What was wrong with the pre-covid office?

Minimise your dependency on office desks

Before the pandemic, many businesses viewed the office as nothing more than a place to store desks. Most contained a 1:1 employee-to-desk ratio and the expectation was that employees arrived in the morning, sat down at their designated desk, and did their work.

Desks are crucial to lots of your employees’ daily tasks, but they only serve one purpose: routine concentration work. For many people, this one-dimensional view of the office was unimaginative, uninspiring, and uninviting. It also failed to meet their broader needs.

The past two years have demonstrated that work is multi-faceted. Over the course of one day, the average employee engages in numerous activities. Concentration work is important but so too is their ability to meet with colleagues, collaborate, share ideas, and even socialise with them.

With so much emphasis on individual concentration work, desk-heavy offices struggled to facilitate interaction and compounded the issue of departmental silos because everyone was shackled to their workstation with little opportunity for cross-team interactions.

Loosen your flexible working policy

Prescriptive home working policies were limiting and inflexible. Often, permission to work from home was decided either by formal request or written into the contract.

At the same time, many business leaders didn't trust their employees to work effectively away from the office. They believed in line-of-sight management and - in their defence - had much less available evidence that greater employee flexibility could boost productivity and wellbeing.

As offices reopen, it's clear that many leaders are still worried about losing their workforce's loyalty if employees continue to work from home, a view surely heightened by recent reports of a 'Great Resignation' spreading throughout the globe.

Create offices with purpose in mind

What do employees need? How will they use your space? These are questions that should guide your thinking. As an organisation, you also need to understand how purpose varies by individual, team, and department. Some companies may need to change employee contracts to support remote working and have the office as a fully hybrid space. Some teams, such as finance, may spend a week in the office at the end of the month for collaborative work. It’s also important to remember that individual preferences depend on a person’s role. On average, admin staff need to use desks far more frequently than managers or sales team members do.

Build your social capital

Although the office is still a place of work, it must be a social space. Since the pandemic began, many surveys have found that social contact is the thing that people have missed most about the office. According to global employee experience assessor Leesman, one in two employees from more than 279,000 surveyed report that their home office doesn’t support ‘informal social interaction’. This number is stark, especially when we consider that 76% of office-based employees have told Leesman that their office supports social interaction.

As a result, your organisation must prioritise social capital in any workplace change programme. Essentially, it represents the intangible value of social networks, team cohesion and relationships. If social capital is low, the higher the risk to employee loyalty and people leaving your organisation for greener pastures.

Communicate the changes effectively

For employees to embrace workplace change, your organisation must make conscious decisions and communicate them with clarity. People are more receptive to change when you take the time to explain the ‘why’. If social capital is too fluffy as a concept, you need to break down the ‘Three Cs’, how the office helps bring them to life, and how they can support employees.

Work with employees to make them feel that they have a say in the decision-making process and any changes are made in their best interests.

There is no room for ambiguity. As an employer, it’s your duty to set clear expectations for the workplace model that you implement, including how often people must be in the office, on which days, and the settings available to them when they get there.

Your hybrid working model will likely sit between one of three options, each requiring a more significant level of commitment and preparation:

Telling employees to come to the office for a set number of days a week is, arguably, the simplest. However, you would still need to ensure that employees understand why they must be in the workplace on those days.

Bestowing decision-making power on department heads to manage their team’s level of flexibility; this would require training for managers.

Giving employees total freedom of choice would require the highest level of management training, with the need to manage remote teams sensitively and with empathy.

Don’t be afraid to fail

You will get things wrong in the post-pandemic office, especially on the first go. Although we may be over the worst of the crisis, the future is full of unknowns. As such, it’s important that your organisation is open to testing new initiatives, learning from mistakes, and remaining flexible – treating the office as if it were in beta, a place that can constantly evolve according to new evidence, data, knowledge and lived experiences. New ways of working may prove to be a poor cultural fit, or unable to meet the practical needs of your employees or visitors. When this happens, it’s vital that you are willing to learn and adapt.

...it's important that your organisation is open to testing new initiatives, learning from mistakes and remaining flexible...

Create a workplace that prioritises your people’s health and happiness

There is lots of evidence that working away from the office and colleagues for such a long period has increased people’s anxiety and feelings of loneliness. According to a survey by UK health charity Nuffield Health undertaken during the pandemic, 80% of Brits felt that working from home has negatively impacted their mental health.

It’s good for people to be around others. Being in the same place with colleagues or customers gives us energy. This allows us to build friendships, camaraderie, and trust at work. Face-to-face interaction means your employees are more likely to feel part of a team and develop a stronger sense of togetherness. That’s the defining lesson of the office pre and during the pandemic, and one your organisation can ill-afford to forget when creating the future office.