W H AT T I M E I S I T W I T H YO U ?
ZOOM MEETING IN 5 MINUTES
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L E T ’ S M E E T AT T H E O F F I C E O N T H U R S DAY
C A N I G E T YO U A C O F F E E ?
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S U R E TO M . . . S E E YO U L AT E R
HELLO TEAM!
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I ’ M W O R K I N G F RO M H O M E TO DAY
Relationship Buildings® is our guide to navigating, interpreting and re-imagining the changing landscape of the workplace.
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Covid19 has fractured how we work globally, at scale. And the combination of our new priorities, fresh insights and lessons learned over the past sixteen months are likely to result in the workplace changing more dramatically than it has ever done in our careers to date.
HELLO
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W E N E E D TO S TO P TA L K I N G ABOUT OFFICE BUILDINGS AND S TA RT T H I N K I N G A B O U T
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IS S UE 2
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Gerard Taylor IS S UE 1
1 We need to stop talking about office buildings and start thinking about Relationship Buildings ®
Nathan Hurley
0 ISS UE 5 07 What Relationship Buildings ® mean for the under-30s
2 Ten years collapsing to ten months
08 Why data-driven design is here to stay
3 Welcome to the hybrid workplace
09 The evolution of the sticky campus, and what we can learn from university spaces
IS S UE 2
4 Welcome to the hybrid home IS S UE 3
5 Why we’re beginning the biggest period of innovation in workplace thinking and design any of us will experience during our careers IS S UE 4
6 When will we make the same breakthroughs in how we relate to each other that we’ve made with technology?
Jim Taylour ISS UE 6
10 Healing Spaces where the office is no longer the health problem, but the wellness solution ISS UE 7
11 Home alone together: recognising new habits and habitats and the importance of getting it right
Luke Palmer ISS UE 8
Relationship Buildings ® and the circular 12 economy: a shared responsibility
page 48 – 49
Relationship Buildings®
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IS SUE 2
WFH (work from home) achieves a better work/life balance
Welcome to the hybrid home
“ If this shift goes well, we have the potential to be more productive in our jobs and happier with a more balanced working life.” “ The long daily commute, with its high financial and environmental costs, won’t be missed by many.” Nicholas Bloom
Research over a number of years has shown that multiple adjustments and some back-tracking are needed before any large-scale change can be realised, with productivity almost always dropping after its introduction. Not only is this not the case with 2020’s sudden decamping to remote working, productivity has, in most instances, actually increased, with numerous surveys showing productivity increases ranging from 10% to 15%. Employee surveys bear this out, showing that, while it took a bit of time to adjust to home working, most workers now believe that it leads to, “an increase in self-efficacy and our capacity to pay more attention to our work.” Ingenuity from the workforce, enhanced by good leadership and organisational support throughout the pandemic, has helped make working from home (WFH) a global success. The unexpected benefits arising from our eighteenplus months of absence from our workplaces, from higher productivity to feelings of self-efficacy, means that WFH is set to remake the workplace and our working lives. The rapid move to home working and its surprising success has made WFH the new normal, and alongside all the opportunities this will bring will be challenges, ranging from how to maintain company culture to the likely knock-on effects on the vitality of our city centres. Perhaps the reason we’re reporting so many benefits from WFH is that our homes are better attuned to a more balanced and healthier workday. This, according to Dan Siegal’s Healthy Mind Platter narrative (which we discuss in more detail in chapter 6), is one that is productive and creative, happy and healthy; where we’re able to exercise, take new perspectives (something that’s particularly important for innovative thinking) and more skillfully navigate the conflicts of our working day. In theory it seems likely that our homes will offer an environment in which our workday can flow more easily from focused attention to nonfocused attention, and where concentration and hard work can be balanced with down time, exercise and play. However, the challenges of lockdown – from home schooling to badly set-up workspaces – can get in the way, preventing us from occasionally taking time out in the ways we think we should be able to at home, such as daydreaming, playing with our children and pets or napping.
| Welcome to the hybrid home
83% of home working employees agreed that their homes enable them to work productively - a higher proportion than the average office (64%) and even outstanding workplaces (78%). But informal social interaction (55%) and learning from others (66%) were the least supported.
