COMMENT Despite the gradual easing of lockdown measures, it seems unlikely that over the coming weeks employees across the UK will return to their workspaces as suddenly as they left them. Facebook has predicted that 50% of its workforce will be working remotely in a decade’s time. Others will undoubtedly follow suit in allowing more flexible practices to continue. In fact, surveys show that 71% of UK businesses plan to adopt flexible working permanently in the wake of Covid-19.
As a result, the role offices play in our working lives will change radically. Large headquarters, once seen as the centre of power and status for corporates, will now have to act as a digital hub, powering a more remote workforce increasingly catered to by a decentralised network of smaller, regional workspaces. And to meet these new real estate needs, businesses are likely to turn more and more to the flourishing flexible workspace market.
If it they are to survive, traditional offices will have to adapt, delivering a product that embraces the technology and the flexibility to meet these new post-pandemic working norms.
Disparate workforce
Past research has found that slow or outdated technology costs businesses approximately 72 minutes of productivity per day. It is a challenge many of us have faced when rapidly adapting to homeworking during lockdown. However, a long-term shift towards working more flexibly after Covid-19 is set to put even greater pressure on companies to guarantee that their teams have the quality and capacity of connectivity required to maintain productivity.
So rather than simply housing employees, post-pandemic offices will have to take on a new role: acting as miniature datacentres or digital nuclei. To cater to tenants still in their cloud-based transition, these sites will have to house more sophisticated, robust and advanced technological infrastructure than ever before to manage increased demand for remote network access, while maintaining the standards of security required by data protection laws.
Occupants were recognising this even before Covid-19, with 72% of CRE tenants believing that unconnected spaces will become obsolete in the near future. While innovative flexible workspace providers have long embraced such capabilities, traditional offices spaces have often lagged behind and will have to modernise to be fit for a post-Covid-19 workforce.
Focusing on flex
As businesses transition to more remote working for the long term, their real estate footprint is likely to decentralise. Instead of relying on one central city-based office, a dispersed network of smaller, regional flexible spaces will likely emerge, with that hub of digital infrastructure at its heart. A greater focus on the growing flexible workspace market, as opposed to traditional offices, will not only allow workers to stay closer to home, but will also enable businesses to adapt their real estate needs more easily, as they recover from the disruption of the pandemic.
Growing demand for flexible workspace has been building even before the pandemic, with businesses turning away from the long, rigid leases of traditional providers to shorter leases within serviced spaces, which provide a fully managed office for one fee. In fact, in the past five years, demand for flexible spaces has grown by more than 50% according to Instant Offices. It is clear that Covid-19 will only accelerate the growth of flexible space and traditional landlords will have to adapt to avoid tenants voting with their feet.
The CRE sector has been slow to recognise the benefits of digital innovation, lagging behind new, dynamic and more flexible office providers. But Covid-19 provides an opportunity to adapt, and implement vital technologies to make our buildings smarter, more sophisticated, robust, and secure.
This will have to be matched with greater focus on flexible space in the months and years to come, as businesses look to decentralise their real estate needs and cater to a more footloose workforce. The CRE sector has the potential to deliver on this new normal, but it must embrace it now for the workers of tomorrow.
Richard Morris is director at technologywithin
