This is London's financial center, the City of London, at 1pm Around half a million people work here. Well, not any more. The Covid-19 pandemic has
changed our relationship with the office perhaps forever. Millions of white-collar workers have seen they don't have to be married
to a regimented commute-to-work, at-your-desk-by-nine system. Instead they have found they can have a more open relationship with the office. But the effects of that
change are significant, streets like this which at rush hour you could barely squeeze
down are now quiet and inside these towers
it's the same situation. Although after the pandemic,
things will get busier, it's not clear they will
return to the way they were. Survey after survey shows
workers want flexibility but more surprisingly, managers and bosses are listening and many
are joining the push for flexible work. So are these changes here to stay and if they are, what does
that mean for the office and those of us who work in them? During the Covid lockdown,
there's been a schism between those who've realized - wait, I need the office - like me
and those who are happy to spend less time there
like my co-producer Tom. When I take a coffee break, I get to see my three-year-old and that is great. I've enjoyed that a lot. And I'm also kind of fortunate, I have a good microphone here,
I have a camera from work, I can move it around
and hide my mess in time to do an interview. Like it has worked pretty well for me to do my job and do it in this
sort of isolated workstation that I've created. I live in a shared flat where it's hard to be productive and given the choice between an office with
a desk and free coffee and all the rest, it's a simple choice. I like being in the office. It just has to be different
for different people, right? Different people have different struggles and different people find
the office as a solution or find the office as a
part of that struggle. The Covid pandemic has forced a radical experiment on us. And the results of that
experiment are coming in. Companies now know if
employees can work remotely, they know if teams are
still being productive and workers have gotten
a taste for flexibility and they like it. Before the paradigm in
the office world was, I'm going to the office nine-to-five and if not, I have to explain why or I'm doing something unusual. Now, I know that I can stay
home one or two days a week or that I could come at different hours and that impacts overall demand. Dror Poleg is an author
and property advisor to some of the world's biggest companies. He argues things aren't going back to the way they were - deal with it. I think at some point things
change fundamentally. There's a difference
between employees being away or offices being empty
for two or three months and between offices being
empty for a year or 15 months like, you just don't go
back to the same place after such a length of period. Dror argues workers have adjusted, they've got new routines and habits. So what will become the new normal? Surveys show workers
are splitting their time between the office and home
and want to keep it that way. Management liked the idea too. A UK survey of over 2,000
office workers found most do not intend to spend five
days a week in the workplace, even when the pandemic
is over. With both bosses and employees seeing homeworking
as a long-term trend. A survey by business consultancy McKenzie of 800 global executives
found 15% will allow staff to work remotely two or more days a week. In the finance sector, the
Netherlands' biggest bank predicts that staff will be working
about half their time from home once the pandemic is over. And in Italy Uni Credit plans to have 40% of work done remotely after the crisis. It's important to say this shift is not being seen across the economy. In the U.S. more than 60% of
workers cannot work remotely, their jobs require at least
some physical presence, but for millions of white collar workers the scale and speed of this change should not be underestimated. In a prime market like New York or London or San Francisco or even
Shanghai or Hong Kong, a company spends between
12,000 to $20,000 a year on putting an employee
in a seat, in an office. Now, one of the most interesting questions that I think companies will
ask themselves now is not - okay, can I save money by
telling everyone to go home - but they can ask themselves
if I take $15,000 and spend it differently can I make my employee more productive? Can I make my employee happier? Can I maybe attract better
people than I currently have? And I think in many cases the answer to that question will be yes. Dror believes we are living through nothing short of a revolution in the way we use offices. And there are going to
be winners and losers. To destabilize the office and
to cause a revolution, you only need 10 to 15% of demand to shift and I think that's what's happening. Jack, there's been recent survey data that you've got hold of about
occupancy rates around here. What are they like? Are these buildings practically empty? Yeah, I mean, they're certainly
more than half empty. Jack Sidders is Bloomberg's European
commercial property reporter and he's been told privately what commercial real estate
agencies won't say publicly. If you were speaking to
them off the record then you'd detect a much more
significant amount of concern. And you actually you see it with some of the public statements, you've seen real estate leaders
come out and say publicly, look, we need to get people back, come on, come on politicians you
need to sort this out. So those of you who are feeling very comfortable, never coming back into the office, well bad news, experts
agree that for most of us we will still have a
relationship with the office just not as demanding but even if workers return
four out of five work days, that's still a huge reduction and it's got investor's attention. What you see if you look at share prices of the big office landlords is that they're down substantially this year. Much of the London, the big
London office landlords, are down 30, 40, 50% this year but the valuation of their
assets has barely changed. It's likely that both of
those numbers are wrong and it'll be somewhere in between. With growing consensus that office workers will be splitting their
time between the office and perhaps their home, flexible workspaces find
themselves well-positioned to take advantage. Tania Adir is the co-founder
and CEO of Uncommon, a London-based flexible working
company founded in 2015. She agrees things aren't going
back to the way they were but sees a bright future for the office. It's very difficult to run a team if people are completely in
different locations. Yes you can work from home, you can work from a
coffee shop one day a week but at the same time to
really have that connection between individuals where
I think ideas come to life, you do want to be present
in physical space together. Tania is betting offices will shift from being primarily places
where you go to get work done to places where you go to
collaborate and build teams. You don't necessarily
need to go to the office, you don't need to waste
the time of commuting. The reasons for that office to exist are fundamentally to come and meet your colleagues, collaborate, be able to come together
and work on the presentation on the new idea to exchange
sort of energies fundamentally with each other. This trend of making offices places for collaboration
has been going on for years but the Covid pandemic
has shifted the dial. The argument's not around
will work be more flexible, it's about how flexible it will be. The office of the future is not a place. The office of the future
is a network that allows me to enable my employees
to access whatever it is that they need to access right now in order to produce
their best possible work. And of course to be happy
and to keep coming back and to give their talents to my business and not to anyone else. Tania agrees that satellite offices will become more common
but argues for most of us, the office will still play a major role. Naturally when everything normalizes, people would want to still
have their headquarters, their culture, their identity
to be able to connect and I think there is a very loud voice out there saying we're all
very productive from home but I think there is a silent majority that are not that productive at home. And they just, they are not being necessarily being heard because your kids are around,
your pet is disturbing you, your neighbors doing decoration, renovation and making noise. After a year of working from home, the gloss may have come off
and many of us will start to miss the office.. But will
anyone, bosses or workers, really want to go back to the old ways? v but instead of cramming
us in the new office may well be spacier with
more room to collaborate. And most importantly, we
will come in when we need to, not because we have to.