“ The hours spent in a cramped train or stuck in traffic on the motorway and the thousands of pounds a year spent on commuting have now been gifted back to employees in the form of working from home, and many who have tasted freedom aren’t interested in giving it up.” Allison English, CEO Leesman
Leesman
pages 50 – 51
Relationship Buildings®
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A Gensler survey reports that, “Working from home supports the ability to focus, and empowers workers with the flexibility they need. There are upsides to working from home. Most employees, across roles and home situations, believe maintaining a work/life balance is easier at home, and find working from home to be productive. Despite past concerns about its efficacy, most workers do not believe their personal and team productivity have been negatively impacted. Importantly, working from home provides necessary flexibility in both the employee’s personal and work life. Few workers want to work from home full time, but most want to continue to work from home in some capacity.” Much of the insight within the Gensler survey is ratified in an insightful report by Nicholas Bloom, an Economics Professor at Stanford University, titled, ‘Our research shows working from home works, in moderation.’ Bloom’s report, which featured in an article in March 2021 in The Guardian, is worth quoting extensively: “This coming shift will largely be driven by employers making a calculation between two different, equally important forces. One is what companies see as the need for in-person creativity and connections, which will spur their desire to bring people back into offices. For many, we are at our most creative working face-to-face, meeting people, talking over lunch and coffee, or gathering in groups. This is why some of the world’s most successful companies, be it in London, New York or Silicon Valley, build such beautiful offices. Leading companies want to lure their employees into work because they believe that’s how to maximise their staff’s creativity and endeavor. Perhaps, too, there is the lingering notion for some that it is easier to keep an eye on staff with them all in the same place.”
Remote work has been a success
6% unsuccessful 11% mixed results
6% unsuccessful 23% mixed results
83% successful 71% successful
Employers
Employees
Q: How successful would you say the shift to remote work because of Covid19 has been for your company? (Responding ‘successful’; and ‘very successful’) Source: PwC US Remote Work Survey January 12, 2021. Base: 133 US executives, 1200 US office workers
“ There’s no question that lockdown has done away with presenteeism, it’s shown many business leaders that their people can be productive, engaged and happy working from home. But it’s also important to acknowledge that
every employee faces their own set of personal circumstances, meaning working from home for long periods of time is not beneficial for everyone.” Kevin Ellis Chairman PwC pages 52 – 53
| Welcome to the hybrid home “ Managing by walking around does not translate
into managing by emailing or Zooming around. People are still getting the work done, but the long-term relationships that once sprang from such shared interactions and experiences are undoubtedly at risk.”
Relationship Buildings®
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European WFH pre-Covid19 McKinsey & Co. 16% Denmark
TRAD & C
O.
T OF FI CE AT TE ND AN CE CH AR MON DAY
TUE SDAY
WED NES DAY
THU RSDAY
Tom
FRIDAY
34%
UK
22%
Netherlands
17%
Belgium
17%
Switzerland
16%
Finland
16%
Sweden
16%
Ireland
15%
Germany
15%
Norway
14%
France
Ali son
13%
Portugal
Rob
12%
Austria
11%
Spain
11%
Italy
8%
0%
Ale sha
10%
20%
Sim on
“ We have gone through a one-way door. We can’t go back, in part because some organisations have offered to let their people work remotely permanently. Welcome to the new board-level role within organisations: HEAD OF REMOTE WORKING.”
What changed during lockdown? Harvard Business Review.
14% bathed less pages 54 – 55
30%
40%
| Welcome to the hybrid home
“There is the potential for something ineffable to be lost when colleagues don’t meet in person. Indeed, a recent study by Microsoft shows that employees at home are more likely to contact current team members but less likely to get in touch with new ones. So, working from home limits our ability to connect with different teams, reduces cohesion and may hinder the potential to create new ideas.” “At home, however, we tend to be more efficient in the daily tasks that make up much of working life. This is the competing force that may keep many of us out of the office, even after Covid. Working at home under the right conditions – which means in your own room with good broadband and no children around (which wasn’t possible for everyone in lockdown) – can be highly efficient. In a large randomised control trial I carried out on working from home in 2010, I found home-based employees were 13% more efficient. When we interviewed employees after the study, they told us how noisy and distracting the office can be. This greater efficiency on current tasks also combines with other factors, like the time saved by avoiding the daily commute, offering a compelling reason for people to stay at home. The past year of Covid home working has perhaps opened many more people’s eyes to this.”
“As companies come to decisions on new working arrangements, they will be essentially making a basic trade-off: the expectation of greater creativity in new projects at the office, but greater productivity on existing tasks at home. And, as with most trade-offs, the right answer is not all or nothing – five days or zero days at home – but something in the middle.” “In a recent survey of 5,000 employees in Britain that I did with Paul Mizen and Shivani Taneja from Nottingham University, working in the office for three days a week was the most popular choice. Indeed, employees reported they regarded this as a perk worth about 6% of wages. Not only is this pattern more efficient for companies but it also helps to keep employees happy and motivated. Or, to put it in cash terms, if your company wants to force employees back into the office for five days a week it will need to compensate them – or face losing staff when economies recover.” “If this wider shift happens as I expect it to, the longterm move towards greater homeworking has huge implications for our cities, reversing long-ingrained thinking about working and urban life.”
