What do we do now? Workplace in 2022
Just in case, I’ll say now: these aren’t trends or predictions. There were times previous where it was almost safe to offer them. Rather, these are the key issues I can see the workplace facing this year and beyond. They’re inevitably intertwined. They reveal the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the present: between corporate agendas and emerging priorities; between what seems technically possible today and what’s believed may be problematic in the longer term; and between what’s actually changed and what’s merely frozen in time, awaiting clarity. I have ten, which is entirely accidental. You may have more.
1. Pull: a reason to be there. The single biggest issue for the office is rather obvious — emptiness. Or close to it. Few doubt that technically most formerly office-based organisations can survive (and some thrive) without it. Because, of course, they have been. But that could still be crisis management playing out. While survival was provable almost immediately, the value the office might bring when left to stand on its own foundations is still locked in anecdote, myth and hyperventilated proclamation, and so will inevitably be slow to prove. If indeed it transpires. Pre-Omicron most organisations allowed a free choice of when to attend, and some offered incentives. Most achieved less than half of their pre-Covid levels, which themselves were little over half of those assigned. So, in the hybrid world the office needs to achieve a critical mass: enough fissile material (people) to ensure a sustained chain reaction (beneficial outcome) without having to add a diktat. Not just 2–3 days’ worth of box ticking, a quest for validation or gnawing FoMo — but actual, genuine value. “It was worthwhile, we’re coming back.” Pull, not push. A compelling (not just an ‘intentional’) destination. And that will in all probability have more to do with who is there than what.
2. Triple bottom line: balancing the needs of people, the organisation and the planet, where a focus on one can create a negative impact on one or both of the others. The organisation’s needs, for so long primary, have been challenged by two forces. The global pandemic has brought long-suppressed human requisites and preferences to the fore, and an increase in the intensity and visibility of environmental activism has necessarily re-focussed our attention on the climate emergency. What is irrefutable is that the under-occupation of offices — as in (1) above — meets none of these needs: it’s a crap experience, a drain on resources and generates needles emissions.
3. Community: an office is part of a community, even if in the erection of security barriers and posting of guards it doesn’t always feel like it. Covid has had a devastating effect on large city centres, drawing away office workers and their contactless golden thread. Which poses the challenge of how the office and all other amenities and services in our urban centres recover together, mutually supporting one another. For the first time, it’s a whole system problem that will need a whole system solution. Which potentially means providing less amenities in offices and engaging with the locality to meet the demand, reversing a trend of the last few decades to stuff them to the gunwales with everything imaginable to create a ‘destination’. From this emerges the idea of the ‘Minimum Viable Workplace’, which thus far has seemed too problematic an idea to pursue. It needs to be. There’s a potential conflict, however, with the aim of achieving critical mass that will necessitate a more enlightened occupant to overcome. Not easy, but entirely worthwhile on so many accounts.
4. Ecosystem: it’s a fairly naff word for a range of workspace options that it can be argued has now achieved a ‘Minimum Viable Maturity’. It comprises the corporate office, flexspace, cowork (distinct from flexspace by virtue of the centrality of community), accessible spaces with the urban environment (hotels, cafés etc) and home. It’s given vigour to the perpetually under-achieving idea of ‘hub and spokes’, which despite its recent apotheosis has been around for decades, where an organisation has a central location and a series of other distributed spaces where its people can work. The solution and its core problem are one: dispersal. Because for the vast majority it’s no longer about simply finding a desk. It’s about people who need to work together being in the same physical space at the same time. Which is why, back when the organisation’s needs were primary, the consolidated, centralised office gained so much traction. While it imposed a commute on most attendees, it brought people together. Those that knew each other, and those that didn’t but might. The whole re-crystallised point of an office. The coming struggle for the ecosystem therefore will be for it to work effectively for ever-morphing groups, not just individuals.
