LISTEN Just because you can, it does not necessarily mean you should. As signs emerge that the nationwide coronavirus lockdown is slowly being lifted, some companies will be considering whether they are now able to reopen offices that have been empty and echoey since restrictions on movement began. But several property leaders think there is a more pertinent question – not could the office reopen, but should it? And the answer may well come down to how safe and secure staff feel about their own return.
“Our first priority, as soon as we knew that things were going to be starting to lift, was how do people feel about returning?” says Hannah Roman, head of human resources at consultancy Bidwells. “It’s not just that we can return, it’s do people actually want to return? And that’s been our main priority, trying to understand how people are feeling.”
Managing the post-pandemic workplace will include a firm focus on the mental as well as physical health of staff. Roman discussed the topic on one of EG’s podcasts to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, alongside Dan Roberts, head of workspace consultancy service at Hollis, and Anna Scally, director of workspace at Avison Young.
At Bidwells, agile working has now been in place for more than a year, Roman says. Employees have all the tech resources they need to do their jobs remotely. Most staff members responding to questionnaires now suggest they’re happiest to remain at home in the near term, she adds – the hot-desking practices at the firm’s HQ in Cambridge now feel like “a big no-no”.
“At the moment, we’ve chosen to make the decision that we don’t need to rush this,” Roman says. “We need to do this carefully.”
The choice is yours
Roman’s fellow guests echoed that sense of caution about rushing a return to the office. Avison Young has told all staff that they have the option to work remotely for the rest of the year.
“So much about wellbeing is giving people choice,” Scally says. “Wellbeing design in the office is all about agile working and giving people choice. And this [discussion around returning after lockdown] is giving people choice and respecting that choice as well. It’s very much understanding that everybody is different. Mental health is an absolutely key part of that risk assessment before people come back to work in deciding whether they are ready to come back to the workplace.”
There are no easy answers when discussing how the Covid-19 crisis will change our workplaces, and Hollis’s Roberts acknowledged that many people will in fact be eager to return to the office having faced challenges while working remotely.
“Some people think that working from home is the be all and end all in terms of wellbeing – you’re saving on the commute time, you’ve got more flexibility, you can spend time with your kids,” he says.
“But there are negatives to working from home as well. Lots of people do feel isolated and lonely. And it does stunt collaboration in the team. And I think it’s going to be difficult to ever really replace the physical office with a lot of people working from home all the time. We need physical workplace interaction with our colleagues and friends to thrive as human beings, which is essential to your wellbeing.”
Government guidelines are already mapping out for property owners and occupiers how workplaces should function when they reopen and workers start to make their way back into the traditional office. Encouragingly, the government singled out employers’ responsibility for the mental wellbeing of staff as an area of focus during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think it’s fantastic that the government actually did put it out there,” says Roman of the inclusion of mental health in returning-to-work guidelines.
“You can get so caught up in ‘oh, I need to make sure I’ve got hand wipes and sanitiser’. And probably the key thing in all of this has been people’s mental health, because I think people have struggled… So it’s great that the government have actually given some guidance to help people that wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about that. Not everybody has a wellbeing team or a team behind them that can help think about those things, because [for example] they’re a small company and they’re maybe having to really work quite hard and covering all the bases at the moment.”
Is nine-to-five null and void?
Managing tomorrow’s workplace will be driven in no small part by managing tomorrow’s working practices. Talk of doing away with offices entirely might be premature, but Roman for one questions whether we need to be spending quite so much time in them. Lockdown has proved that people can have a better work-life balance than they realised, she says, and that the notion of a strict nine-to-five could be seen as increasingly irrelevant.
“Yes, go into the office – but do people have to be in at 9 o’clock again?” she asks. “Just think about traffic. Think about pollution. And do you have to have a whole day in the office? We’ve all proved that we can actually do a bit of home schooling at 10 o’clock and at 11 o’clock, we’ve done a call with our team. There’s different ways that we can work.”
Mental health is an absolutely key part of that risk assessment before people come back to work in deciding whether they are ready to come back to the workplace
– Anna Scally
And if the way we work is shifting, there seems little doubt that our post-pandemic workplaces will look and feel different too, both in the near term as occupiers and owners reshape spaces to keep people safe, and over the longer term as new trends in usage and design become the norm.
“I think in terms of office design, this whole experience has properly shown us that we need to look after our people and our planet,” says Roberts. “I think that will be reflected in the long term… People will be accepting that they need to get an accreditation for things like WELL, because that focuses on mental health, air, nourishment, water, everything – all the quality things that look after people’s wellbeing as well as the planet.”
For Scally, it comes back to taking the best from lockdown and bringing it into the workplace. Seeing these recent weeks not only as a time of challenge, but as a period which can now encourage change in the workplaces we have grown so used to over the years.
“We’ve got this amazing opportunity to look at the things that we love in our home,” she says. “Our fresh air, our natural light, our space, our greenery. They are all things that have been shown to improve our wellbeing and our productivity in the workplace. This is our opportunity to really understand that. We’ve seen it working well at home. Let’s make sure we implement it within the workplace.”
The panel
- Dan Roberts, head of workspace consultancy service, Hollis
- Hannah Roman, head of human resources, Bidwells
- Anna Scally, director of workspace, Avison Young
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@egi.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @estatesgazette