“ As a business you have to make yourself attractive and that’s the challenge for some of the financial institutions which are saying they are not really fans of agile working, because a lot of the generation coming through will be resistant to that.” Anita Rai Head of Employment JMW
zz z
36%
59%
70%
napped more (parents even more)
made health a priority
spent more time with loved ones
Relationship Buildings™ IS SUE 2
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Chapter 4
FLOOR 22
FLOOR 21
FLOOR 20
FLOOR 19
FLOOR 18
FLOOR 17
FLOOR 16 BIG CORPORATE
& CO.
FLOOR 15
| Welcome to the hybrid home
“Skyscrapers, in particular, are facing the most radical change. High-rise buildings in city centres have the double challenge of public transport and lifts. Postpandemic, many of us will still be nervous about the density of people in any given circumstances. In our survey of UK employees, over three-quarters of respondents reported feeling uneasy about taking crowded tube trains or stepping into packed lifts. So tower blocks will have to cut rents, reduce density, and even convert some floors into flats to reduce crowding – and to find new income.” “In the coming months and years, the radical shift towards working from home that occurred during the pandemic is setting up society for a new reality. For many of us, the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 daily commute will end. Instead, we will be working from home two days a week and travelling in to the office three days a week (or a formulation close to that), many of us from the suburbs and beyond. Ultimately, if this shift goes well, we have the potential to be more productive in our jobs and happier with a more balanced working life. This could also help to improve affordability in our largest cities as higher earning
employees move out, away from their bricks-andmortar workplaces. But will those working from home remember the other half who cannot do the same?” The shift to WFH is remaking market sectors, consumer behaviours and spending patterns. These shifts will have long-term economic impacts on everything from the type of clothes we’ll buy to the city centre morning coffees and lunches we won’t consume, from the new boom in home shopping and deliveries to where we choose to live and the consequences for our modes of transport. Most of us will be happy to take advantage of opportunities to spend more time working from our newly tech-enabled homes and benefiting from the new work/life balance this facilitates. The end of the long daily commute, with its high financial and environmental costs, won’t be missed by many. Neither will excessive travel to client meetings and presentations, much of which now seems selfindulgent, carrying an unsustainable environmental, financial and human cost.
“Skyscrapers, in particular, are facing the most radical change [...] tower blocks will have to cut rents, reduce density, and even convert some floors into flats to reduce crowding – and to find new income.”
% who believe working from home is productive, by family status: Living alone 60% Living with kids (under 5) 64% Living with kids (5-12) 67% Living with kids (13+) 67% Living with other adults 62%
Gensler
pages 56 – 57
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| Welcome to the hybrid home
Change comes slowly, slowly, then…all at once. We are living through a ‘paradigm shift’ (of which WFH is a big part), the full consequences of which will play out over the next couple of years. I think it telling, however, that on the morning of writing (in mid-April 2021), headlines in the media include:
French lawmakers have moved to ban short-haul internal flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to reduce carbon emissions. The RAC want to deter SUV drivers and frequent fliers – and persuade the wealthy to insulate their homes well. Steve Gooding, from the RAC Foundation, said: “We should all choose the right vehicle for the right trip to cut the size of our carbon footprint.”
The UN reports that the world’s wealthiest 1% produce double the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%. The wealthiest 5% alone – the so-called “polluter elite”– contributed 37% of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.
Virgin Atlantic boss warns of long-term hit to business travel Shai Weiss questions whether corporate trips will ever fully recover from the pandemic.
Projection for International Travel 2022+ 54%
Less
Same
46%
More Knight Frank
pages 58 – 59
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Will WFH relieve city centre congestion? “Virus prompts cooped-up Londoners to head for the hills,” reported The FT in mid-September 2020. Without the need to be in the office from 9-5, there’s been a rush to buy in the Home Counties, the West Country, the Yorkshire Dales and even further afield, which the UK government’s holiday on stamp duty further facilitated. In January 2021 the FT reported that, “For the first time in 30 years, London’s population is falling. Coronavirus has stemmed the flow of migrants into the capital and created new reasons for residents to depart. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, almost 700,000 foreign-born residents may have left the city, according to one estimate by the government-funded Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE).” “Meanwhile, the number of Londoners departing the city and buying homes elsewhere has increased. Estate agency Hamptons International estimates that departing Londoners bought 73,950 homes outside the capital last year, the highest number since 2016 — and the highest proportion of sales outside of London since before the financial crisis.” According to the Nationwide Building Society, August 2020 saw house prices rising at their fastest pace in 16 years. London’s workers’ flight (as it’s being called in the press) is projected to be replicated across most of our heavily congested cities. And because WFH will require fewer long commutes, moving away from our cities will be a more viable option for many, meaning the flight of professional workers from our cities and the resulting pressures on housing stock are only going to increase.
