation has rarely been freighted with such significance. The shift from ready-made lunch, bought in haste and wolfed down at a crumb-filled keyboard in the office, to homemade "sarnie" (made in haste and wolfed down at a crumb-filled keyboard at home) came to symbolise not only a culinary change, but an economic transformation.

The plight of London-centric chain Pret A Manger became an index for the hollowing out of city centres. Between lockdowns in the UK, politicians and business leaders urged workers to return to offices, with what sounded to some like a back-to-front argument that an entire support network of pubs, cafés and sandwich bars would otherwise collapse.

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The one constant has been the handheld snack itself. Sixty per cent of all homemade lunches are still sandwiches, according to Dublin-based Greencore, which produced 700m ready-made sandwiches for supermarkets, cafés and food outlets in 2019. More than a third of people working from home are going out to buy pre-prepared "food to go". Pret is opening its first delivery-only "dark kitchen". The proportion of orders made on mobile phones by Chinese customers of Starbucks more than doubled in the year to September. It is no consolation for family-owned city-centre cafés, but the laziness of the hungry, time-poor remote worker may yet save the big chains.

The water cooler chat vs the WhatsApp group

Once, the water cooler was fundamental to the "history of the office", says Sheila Liming, author of a new book on the subject. It exemplified two of the office's purposes: the sharing of resources and communicating ideas. In doing so, it became shorthand for informal work chat and gossip.

Yet even before the pandemic turfed workers out of the office, social media had become the forum for water cooler chat. Why wait until the morning after to discuss the cliffhanger in the latest television whodunnit, when you can " twatch ", or tweet while watching? WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging platform, became a work side-channel, indispensable for virtual office banter and work collaboration.

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Kantar, the research group, found that by August, 65 per cent of WhatsApp users reported increasing use over the pandemic. Participants on Zoom meetings became adept at spotting colleagues' furtive glances, a sign they were simultaneously WhatsApping a critique of the online gathering. This informality was both its appeal (flattening hierarchies) and its drawback (duping the user into false intimacy, and potential career-damaging blunders). By the end of the year, employees were complaining of pandemic burnout: overloaded with multiple forms of communication and unable to switch off from messages that could arrive at any time of the day. In response, some companies turned to tech-free days.

Join the debate

As we have adapted to working from home en masse, which changes do you think will outlive the pandemic; which will come to symbolise this tumultuous moment in history? What do you think should change for good? Join the discussion in the comments below this article.

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Do you pine for lost office rituals - or prefer the new normal?

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As coronavirus spread around the world in the early spring, many workers were forced to adapt to working from home. Some changes will outlive the pandemic; others may come to symbolise this tumultuous moment in history. What do you think should change for good? Join the discussion in the comments below this article.