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Chancellor Rishi Sunak has reignited the push to return to the office, recently telling people to go back to their desks if they want to get on in their careers. But what will they find when they get there?
Joanne Rewcastle recently started her role as head of engagement at regulator The General Dental Council after 16 months working alone at home. She was astonished by just how loud the open plan office was. “The office was by no means full, and if anything, that made the conversation seem louder,” she explains. “It felt like we were in the library listening in to a private conversation; it was very bizarre. It did make me feel really uncomfortable, I actually thought, I need to leave.”
Rewcastle had to reschedule a call with a colleague for when she knew no one else would be around. “But I can’t be doing that when more people are in the office,” she says.
Fifty per cent of the UK workforce are now back in the office, according to ONS data. But Zoom is still outperforming analyst expectations, with Q1 revenue up 191 per cent year-over-year, fuelled by the continued high demand for videoconferencing. The buzzing, collaborative office that many were expecting has actually turned into something quite desolate – and video call heavy.
“I’m not having meetings, face-to-face ones anyway,” says Camille*, who manages a small team at a London media company. She loved her office before the pandemic left it deserted. “Whenever I do have them with my team, it's great. But that happens so rarely, I basically claim one of the meeting rooms as my office for the day, and I’m just there moving from Zoom call to Zoom call.”
Now, she doesn’t get much out of the office apart from a change of scenery. “To be honest I would like to go back full time. But if I'm going to be doing Zoom calls, from my house or from the office, there’s not much difference.”
It’s a far cry from the picture Apple CEO Tim Cook painted of hybrid work. “I know I’m not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings,” he wrote in an email to his employees. But meetings and chats can’t take up all of people’s time, which is why it is interesting that the email also outlined the expectation that Apple workers would be required to return to campus every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from September. Forcing employees to come in for just over half of the week can cause more issues especially if people don’t have enough reasons to interact with other people for that length of time.
“The problem with any mandate on flexibility is that it's inherently inflexible,” says Alexia Cambon, HR research director at Gartner. “If it goes against the whole principle of flexible working, which is that you can design your day in a way that makes you productive and healthy and happy, then it's obviously not going to be the most effective way of adapting to hybrid work.”
Since Cook’s announcement, several Apple employees have quit, while others pushed back with an internal letter to the executive team. “It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees,” they wrote. “Our best collaboration has always required remote communication with teams in other offices and across timezones, since long before the pandemic.” Apple employees in France sent a similar response.
Yet it’s this magical hum of innovation and collaboration that many CEOs cite when insisting we need to get back into the office regularly. Offhand and overheard comments can spark ideas. After all, Google Talk’s translate function wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a few colleagues having a spontaneous chat across their desks. Google recently delayed its return to the office plans due to Delta, but come October 18, employees are expected to be vaccinated and in the office three days per week.
The idea that we collaborate more when we are together in person is not backed by data. Pre-pandemic studies show that open plan office workers had 70 per cent fewer face-to-face interactions, as they headphoned-up to avoid them – mandating a number of days per week seems arbitrary at best, and more likely counter-productive.
Whether it’s one, two, or three days per week, the enforcement approach doesn’t consider an individual’s schedule. The chances are slim that every week, no matter what you’re working on, you’ll need the same number of in-person meetings. So, inevitably, like the full time office workers before them, hybrid workers will be left having meetings for meetings sake. The freedom approach doesn’t work either, as that leaves teams split up, forced to collaborate over Zoom.
“If anything needs to decide how often we come together to collaborate, it should be the work that we're doing,” says Gartner’s Cambon. That’s what social media strategist Emma Robertson’s employer is doing. Instead of mandating specific days in, Publicis agency Langland is piloting a model called: ‘Heads Up, Heads Down, Heads Together’, where each employee assesses their need to come into the office based on the type of work they’re doing. “I have friends who work at different agencies and they’ve had a bit more of an iron fist approach,” says Robertson. “My work has been a lot more empathetic and, frankly, just realistic.” For now, her team is tackling hybrid working like an experiment, she says.
Hybrid employers still have a long way to go if they want to find a balance between Zooming from an open plan ghost town and renewing all the problems of the before-times office. “We’re going to start to really rethink what the office space needs to be and the purpose it needs to play,” says Cambon. “And maybe that purpose actually isn’t an office at all. Maybe it’s something completely radically different.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