The average space designed for living supports the average employee better than the average space designed for working. Leesman
A headline in The Guardian in March 2021 reports, ‘Cornwall overtakes London as most searched location for UK movers,’ with Rightmove reporting that flexible working is prompting people to leave cities. The article suggested that, “the coronavirus pandemic sparks a new era of flexible working and lifestyle changes that have fuelled a surge of interest in relocating to rural locations. A year on from the start of the pandemic, a move to that dream home in the country appears to be uppermost in many people’s thoughts, with rural locations and coastal towns and villages at the top of the property search list.” “The same trend has been seen in the commercial sector, with a shift away from traditional city centre offices. IWG, the shared office space company formerly known as Regus, reported a 20% surge in demand for office space in rural locations and a 32% increase in suburban locations compared with a year ago. City centre office location enquiries, meanwhile, have dropped by 11%. There has also been a dramatic increase in homebuyer interest in more remote rural areas, including the Isle of Skye, Braemar in the Cairngorms National Park, and locations in Norfolk and East Sussex. ‘The standout trends over the past year have been increased demand for countryside and coastal living, more people making the dream of a detached home a reality, and the increased appeal of a garden,’ said Tim Bannister, Director of property data at Rightmove.”
The challenges of Remote Working Boston Consulting Group
再
| Welcome to the hybrid home
of employees working from home rank new technology hardware as the number one area of support that would make remote working easier. Accenture COVID-19 Consumer Research July 2020
managers feel it is harder to control and 24% of drive productivity while remote of managers believe it is harder to ensure 39% team engagement and connection of employees believe remote makes it harder to 51% maintain work culture, especially onboarding
pages 60 – 61
HE BURBS
IS SUE 2
ORE ROOM LESS MONEY
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M O T FR R FA I M E E E E TI MI & M L E Y
Relationship Buildings®
QUIET AND P E AC F U L GOOD L O CA L SCHOOL GOOD
B R OA D B A N D
CORNISH C OA S T LONG COMMUTE S PA C E F O R A PROPER HOME OFFICE
“ Fewer workers commuting to offices, fewer face-to-face meetings and conferences means fewer offices, hotels and business travel are going to be needed. Where we choose to live (and work) will begin to shift the balance of city, suburban and country living.”
GOOD COUNTRY WA L K S
20%
RURAL OFFICE S PA C E
+
L O CA L FA R M E R S MARKET H O M E
O FF IC
VIRTUAL
E
pages 62 – 63
HOME COUNTIES
MEETING
D G A IN E W N G O A N A R I L T W IL S B V A U G P
WTIH COMMUNAL ALLOTMENTS
R
SUBURBIA
£
PAY % L E S S HOUSE WTIH G A R AG E
SUBURBIA
MO /LES
D E TAC H E D HOUSE
SUBURBIA
STAMP DUTY H O L I DAY
GREAT VIEWS
SHORT COMMUTE
THE
LARGE GARDEN
IG
LONG COMMUTE
FL S
BRAEMAR
E
G
N
HOME OFFICE
A
H C
ISLE OF SKYE LARGE S PA R E BEDROOM
£
PAY % L E S S
FIBRE B R OA D B A N D CONNECTIVITY
THE WEST COUNTRY
ROLLING HILLS
O R H KF O R M O E M
EASY AC C E S S TO LONDON
STAMP DUTY H O L I DAY
W
SHORT COMMUTE
CA I R N G O R M S NATIONAL PA R K
CHANGE
ER RK O W
“There’s still nowhere else in Europe with more expensive housing or public transport, or more draining journeys to work, than London.” Andy Haldane Chief Economist Bank of England
CHANGE
+
SUBURBAN OFFICE S PA C E
T H
Leesman
32%
CUTE V I L L AG E
EASY COMMUTE
CHANGE
W O B R A L K/ A N L C IFE E
E TIES
83% of home working employees agreed that their homes enable them to work productively - a higher proportion than average office (64%) and even outstanding workplaces (78%). But informal social interaction (55%) and learning from others (66%) were the least supported.
Relationship Buildings®
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ve working Most UK workers belie and from home is effective productive: their 71% are satisfied with m home experience working fro ng work/life 52% believe maintaini at home balance is easier to do to find time to 48% think it is easier ork at home complete individual w from home is 64% believe working productive Gensler
“I am confident that cities will prove their resilience and appeal – they will bounce back stronger and better as a consequence (of Covid-19). In 1920, New York and London were the largest cities in the world. Today they are not even in the top 10 – overtaken by a superleague of megacities, mostly in continental Asia. Cities are in a constant state of evolution, forever changed by the technology of their time.
