The great office evolution: Reimagining the workplace

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has redefined how and where many of us work. Our new normal requires agility and adaptation from employers and workers. Now both sides have the chance to capitalise on the positive and mitigate the negative. While hybrid and remote work are not new concepts or practices, the scale at which the pandemic has required their use has never before been experienced and is only possible now due to the plenitude of advanced communication and collaboration technologies available. Navigating this forced work experiment through the lens of site selection enables a company to form a comprehensive set of considerations for data collection and objective analysis. This will allow organisations to understand current trends based on historic benchmarking from similar occurrences to maximise potential and minimise risk. No one knows exactly what to do next, but what we do know is the best process to figure it out. This paper discusses how, despire some large corporations introducing hybrid work schedules, allowing employees to work anywhere they like, and some companies even considering cutting workers’ pay if they no longer commute to the office, smarter companies are figuring out how to work within the new normal of mass remote and hybrid workforces. It concludes that businesses need to right-size their real estate portfolio while enabling their remote workforce to produce in the most effective and accommodating way possible.