A New Kind Of Relationship

Could all this working-from-home spark a healthier relationship between us and the office?

A survey by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) has revealed that people working from home are drinking more alcohol, eating more unhealthy food and having trouble sleeping. More than half of those polled revealed a significant increase in new aches and pains in the neck, shoulder and back.

Half of those surveyed said they were working longer hours and were not happy with their lifework balance. One in three said they felt isolated. In a nutshell, working from home isn’t all plain sailing. Many of us are pining for office life again, at least to some degree. So, has the demise of the office been greatly exaggerated? In an era of Zoom, video calling, team messaging and cloud document sharing, it was widely thought that colleagues didn’t need to be in the same country, let alone county. No more overheads, no more commutes. Your dead time in the office becomes your productive domestic time at home.

But hang on. Home working has some drawbacks: no team building, no brain-storming get-togethers, no freedom, albeit temporary, from the pressures of home and family life. It is both intriguing and significant that the trend from those firms best able to run virtual offices in the United States has been to invest in exemplary state-of-the-art offices for their employees. This trend is now spreading to the UK. It is tremendous that we are now prioritising the creation of wonderful offices, inspiring creativity, collaboration and hard work, which – crucially – are key to attracting and retaining talent. Even the most passionate advocates of working from home can’t pretend to be consistently inspired in isolation.

Managing remote teams is do-able, but company culture dwindles when technology consistently replaces face-to-face interaction. We are inherently social and we thrive on feeling connected to those we have relationships with, colleagues and clients alike.

Working from home does not allow for those “watercooler” moments. The shared office ensures we don’t miss out on micro-interactions with people. Tone of voice, facial expressions and importantly, context, can get lost in translation when working from home. The boundaries between work and personal life are much harder to maintain when work ends in the same place personal life begins. Your remote workers are already juggling more, whether it’s childcare or figuring out how to co-work with their spouses – and in the younger generations – spending a lot more time with flatmates.

Five-day home working is not for everyone and actually it’s not for most – the need to collaborate and socialise are too strong a pull. However, the five-day office day work, sitting at a desk, being ‘present’ but not productive, is also not the answer. It is about agile working. The office is a tool to enable collaboration – but it sits alongside digital tools that can be very effective too. It is about picking the right tool for the right job and the right individual. There needs to be more of a focus on output and not just time. Managers will need to adjust to managing their agile workforce through the office and through remote working effectively. You shouldn’t need to see someone face-to-face to know and trust that they are working – output and results show you that. This current crisis will reveal how we can become more effective as well as more resilient. It will challenge behaviour.

What is clear is that the average office is neither a compelling place to work nor that productive. This is much more than adding some bean bags, slides or beer taps, it is about creating the right type of environment that fosters effective working – great offices and great environments will rise to the fore. There are already a few trailblazers of the 21st century office in the north east and more to come. Once the lockdown eases, don’t be surprised to see the myth of the joy of working from home well and truly shattered.