Gym Garden Centre
Dining Cinema
Neighborhoods have seen a resurgence. The ideal of being able to live, work, sleep, shop, dine, be educated, entertain and be entertained – with all the venues for as many of those activities as possible to be within walking distance of each other. Perhaps the obsolete office building becomes the residential tower of the future … if you can relax about zoning, then perhaps the department store which is zoned as retail can be rezoned for leisure, as a cinema, or for industry. Zoning needs to be flexible to deliver the new living and working environments that younger generations are demanding”. Sir Norman Foster
School
Bakery
Home
Work
Shopping
| Welcome to the hybrid home
“The huge population of London means that, traditionally, it’s the most searched-for location. The evolution for many from balancing their laptop on the end of a bed last March to making an office a permanent addition to a home has led to a need for even bigger homes than before. The Rightmove research found that detached homes have been the ‘sweet spot’, while ‘garden’ has been the most popular keyword on property searches over the last nine months, as people look to trade up (which is of course doable if you swap limited and more valuable city centre space for more expansive rural space) for extra rooms, a garage or space from their neighbours.” “The biggest shift in the proportion of city dwellers looking to relocate has been in London, where 52% of inquiries are about moving out of the capital, compared with 39% a year ago. ‘It has been an incredibly busy year as people rethink the types of homes they want to buy and where they want to live,’ said Emma Ward, a director at Groundrys Estate Agents in Cornwall. ‘Some are moving here to be closer to family while others are looking for a complete change in lifestyle.’” This is confirmed by a Guardian article from October 2020 titled, “The great rebalancing: working from home fuels rise of the ‘secondary city’”. Journalist Elle Hunt reported, “So-called ‘secondary cities’ – towns and rural areas accustomed to being runnersup against big urban centres – may indeed spy an opportunity. In the US, the state of Minnesota has been pouring investment into broadband to make remote workers a cornerstone of its economy.” “This month, it declared 23 towns as ‘telecommuterfriendly’, creating a network to track and improve broadband speeds, and to compare notes on how to attract and support remote workers. ‘Ultimately we want to get to a place where the whole state is telecommuter-friendly,’ says Steve Grove, commissioner for the Department of Employment and Economic Development. He sees huge potential for rural areas offering quality of life but not much potential for employment; teleworking, Grove says, is the ‘sweet spot’. Some countries such as Estonia, Georgia, Barbados and Bermuda have special visas to attract the digital nomads rendered rootless by the pandemic. Cutler J Cleveland, Professor of Earth & Environment at Boston University, says the teleworking boom amounts to a fundamental restructuring of how we live and work – but without policy to underpin it, winners and losers could soon emerge. ‘We need to be aware of how it ripples through society.’”
This trend is being replicated internationally. A New York Times report from May 2020 suggested that before Covid a burning issue (for tech companies particularly) was how to reconcile bringing workers into large offices in expensive cities with the need for affordable housing: in fact, Facebook once paid cash bonuses to employees who lived within ten miles of its headquarters. The post-Covid world is seeing a shift away from this overreliance on offices in expensive and saturated hubs such as Silicon Valley/San Francisco, Seattle, New York and London. Over the last decade our cities globally had become too expensive for many workers to live in. In cities such as London, San Francisco and New York, younger workers have had to resign themselves to house shares with limited private space, which has put constraints on how they live and organise their private life. As noted in previous Orangebox research, this gave rise to the members’ clubs, co-working spaces, cafés and hotel reception spaces so beloved by millennials because it offered an escape, and a way to enjoy a better designed and more refined communal space. As expressed throughout this report, we’re only just starting to understand that the changes engendered by lockdown, from WFH to the vertiginous rise of online shopping, are likely to transform our cities. Media headlines such as, ‘Great Britain’s high streets lost more than 17,500 chain store outlets in 2020’, ‘61% of UK consumers foresee the end of the High Street’, ‘The American Retail Apocalypse: Who’s Gone Bust or Closing Stores?’ are rife. It’s clear there’s dramatic change ahead not just for the office and its immediate surroundings, but also for our wider town and city streets.
More than 2 in 5 managers believe productivity can increase and costs can decrease under remote working. Boston Consulting Group
pages 64 – 65
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casual cl hes
IT SEEMS MORE THAN ANYTHING E L S E T H AT W E A R I N G
Feeling super-comfortable and relaxed while working is clearly highly valued, as this infographic from an extensive survey by Boston Consulting Group shows. Wearing casual clothes is by far the most valued and rewarding of the five benefits of working from home: better, even, than having more time for family and friends or for hobbies. We therefore think that it’s worth considering the cultural changes the new mix of work and casual clothes will bring to our lives, as a light-hearted counterpoint to the more serious issues discussed in Relationship Buildings ®.
