Working to live: How is the workplace evolving?

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Long before the global pandemic turned remote working into a necessity, Faris and Rosie Yakob had worked ‘out of office’ – for more than eight years and counting. They live on the road, moving from project to project, staying in hotels or short-term rentals, and with friends and family.

Their nomadic creative consultancy, Genius Steals, is registered in Tennessee, and has an accounting team in Washington state and a roaming operations director. With the global lockdown easing, at the time of writing the Yakobs were flying back to the US to get their vaccines, with a stint in the Dominican Republic on the horizon.

Faris recalls his former life at a New York-based ad agency, where board meetings were held on Sundays because they were too busy during the week. “We lived in a world of people who lived to work – and while we loved what we did, we fell into a different camp. We worked to live and, more specifically, to fund our wanderlust,” he says.

With work undergoing a major transformation following the global shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, new models – such as remote working and hybrid working (a mix of remote and office work) – are likely to become a long-term reality. But what impact will this innovation have on society at large, and on the cities where we (used to) work?

The Yakobs were early adopters, but remote working, with its nomadic possibilities, is gaining traction. Smart companies are embracing the concept of telecommuting, remote and distributed (TRaD) working to attract the best talent. Various countries, including Barbados, Bermuda and Estonia, with its ‘digital nomad visa’, have launched special residency offers to lure adventurous remote workers to their shores.

Global virtual teams

While it’s easier for independent consultants to flourish in a remote-working environment, the pandemic brought home the difficulties of maintaining camaraderie and collaboration for larger teams. Laudes Foundation, set up by the philanthropic Brenninkmeijer family – behind C&A and more – has employees spread across multiple geographies and time zones, working hard as a virtual global team.

Stephanie Klotz, its senior brand and communications manager, based in Cologne, explains that the company used to meet for retreats once or twice a year. In lockdown, it’s become increasingly important to connect with colleagues on a personal level.

“In our international world, most people take for granted that everyone will just understand each other and work well together. This cannot be further from the truth,” says Klotz. “A Dutch person, for example, may have a direct approach that would shock any South American. A Brazilian might be a bit more emotional than any German can take. It is really important that global teams learn to work across cultural differences, because that’s when you see the magic of diversity.”

Her colleague, Gabriela Rocha, brand and communications manager, based in São Paulo, agrees. “I always keep in mind that the minority of the people that I work with are Brazilians and they have different ways of handling the same situation.”

For Shubhi Vijay, brand and communications specialist, New Delhi, working in Laudes’s global virtual team also means a late start and finish to the working day. “The geographical differences matter less than the time differences, as the former feels like an opportunity to know more about a culture, an economy, or even Netflix content,” she says.

Flexible working

A popular cliché of 2020 was that Covid-19 accelerated pre-existing trends. Yet that is a poor description of the massive rupture to office work, according to a report in the Economist. Before the pandemic, Americans spent 5% of their working time at home. By spring 2020, the figure was 60% – and many people don’t want to give up the flexibility.

McKinsey reported that 52% of workers surveyed between December 2020 and January 2021 would prefer a more flexible, hybrid working model, up from 30% before the pandemic. Indeed, one in four said they would consider switching employer if they were forced to return to the office full-time, and more than half hoped they could work from home three days a week after the pandemic.

Although Melissa Jamieson, chief executive of flexible working consultancy Timewise, is pleased that Covid-19 removed barriers to remote working, she predicts turbulence as businesses try to move from hybrid-working policy to practice. “We anticipate issues of fairness and inclusion to rise,” she warns. “Who gets ‘seen’? Who gets promoted? Who gets included in X or Y meetings?”

Jamieson is concerned that conversations around where work is based are overshadowing other forms of flexible work. “We know that nine in 10 people want flexibility in their next job, from research undertaken with ComRes. Our annual Timewise Flexible Jobs Index found that, in 2020, 78% of UK job vacancies made no reference to flexible working options whatsoever.”

Countries such as New Zealand and Spain have mooted the possibility of a four-day week, and Sweden famously experimented with six-hour days. Similarly, retailer Morrisons is introducing a four-day working week for its 1,500 head-office staff, who will work nine hours a day (rather than eight), as well as one Saturday per month. Unilever in New Zealand is moving its staff to a four-day week on the same
pay, following a similar trial by Microsoft in Japan.

