ACE colleagues met in an open forum in January 2021 to discuss a couple of topics at the forefront of peoples minds. Below is a brief summary of the conversation reagrding future office arrangements.

Planning for the post-pandemic office: What have we learned and what happens next?

To answer this question it is worth reflecting on our response to our organisations’ shifts to home working and moving online. Which leads us to consider how far can we say we have innovated successfully, as opposed to just muddling through?

This shift in working challenged us do certain things that many thought might be very difficult to do remotely. Examples include organisational change programmes and staff away days. For a number of organisations the results have been successful, and we continue to be surprised by how much we have adapted, and perhaps by how these things can in fact run better online and remotely.

There are clearly some organisations who have really struggled with the shift in culture to online and home working. However for most the significant adjustment has worked much better than expected. There are also clearly many wider potential positives to the changes we’ve seen, for example financially for our organisations and from a sustainability perspective by for example reducing travel.

So these things are possible, which leads to the question what does the future look like?

Many arm’s length bodies made a start to this prior to the most recent lockdown. Organisations invested significant amounts to make offices Covid-secure. However this often resulted in low take up of staff coming into the office. This perhaps points to how we should approach the next opening up.

We recognise any shifts back to office working will be phased as social distancing is likely to be with us for a while. Similarly timescales for this are very flexible and uncertain.

The key balance to strike is between what individuals want, what could work for our organisations, and what’s fair. Clearly all individual circumstances are different and therefore a nuanced approach is required in order to balance the individual need over that of the wider team.

Many organisations are thinking about how not to return to how it was before. We have moved from largely expecting people in the office to having to justify their presence. Examples of changes we might see include blended working contracts being the norm, travel undertaken only where essential, a far greater proportion of blended office space, much more technology in the office and at home, and a much wider geographical spread of staff.

However, the question remains: do we know how to work well remotely?

The sense is that productivity has not been reduced by remote working, but is it that we are just missing things? There remain some questions that many organisations still grapple with including for example:

• How do you integrate new people into a largely online organsiation?
• How do we bring in spontaneity of discussions that were very common in an office?
• How do we maintain health and wellbeing for remote staff?
• How do we match government agendas directing our decisions such as places for growth versus limited practical options we may have say as our leases come to an end?

So an interesting start to a conversation that no doubt will be one we continue to return to.