I S H I G H LY VA L U E D
“In the American imagination, the standard for professional work wear has long been a suit or a conservatively tailored dress, even for workers who don’t go into an office. That’s largely held true despite the successful invasion of ‘business casual’. That many of the world’s most profitable companies— Google, Facebook, and Apple among them—allow employees to come to work in jeans and sweatshirts all week has yet to meaningfully destabilize that perception.”
An enjoyable essay by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic magazine from summer 2020 sets the scene: “In theory, the question of what to wear to work shouldn’t pose an unanswerable dilemma. Most workplaces have at least some kind of dress code, and for many of those who greet customers and perform service jobs, a specific uniform is required. Even in the most ambiguous situations, context clues abound on the bodies of colleagues: If no one ever wears jeans, you probably shouldn’t either.”
“The seapage of work beyond the office is one of the defining experiences of modern employment— and from one perspective, the erasure of dress codes isn’t helping. In the past, you could come home and take off your uniform or office attire with the knowledge that you were totally free until the next day, mentally and physically. Now many people wear the same jeans they wore to work to cook dinner, cellphone and laptop never too far from reach, the mind and body never totally disconnected from labour.”
“Much of that confusion is the result of rapid change. Millennials, notorious murderers of American institutions and social norms, are now the largest generation in the country’s workforce. As the oldest members of that group, people in their late 30s accrue power in their organizations, they’ve started to reshape the meaning of ‘work clothes’ in their image—upending the very idea of a dress code as a single standard to which all should aspire. When they’re done, work clothes might be dead for good.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, a great number of column inches have been written about how the new mix of office and WFH will reshape the clothes we wear, blurring the lines between what we wear in the office and what we wear at home. I‘d like to dive into three articles from summer and autumn 2020: ‘The Zoom Shirt: how the pandemic changed work dress codes’ from The Guardian, UK; ‘Goodbye, Blazers; Hello, Coatigans’ from The New York Times; and ‘Heels or hoodies? How workwear is changing’ from The FT.
The most important benefits of WFH Percentage of employees highlighting aspect as a benefit of remote working. pages 66 – 67
Boston Consulting Group
47% More time for family and friends
“ I think we are able to work from home effectively because we’ve done it face to face before. We built a foundation and I think it’s part of human nature. Can we do things more flexibly? Absolutely. When I look at the extent to which people commute and the toll it takes on their work/life balance, I think we can come up with better solutions.” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet
WFH and Covid will also change how we dress at work. “ The pandemic may have ended formality forever; office wear was already becoming more relaxed. It’s a shift that’s been occurring for years, as employers in more buttoned-up industries like financial services competed for talent with tech companies and upstarts that had their own, more laid-back work cultures.” CNN
47%
More time for hobbies
69%
Wearing casual clothes
36%
Bringing whole self to work
49%
Personalised workspace
| Welcome to the hybrid home
Relationship Buildings®
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IS SUE 2
“Millennials, notorious murderers of American institutions and social norms, are now the largest generation in the country’s workforce. As the oldest members of that group, people in their late 30s accrue power in their organizations, they’ve started to reshape the meaning of work clothes.” The Guardian piece reported that, “Work dress codes have radically altered during the pandemic. According to a poll from market research group NPD, only 10% of people get dressed for working from home at the start of the day and then change into comfortable clothes later. With virtual video conferencing as the only contact with our colleagues, one item of clothing that has become essential is the so-called ‘Zoom shirt’. According to Urban Dictionary this is the, ‘shirt or blouse that’s kept on the back of your desk chair to quickly be presentable for video conferences.’ A recent poll by LinkedIn found that 42% of camera-ready home workers owned one.”
“The pandemic has shifted people’s ideas about what to wear, with a focus on simplicity and pareddown wardrobes. ‘Outfit of the day’ culture is no longer relevant in this new normal. ‘I think it’s safe to say that dress codes have been gradually relaxing for some time now,’ says Charlie Teasdale, style director at Esquire magazine. ‘The recent benchmark seems to be the shifting attitude of financial institutions which have all got rid of suits and ties for most employees,' he says. Last year, Goldman Sachs relaxed their dress code, asking staff to exercise ‘good judgement’ in what they wore, while a 2018 poll found that only one in 10 people still wore suits to work.”
“’It allows you to retain an image of professionalism on camera without having to get kitted out in full office attire, when you’re sitting at your kitchen table all day,’ says Rupert Wesson, Director at Debretts. ‘Dressing in a formal manner helps you look and feel more polished. It conveys respect to others. A study actually found that employees were more productive when casual dress was permitted. The ‘Zoom shirt’ supports this idea.’”