Redesigning offices and cities

Just as new homes built in the future may need to include a space for home working beyond the dining table, offices built in the future will look different. Indeed, Los Angeles-based architecture company Clive Wilkinson, which designed open-plan offices for companies such as Google and Microsoft, believes offices will have different kinds of spaces:

• The library – a no-talking, working space that combines large tables, individual nooks and comfortable chairs for quiet focus
• The plaza – a kitchen/social space that enables colleagues to have spontaneous encounters
• The avenue – a walkway with tables, seating and booths, where colleagues can chat to each other.

To better understand how to develop its future work spaces, Swedish technology business Ericsson gathered data from more than 36,000 employees in 102 buildings across 52 countries in June 2020. From this research, it developed five employee personas, ranging from those who feel they have to go to the office, to those who choose to go (the majority of employees) and those who rarely go.

These insights have changed some of Ericsson’s decisions around office design. For example, in one particular layout, 60% of the space was dedicated to focused, desk-based work – but after calculating the persona split, Ericsson decided to reduce the desk space to 15% and include more team and socialising space on the floor plan instead.

Beyond internal office design, we’re also likely to see more satellite offices and co-working spaces in the suburbs – aka the WeWork model – as organisations listen to employees’ increased reluctance to do the long commute. However, Tom Johnson, managing director at Trajectory Partnership, believes talk of the death of the city is widely exaggerated.

“It’s not the case that cities will become ghost towns, not least because market forces will determine that commercial and domestic rents drop to make them more affordable,” he says. “Cities will be rejuvenated as people return to these spaces, not because they need to be in the office writing a report, but because this is a space for interaction and collaboration.”

The 15-minute city – or ‘ville du quart d’heure’ – is one such idea being discussed by Parisian politicians looking to encourage self-sufficiency within each arrondissement (district) of the French capital, with their own shops, parks, cafes, schools and workplaces just a walk or bike ride away. It’s not a new idea; Melbourne in Australia designed 20-minute neighbourhoods, where everything is in close proximity.

Societal impact

The elephant in the room when discussing the accelerated transformation of the workplace is that it didn’t happen for everyone.

Remote/hybrid/flexible working is not an option for many key workers who took heroic risks by showing up to work in the pandemic. Nor is it a possibility for blue-collar workers –and they are already facing the prospect of a deep recession and unemployment in the UK when the government’s furlough scheme comes to an end.

There’s also the looming shadow of automation on the horizon. This is one reason why discussions around universal basic income (see 'Does the future of work need a universal basic income?') are gathering momentum.

“Acceleration in automation tends to happen during recessions,” says Johnson. “Today, we’re seeing more jobs automated on a faster timeline, especially in food service, events and retail. This is going to be a huge disruption, and will involve policy decisions around education and long-term unemployment.”

Along with automation come other important global trends – such as climate change, migration and new technologies – that will impact the future of work beyond the pandemic. For example, in the so-called ‘rust belt’ in the Midwest and Great Lakes region of the US, the decline of the automotive industry has disrupted the regional economy.

Author and strategist Dr Parag Khanna, based in Singapore, is convinced that the pandemic will have a deep impact. “The 14th-century Black Death caused millions of deaths across Eurasia, splintered the largest territorial empire ever known (the Mongols), forced significant wage growth in Europe, and promoted wider maritime exploration that led to European colonialism,” he says. “These phenomena trace strongly to the plague, even if they played out over centuries. The consequences of today’s pandemic will emerge far more quickly, and with the benefit of foresight, we can try to mitigate them, capitalise on them and build a more resilient global system in the process.”

Khanna believes the five additional disruptive forces of demographic imbalances, political upheaval, economic dislocation, technological disruption and climate change, along with increased connectivity, will result in accelerated migration. His forthcoming book, Move: How mass migration will shape the world (to be published in October 2021 ) examines where four billion restless young people will move as they seek a new life abroad.

Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay, Economic possibilities for our grandchildren, imagining what the world of work might look like in the future. By 2028, he predicted that the standard of life would be so improved that we would work 15-hour weeks.

But people aren’t like this. Instead of finishing work at lunchtime, they find new things to consume and new reasons to earn money. Many of these new things didn’t exist during Keynes’ lifetime – iPads, kitchen islands, electric scooters, personal trainers, garden rooms, smartphones for every member of the family... So, will we see an adjustment in society’s focus on consumerism? It’s too early to know. But it’s partly in our hands.

Back to Faris Yakob, who, according to his work calendar, is in between the Dominican Republic and a family reunion in Nashville right now. “How you spend your days is, of course, how you spend your life. If you don’t like it, adjust accordingly and see what happens.”

This article was first published in the July issue of Impact.