Reimagining the workplace: the opportunity and the change agents

The question of how organisations get the best from their people has never been more important than it is today, writes Linda Hausmanis, CEO of the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management

The pandemic has forced on us the opportunity to reimagine the workplace. As we move into new modes of working, we are seeing organisations adapt physical space, working culture and technology. In many organisations the workplace and facilities teams are leading this change.

The question of how organisations get the best from their people has never been more important than it is today.

With Covid-19 restrictions lifted as the government nudges us towards treating the virus as something we live with and work around and offices buzz again, we may be approaching a crunch point as employers grapple with the question of what the future of work will look like, and what will be best for organisations and their people.

Employers are grappling with a lot right now. Even before the crisis in Ukraine a squeeze on supply chains and a serious skills shortage has made for a challenging operating environment. A post pandemic exodus by many workers has been dubbed ‘the great resignation;’ and many are seeking permanent flexible working arrangements having experienced benefits from home-working, albeit enforced by lockdowns.

‘How hybrid will the future be?’ is one way to frame the future of work question
While the hybrid set up has emerged as the dominant workplace model, underpinning it is a growing recognition of a shifting focus from where people work to how people work. As the space, technology and culture of our workplaces evolves, the rules of engagement and the borders of this new frontier will remain fluid.

For instance, we know that home working is not a panacea. Indeed, many people have struggled with Covid-imposed working arrangements. Last December, in IWFM’s survey of UK office workers about their experiences of remote working, one in five said their overall well-being had worsened in the prior year due to changed working practices. The figures for women (26 per cent), part-timers (27 per cent) and over 55s (31 per cent) underlined the problem. There will be other factors at play, not least the pandemic itself, but whatever the causes, it is clear that individuals have different circumstances and preferences which require due consideration if we are to emerge from the pandemic equipped to prosper.

The same research found that up to 83 per cent of full-time office-based workers expected to spend all or most of their time in the office in future – often in a mandated schedule, suggesting that for many, the notion of ‘work’ happening only in a dedicated workspace persists; the idea of work as an activity, not a destination seemingly unlikely to be adopted by some organisations.

Yet the swiftness and flexibility shown by thousands of organisations in transitioning to full remote working when the first lockdown commenced, and continuing in hybrid set-ups beyond the crisis, remains a powerful illustration of the workplace discipline’s triad of people, technology and workspace converging to enable collaboration and productivity from multiple locations.

Workplace principles in action
So, how hybrid will the future workplace be? This may be the question of the moment but hybrid is neither a new concept nor is it a template solution. It is an example of workplace principles in action. What do I mean by that?

In December 2016, a report called The Workplace Advantage was published by the Stoddart Review. Five years on, this landmark work remains a beacon for demonstrating the contribution that the workplace can make to organisational success.

The triad of people, technology and workspace
A key finding was that the technology-enabled workplace actually brings people together, facilitating greater levels of collaboration and innovation, underlining the very purpose of the workplace as a productivity enabler.

The pandemic was a good backdrop to the speed of technological development. It saw tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom emerge as crucial enablers to engagement, teamwork and business continuity. We will continue to see technology’s impact in the shift from managing buildings better to enhanced experiences in the longer term insights coming from data-driven design and experiential analysis.

The response to Covid has brought us closer to workplace than we have yet been. It’s been said that it changed the office more in one year than in the previous hundred. It has forced on us the opportunity to reimagine the workplace. As we move into new modes of working, and we see organisations adapt physical spaces, working culture and technologies, we see that in many of them the workplace and facilities teams are the agents of this change.

Commenting in IWFM’s magazine Facilitate recently, Martin Read observed that in contrast to previous opportunities for the workplace profession to see through transformational change, the C suite has been attuned to hybrid working from the start as business owners have seen workers adapt easily to sudden relocation causing them to reconsider long held perceptions of where office work is done.

It is still early days. The future of work and the hybrid / non hybrid debate will continue: how will more distributed working patterns impact in the longer term? Where does the workspace and responsibility for it begin and end? How will organisations manage their property portfolios? In our 2021 Outlook Report, 84 per cent of client side respondents had changed their flexible working strategies and nearly 60 per cent said they would reduce the amount of space they occupy. What will happen to our town centres? How will these changes influence our carbon and climate goals? Much to think about.

What we do know is that each organisation is unique and will require a bespoke approach to optimise productivity, underpinned by meaningful engagement. Facilities professionals can be front and centre of that, assisted by technology.

What we expect to see is more skilled facilities professionals continuing to make a difference by using the experience of the pandemic to devise integrated property or workplace user strategies that can blend a number of factors. These include the future demands of a (probable) smaller office footprint, the impacts of businesses rationalising and refocusing service requirements and the changing expectations of the physical workspace as somewhere to bring people together differently than before; underpinned, of course, by clear purpose.

And organisations must use these agents of change to develop and review their workplace strategies with learning and meaningful engagement.

Some organisations are leading the charge in this area. Some are even actively aiming to attract talent with their forward-looking culture and ways of working.

This is a moment for workplace. Adapting workspaces, culture and technology to empower people to work wherever they are most productive should be the goal, because fundamentally workplace is driven by how people work, not where people work. That is workplace in action.

IWFM’s Conference Agents of Change: Workplace and facilities management’s role in an ethical, sustainable future is on 8 June.