“Another factor is the rise of shared office spaces, where companies share hot desk areas. ‘This means that attitudes to the workplace and workwear are becoming more casual,’ says Wesson. There’s a chance our work dress code will be permanently altered. ‘Lots of people will opt to continue working from home so the nature of workplaces and dress codes will become even more fluid than it was before lockdown,’ says Teasdale. ‘There’s a new commute too: people are cycling (or scooting or running) into work more often, too, so the rigours of that will have an effect on how people dress as well.’ By the time we go back to offices, these factors and consumers’ increased awareness of the environmental impacts of the fashion industry could lead to the biggest change we’ve seen.”
“ Regardless of when people go back to the office, I think people have grown comfortable with what they’re wearing. I just can’t see people giving away the feeling of comfort.”
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“ In the past you couldn’t have a kid walking in the background during a team meeting, now it’s normal.”
Kantar
T SALES IN I U S , 6 1 0 2 E SINC LEN BY MORE L A F E V A H K U THE THAN 24%
“ I think the pandemic has caused many consumers to rethink how they consume and get dressed each day. The reality is consumers still want variety and fun from their wardrobes without the waste to their wallet or the planet.”
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The New York Times reported on the drop in standards being experienced as a by-product of supercomfortable WFH attire when they noted, “An article in The New Yorker from the summer of 2020 reported that ‘A Florida circuit judge named Dennis Bailey sent a letter to local lawyers about proper attire during Zoom court hearings. “It is remarkable how many attorneys appear inappropriately on camera,” he wrote. “We’ve seen many lawyers in casual shirts and blouses, with no concern for illgrooming, in bedrooms with the master bed in the background, etc. One male lawyer appeared shirtless and one female attorney appeared still in bed, still under the covers. So, please, if you don’t mind, let’s treat court hearings as court hearings.”” They concluded by warning that, “As many professional women have found themselves in an extended period of remote work, their notions of work wear have transformed, shaking up businesses that have sought to outfit them for the office. American office attire was already facing the effects of ‘casualization’, but as the pandemic drags on, the shift is accelerating and may stick around for good.” The FT reported on the personal experiences of city workers returning to London workplaces, albeit briefly in the summer of 2020: “On her first day back in July, with a client meeting in the diary, Rachael took a Sandro knit dress out of its dry-cleaning plastic and paired it with a smart cardigan blazer and ballet flats. ‘It actually felt really nice to get dressed up again,’ she says. ‘For me, clothes are how I feel more confident and powerful.’ Rachael was one of several lawyers, bankers, civil servants and consultants I spoke to a fortnight ago about dressing to go back to the office. For many, rediscovering forgotten shirts, trousers and even ties, with all their promise of the outside world, had become a relief and an occasion. Even if they were coming in to work just one or two days a week, the psychological shift was palpable.”
“ Office workers, especially woman, won’t be used to formal or uncomfortable clothing any more. I think the biggest impact in our industry (management consulting) where business-casual will continue to be the norm due to client meetings, might be the shoe etiquette for woman. I think it will become perfectly acceptable for woman to wear flat shoes or even sneakers to the office.” The FT
“Workwear was already in flux before lockdowns began. Suits were becoming less popular (according to Kantar, UK suit sales fell by more than 24% from 2016 to 2020), and attitudes at big banks and city law firms had relaxed even before ‘waist-up dressing’ took hold. For many, the professional persona projected by heels and tailoring has been replaced by more rounded, domestic impressions of colleagues via glimpses of kids, cats and questionable interiordesign choices. ‘It’s a cliché, but the lockdown has accelerated existing trends: even five years ago it would be odd for a male associate to walk around with an open collar if away from his desk. Now it looks more unusual if they are wearing a tie.’” “When a business consultant briefly returned to her near-empty offices on the Strand in central London this summer, she relished the opportunity to wear hoodies and less make-up, and match her clothes to the weather rather than the dress code. She expects to see more variety in how people express themselves: ‘Some will be more casual but others will want to find their own style of formal.” As we have more flexible working, so too more flexible wardrobes.’” Although in the introduction to this section I said we should be wary of making too many sure-thing projections, I’m more that happy to close this aside on clothes in the workplace with a projection coming out of Japan… “Pyjama suits are next big thing as formal wear is hit under Covid” was the headline for a Guardian article in February 2021, which noted that, “working from home pyjamas had been launched by two Japanese firms who combined the latest hybrid of the suit and loungewear.” They suggested that WFH, “has rubbished the idea of formal dress codes, as sales of suits have suffered and in this instance been replaced with the ‘pajama suit’. It is made of the same fabric as pajamas but looks like a suit, from its cut to the buttons on the sleeves.” The WFH jammies are described as, “business on the top, loungewear on the bottom.” Perfect for super-comfortable WFH Zoom calls.
