Editorial: Covid-enforced hybrid, work from home adaptations ongoing

Employees are now used to more flexible arrangements around office and home work. Photo / 123RF

Opinion

EDITORIAL

Two of the enduring impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic globally have been the rise in more flexible working arrangements and the dilemma over office space in inner cities.

Consultancy firm EY surveyed 15,000 people throughout 20 countries and found more than half of workers now have hybrid work patterns.

Most commonly it involves one or two days of remote working per week.

Another consultancy firm, Advanced Workplace Associates, found on average hybrid workers produce nearly two extra weeks of work annually.

Working from home is now a new normal standard work option.

People have rearranged their lives, some moving long distances from their office. And it means more people can be work wanderers, doing jobs for firms in other countries.

For people who just want to get their work done without the usual office add-ons of noise, personal politics, distractions and the commute, working from home can be a much better experience than the office.

Plenty of people, though, wouldn’t want to be without the social contact and stimulation and help with getting ahead that comes with mixing in their workplace.

It has changed the previous patterns of the work day with people able to log on with their first coffee in the morning. They can be well into it when they used to be moving slowly in traffic.

A Wall Street Journal report said the 4pm to 6pm period is a new work ”dead zone”, presumably when people at home are getting dinner or walking the dog and people in the office are taking a break or getting home early.

Without having to factor in commutes there and back again people can in some cases be more flexible - working over more hours but with breaks.

Microsoft researchers say there’s a “triple peak” of productivity: before and after lunch and in the early evening.

Ireland has a cross between remote and office work with hubs set up in rural towns. People can work remotely for a business while living in a cheaper place, but still hang out with regulars at these working centres. There are 321 hubs set up with 12,200 registered users with the aim to reach 400 by 2024.

Another study, conducted by the IFO Centre for Macroeconomics and Surveys, a German think-tank, found employees in different countries wanted more remote work than they were getting.

The research surveyed 42,400 fulltime employees in 34 countries.

The average paid days away from the office per week in April and May ranged from 0.4 in South Korea to 1.7 in Canada. But the amount people actually wanted ranged from 1.2 to 2.7.

It had the average for New Zealand at 1 (2.3) and for Australia 1.3 (2.2).

Mathias Dolls, of the IFO Centre, said: “What we’re seeing is that employees really value the option to work from home. However, there’s a gap between the number of days that employees would like to work from home and the number that their employers are planning for them.”

A clear fallout from this change has been a lot of empty office space worldwide.

Consultancy firm McKinsey has estimated the new working pattern could wipe more than a trillion off the value of office buildings in major cities by the end of the decade. It looked at nine cities and predicted demand for such space would be 13 per cent lower than before Covid-19.

It looks like there will still be further adaptation to go with this change that’s here to stay.