I recently caught up with old friend Hugh back from the UK and living over the hill in the Wairarapa where he keeps 3 horses. He is still working with the same international IT firm and only travels about once a fortnight to their Wellington base on Customhouse Quay. The pandemic has been a gift to folks like Hugh as it has completely changed our views on how and where we shall work. Hybrid working as we now call it is completely mainstream and we all know plenty of people who practice this mode. But is it a good thing really and for whom?

So I rang John Clegg, family IT guru and CEO of Summer of Tech, an IT training and recruitment provider. In his world of working with IT graduates he confirmed the practices success was mostly down to the individual, more outgoing extravert types need the personal interaction and introverts who would otherwise work in an office wearing head phones all day prefer working from home. In the IT world according to John the introverts tend to outnumber the others and so hybrid working is the preferred option for many. Anecdotally he claims more hierarchical and structured companies struggle more to provide this flexibility.  

The potential advantages to companies is their ability to trim the office space budgets, typically I have worked with many smaller tenants who might be moving to space say 30% smaller however today I heard about a massive IT coy who has downsized to a third of their previous size. One other opportunity is that companies may be open to a far larger talent pool of people living outside commuting distance and also inclusive to persons with disabilities for whom commuting is problematic.   

Section 69 of the Employment Relations Act offers employers a variety of grounds to deny a request to work from home. John believes that generally and across the board in NZ anyway where productivity can be  measured in billable hours, revenues are down only slightly however employee satisfaction is largely up. His comment is interesting because according to a massive Microsoft study published last year, 80% of employees surveyed claimed their productivity was up and 54% of employers agreed.   Hybrid working is being embraced and a return to pre-pandemic office occupation patterns will not happen. How then to entice and even reward workers back to their offices ?

In my next blog I will outline some ideas from 2 experts in office layout design, Claire Deacon and Barryn Westfield of Workspace Architects.