5. Experimentation: beware any commentary that claims any degree of certainty. Unless it’s about something that’s already happened. And even then, beware. Uncertainty is opportunity, but not if you go and pile it all on red 36. It’s time for ‘Trojan mice’ — small, ‘safe to fail’ initiatives that explore and test ideas. Which means we also have to understand how to create, engage our colleagues with, monitor and respond to an experiment. How much of that learning is then openly shared is also likely to be a test of the industry’s willingness to redefine itself and grow together. We’ve done it before, but it may just seem a little more existential this time around.
6. Dynamics: how the workplace can operate effectively in the present and forecast the future. Workplace design has always operated a short distance from a blind bend, reliant on occasional or ancient (or both) information in order to be ready for tomorrow. Current tech-in-use including rule-based applications such as desk booking systems are static, reliant on user input. They lack the inherent intelligence required to learn and forecast in the absence of intervention. If you don’t book a desk or room, you don’t get one. Unless you show up without booking, so it doesn’t know you were there. Technology will need to learn, forecast and adapt our workplace, with or without our mediation. It’s too important. That’s what AI can — and will — do.
7. Understanding: the data we need to create and manage the workplace. It’s easy to forget that it was only a couple of years ago when people were sent around the office once every few years with iPads counting people at desks. We thought the outcomes were fantastically insightful, we based huge capital investment on the findings. A whole new toolkit is necessary to meet the need to understand the dynamic, experimental workplace. One-time data will no longer cut it. Which increases the need for intelligent, real-time applications that can tell us what’s been happening, what’s happening and what probably will. An effective combination of (5), (6) and (7) can also ensure that a space to which a longer commitment is made can continue to meet the needs of the organisation and its people over time, rather than the solution being to continually add or remove space, or move altogether.
8. Equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I): how the workplace can both be effective for everyone, and be an active driver of greater equality. We’re still locked in generic thinking, creating enough worksettings in a physical space to enable everyone to find a space that works for them and their work. It’s the broadest possible hope for satisfying the triple bottom line in (2). Within such space, intelligent tech can ensure we can work together when, where and as we need, as in (6). Yet how many workplaces actively consider the nine protected characteristics of the UK’s Equality Act (2010): age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation? Added to which are key considerations not directly included — neurodiversity and menopause being two that affect significant numbers of people.
9. Health: interestingly, as someone who started out in FM, ‘wellbeing’ succeeded where health and safety failed — it became a cool idea and a much-demanded outcome. But Covid has refocussed us on more fundamental aspects of the workplace as they relate to our physical and mental selves. Most notably, air quality and ventilation. Few office occupants have any degree of control over this aspect of their workplace, so it has to perform for everyone. Yet it rarely does, and often doesn’t perform at all. An airborne virus has found out the shortcomings in many a building. Before we order the apples and re-start the dawn yoga, there are more fundamental things we have to get right.
10.Duality: the physical and virtual workplace, in harmony. By which we don’t mean web calls, the slight upgrade on the phone call on which we’ve become reliant of late, but the ‘metaverse’, the second but altogether bigger coming of Second Life (which is still going). In demonstrating the ‘metaverse’ its founder managed to create an even more annoying version of himself than the real thing, which means we’re all likely to, as well. Yet that whole ecosystem of space in (4) will of necessity include the metaverse — non-physical space. Inevitably, the tables will be too small there, too. Yet if we think it’s tricky managing a portfolio of corporate and flexspace such that it remains continually relevant to the organisation, imagine having to including a virtual space in which we’re ever-present, too.
If we get each one of these right, or even partially right, the office will have a beneficial future. If we don’t, there are three possible routes beyond simply limping on in hope: closure and a fully distributed solution (technically feasible, but for which the long-term implications remain unknown); substantial reduction (with the risk that critical mass will still not be achieved and the problem will remain proportional to the office size until we reach the first path); or the undesirable return to compulsory attendance. And after everything we’ve been through, who on earth wants that?
There’s much to be done, all of which can be done. We’d better crack on.
