Office of future

Not every prediction comes true, but in the last couple of years we all bore witness to the rapid undoing of the traditional office.

The office of the future

STRATEGY: BIG IDEAS

COVID-19 came along, your staff got locked down, perforce you had to improvise – working from home, flexible hours, Zoom – and some of that stuff you’ll keep going when ‘normal’ returns because it worked out surprisingly well and people quite liked it, except when Dave in Marketing kept forgetting to unmute.

The changes are part of a wider societal change where, faced with some threat or shock, previously well-solidified work practices “unfreeze” and, for a while, are open to reinvention before resolidifying into a new orthodoxy. COVID was the trigger for a lot of it: “It’s fair to say COVID has been the most significant catalyst for change that I’ve ever seen”, as Gratton put it in this webinar, but it is only the latest step in the evolution of the office since its early factory-model ‘Taylorist’ days back in the 1860s where tasks are broken down into steps and focuses on how each person can do a specific series of steps best. Now, there’s a new step change coming: a parallel for those of us of a certain age might be the norm-challenging ’60s, while more recently there’s been a head of steam building around culture change in the era of the millennials.

Donal Curtin is an Auckland-based economic consultant. He served for 12 years on the New Zealand Commerce Commission and was previously chief economist at BNZ. He was named Columnist of the Year in the 2020 Mumbrella Publish Awards and was Highly Commended in the 2021 Awards.

Story Donal Curtin

“It’s fair to say COVID has been the most significant catalyst for change that I’ve ever seen.”

– Lynda Gratton, London Business School

It's been universal: “The interesting thing for me, as an organisational theorist, is that that unfreeze happened to everybody at the same time, whether you were in Tokyo or San Francisco… somewhere around the end of March 2020 your company unfroze”. And recent changes look irreversible: in Employment Hero’s 2022 Remote Work Report, 50% of Aussie remote and hybrid workers, and a very similar 48% of Kiwis, said they would consider quitting if forced to go back to the office full-time.

If the old ways are indeed on the way out, then there is a window of opportunity to have a complete rethink of how your organisation does things, in particular drawing on the lessons around flexibility and technology that COVID revealed, rather than just letting it all wash over you: you need, as Gratton puts it, “intentionality” rather than drift.

“I am convinced that we can create a future that will support us in being not only more productive in our work, but also more fulfilled.”

– Lynda Gratton, London Business School

There’s a lot to like about the rethink. It makes for big efficiency gains. One case study Gratton likes is Fujitsu: its staff faced long, unpleasant commutes, a deadweight loss of everyone’s time. Instead, Fujitsu redesigned and resituated its offices: small ones close to employees’ homes where they could focus, other small ones, still close to home, where they could work together, plus larger hub offices for the big get-togethers. Wins all round. As a general point, as Gratton says in her book and as economists learned from Adam Smith (who believed wealth is created from labour and self-interest) and the managerial invention of the division of labour, “It’s the combination of technological innovation and working behaviour and practices, such as establishing a rhythm of coordination, that will turbocharge this cycle of productivity”.

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Christopher Niesche is a business journalist and content writer with over two decades experience reporting on topics such as finance, trade, fintech, management, accounting, small business and human resources.

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Sound like you?

Then you’re at risk of missing out on Lynda Gratton’s big idea.

She’s a professor of management practice at the London Business School, and she sees the COVID-induced changes to work practices as just one part of a wider revolution in business organisation, which has the potential to make firms more productive and their employees happier and more committed.

of Australian

50%

of Kiwi

48%

Remote workers said they would consider quitting if forced to go back to the office full-time

Source: Employment Hero 2022 Remote Work Report

Based on her work with a wide range of companies that have decided to go a new and better route, she’s devised a Redesigning Work playbook. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, fill-in the-blanks process: as Gratton points out, you could well be doing one thing in one part of the organisation but something different elsewhere and the overall pattern – what she calls the company’s unique “signature” – will be what best suits your particular purposes and culture.

In summary, it’s got four parts. ‘Understand’ is about delving into what drives productivity at your place, how knowledge moves around, what everyone – both company and employees – want from work and what life at the coalface is actually like. ‘Reimagine’ is about finding a better combo of time and place to get the mix of energy, cooperation, coordination and productivity that you’re looking for. ‘Model and test’ is seeing whether the ideas from ‘Reimagine’ work, against criteria of future-proofing, technological change, and fairness: a classic example of an apparently bright idea backfiring (quoted in her book Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization & Make Hybrid Work for Everyone) was the open plan office. It aimed to increase the flow of ideas among people in closer contact: in practice, they put their headphones on and had less face-to-face interaction than before. Finally, there’s ‘Act and create’, making it all happen: it involves leadership, management, involvement, communication.

Change on this scale won’t come easy to traditional command and control business hierarchy: it involves more ‘co-creation’ between management and staff than used to be the norm. And some changes won’t be warmly embraced by staff, either. If central offices are going to be used less, you can’t blame management if they pushback against the cost of half-empty offices with the likes of hot-desking, which many employees dislike: a survey by Cushman & Wakefield Australia in 2022 found the majority of its tenants were going down that route. But overall it’s worth it. As Gratton says, “I am convinced that we can create a future that will support us in being not only more productive in our work, but also more fulfilled.”

From CA Library

CA Library has curated a reading list of 26 titles on strategies to make remote and hybrid working successful. Remote and hybrid working

CA Library have brought together 20 titles on how to adapt, thrive and stay relevant in The future of work.

Sound like you?

Then you’re at risk of missing out on Lynda Gratton’s big idea.

“Just imagine if 50% of all firms cheat in terms of their carbon emission statements, then we can simply not steer actions against climate change in a reasonable manner because we don't really know what the real emissions are,” he says.

– Lynda Gratton, London Business School

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