EDITOR’S COMMENT: Has Schroders just changed the conversation over the future of the office?
It feels that way. When a modern tech company such as Facebook or Twitter makes a statement about where and how staff will work after the coronavirus pandemic, it’s notable. But it doesn’t necessarily feel like a bellwether.
As our editor Sam McClary put it earlier in the summer: “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.”
Yet we now have Schroders, an established fund management giant, allowing many of its staff to continue working from home indefinitely – as The Telegraph put it, “firing the starting gun on the end of City life”.
There’s hyperbole in that turn of phrase. But Schroders’ move – alongside a similar initiative from accountancy firm PwC – underlines that even big companies with long-established ways of working may now have to reconsider how and where they operate, not least if their staff start to request a shift. Change is coming to the office, and workers may demand it even if company bosses and their real estate advisers are unconvinced.
Now, to be clear – I don’t buy into the “end of the office” talk. But at the same time, full disclosure, I’m still working at home, have found lots of benefits in terms of wellbeing and am still communicating effectively with colleagues (actually, I should let them be the judge of that). And this experiment has made me question aspects of working life that were taken for granted – as one investment manager put it to me this week, it feels odd to try to explain to your children why you would traditionally have had to get on a train at 7am to do a job that you’re now doing from the house.
The balance that we as workers and business owners strike as to who works where and when will be complex and likely impossible to pin down in a precise – or indeed single – model. And that’s all the more reason for the conversations about it now to become more nuanced (we can hope, can’t we?). Covid-19 will not lead to “the end of City life”. Neither will life continue as it did before.
Eversheds Sutherland’s Bruce Dear puts it perfectly in this week’s Lockdown Diaries column: “Anyone who thinks the office is dead is reading a fake obituary, but anyone who says our relationship with, and demand for, office space won’t change is letting nostalgia mask obvious evidence.” The eventual reality will not be either/or.
And to take even more from Dear, I love this line: “We must all resist the temptation to cower under the duvet of pessimism, and throw it aside to work every day (in the kitchen, shed or office).”
Too many of our conversations have been coloured by fear, loss or pessimism. We debate “the death of the office” rather than focusing on the birth of… whatever comes next. We talk of missed “water cooler” moments instead of focusing on how tech can help us recreate those on the days we’re not at our desks.
Whatever comes next doesn’t have to be feared – it may be fuelled by crisis, but with understanding and creativity, surely the next iteration of the modern workplace and work practices can encourage healthier, happier, more productive and better-connected colleagues, no matter what building they sit in on which day? And that can open opportunities for developers, designers and investors ready to rethink their approach. No wonder sensible players in this market are spending more of their time on tech.
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@egi.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @estatesgazette