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Google Data
AFTER THE SECON D LOCKDOWN, SALES FOR WOM ENS PYJAMAS ROSE BY 110%
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Why innovation will flip Zoom gloom The primary reason for the success of WFH appears to be the rise and rise in the use of our loved and loathed video conferencing (VC) tech. Growth statistics bear this out. Throughout the pandemic, all the leading players expanded rapidly, with both Zoom and Google Meet showing unprecedented growth. Zoom’s most recent figures suggest the platform has 300 million daily meeting participants, compared to just 10 million in December 2019 (counting both free and paying users), an increase of 2900% since the end of 2019. Google Meet’s figures hover around 100 million participants logging into meetings every day, and from March to June 2020 Microsoft Teams grew by 894%. In October 2020, Microsoft announced 115 million daily active users. Overall, video conferencing has seen a 535% rise in daily traffic in 2020 and some surveys show that 90% of people find it easier to get their point across on video, with 76% of employees using video conferencing for remote work. 40 million users were also conferencing on Skype daily during the first half of 2020. There is no doubt that video conferencing has been revolutionary, because by allowing us all to work collaboratively and effectively, no matter where our computer sits, it is helping WFH become the new normal. Familiarity breeds contempt, however, and most of us are all too familiar with Zoom fatigue. The good news is that the mass overnight take-up of this tech is likely to encourage the rapid development of a toolbox of assets aimed at enhancing VC and making it more pleasurable to use. In January 2021 The FT reported, “Zoom fatigue may be real but the shift to virtual meetings is one of the more helpful changes to have taken place in the past year. Not only do they cut out long commutes and jet-lagged business trips, but they appear to have sharpened up start times and reduced cross-talk. Recorded meetings are very helpful for those of us who work with colleagues in different time zones too.”
Creativity in the office, efficiency at home – the hybrid model. Nicholas Bloom
“California video-conferencing company Zoom is currently trying to convince investors that video meetings have a long shelf life with Zoom Rooms, physical hardware set up permanently in offices that enables hybrid in-person/video meetings.” “Now that we are all more familiar with the concept, maybe it’s time to get a bit more adventurous? Options are, for now, still quite limited. There is Mmhmm, which works with Zoom and other video apps to let users customise their feeds with virtual backgrounds. Cosmos Video is a start-up that allows users to meet in virtual venues to try to recreate the feeling of working in a shared space.” “The one I like is Gather, a chat platform I was introduced to when a friend used it to host a Christmas party. Free for up to 25 people to use at a time, it has little avatars you move around using the arrow keys like in a video game. You can walk through spaces that look like a university, the moon or Times Square. As you approach another user, their video appears; walk away and it disappears. The retro graphics are cute but the best thing about Gather is that you can toddle your avatar away from the group and have a separate conversation with other users. It is the closest a video platform has come to imitating the experience of being in a group and turning towards one or two people to speak privately. With no end in sight to virtual meetings, I’m certainly ready for something more entertaining than the standard gallery view.”
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Reports across other media highlight new generation virtual office tech from companies such as Pragli, Sococo, Virbela,Walkabout Workplace and Wurkr, each with their own take on bringing virtual office spaces to your computer screen. “These are intended to run continuously in the background, showing in real time what your colleagues are doing through the medium of digital aerial views and walk throughs of office floorplans, avatars, or even 3D worlds. They aim to emulate the natural, rapid types of interactions that frequently take place in a physical workplace, like tapping someone’s shoulder to ask a question.
These platforms also display context about colleagues – Are they meeting with a client right now? Are they listening to music? – and they provide multiple pathways by which coworkers can informally connect.” While much of this may in time be viewed as unnecessary frou-frou, there’s no doubt that the race is on to substantially expand the potential of VC. We all stand to benefit from new tech with the ability to make WFH more rewarding and workable. Perhaps it’ll only be in hindsight that VC will be seen to be as a fundamental a change to the way we work as the telex, fax and email were before it, enabling more fluid and seamless connectivity that helps us communicate super-effectively.
The ideal WFH toolkit Desk, chair, screens/printer Computer, connectivity Tools for collaboration and fostering innovation – eg. MS Teams, Zoom, MURAL etc. Cyber Security guidelines and enablement Support and training Accenture
US executives planning new investment to support hybrid working 72% virtual collaboration tools 70% secure IT infrastructure 64% training managers for hybrid 55% new workplace spaces PwC
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