EDITOR’S COMMENT: We need the office. I for one am getting increasingly hopeful of returning to somewhere I can actually be with my team. Somewhere we can feed off each other’s energy just by being around one another, somewhere we can help each other out, instantly, with an idea for a headline, a number of someone to call, a reason to be cheerful.
For many jobs, people need a place they can congregate to be productive and creative. This just cannot be done at home consistently, and it certainly can’t be done alone. It requires a team. And because we are human, teams need real interactions, not virtual ones. We need to pick up on those microscopic tells in body language, we need to have spontaneous collisions of ideas, grumbles and solutions. We need to be able to earwig, to eavesdrop, to subliminally steer and to learn through osmosis. We need the “office”.
But do we really need a glitzy, ego office on a piece of prime real estate? I’m not so sure. An office that is technologically enabled, environmentally friendly and pleasant to work in, yes, but a shiny tower or a plump orb on the banks of the river?
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan isn’t quite so sure either. He has launched a consultation this week that could see the Greater London Authority leave its iconic City Hall and move to The Crystal, a property it owns in east London’s Royal Docks. The move would save the authority £55m over five years, money it believes would be better invested in the community, in delivering for London.
Khan says he wants GLA budgets to focus on supporting frontline public services and the economic recovery, not high City Hall building costs.
And he is not the only one. NHS Property Services is looking at whether it should quit its London HQ at 99 Gresham Street, EC2, to cut costs and make better use of its financial resources. The 27,000 sq ft it occupies costs around £93 per sq ft, including rates and services. It is not an insignificant amount of money and arguably should be put to better use.
The same thoughts are likely to be going through many a public body’s mind (or C-suite). Central government has been working on a plan to rationalise its portfolio for years, of course, moving people out of expensive London HQs to cheaper regional hubs. According to exclusive EG analysis this week, UK government agencies occupy some 13m sq ft in London, with more than half of that in one of the capital’s most highly rented markets, the West End. Those offices, according to our analysis, cost the public £435m a year in rent. With UK national debt now standing at almost £2tn, surely every little bit of money saved helps?
That’s not to say that businesses – whether public bodies or blue-chip corporates – should house their staff in crappy office space in even crappier locations; it just means that businesses need to think harder about what their employees really want. Most of us work for companies because we share their values and purpose, because we want to deliver the product or service they provide. We don’t work there for bragging rights over our office space. A trendy office with a killer view is a nice-to-have, but it is not a necessity.
The office is definitely not dead, but unless you’re a wealth fund manager, it is probably going to have to be a little more focused on people and price than prominence and prowess. At least for a little while anyway.
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