02 Nov Work from Home or the Office, which will it be?
Hello everyone, I hope you all are well and Covid free. As you all know the landscape is changing with the unknown of when and how we will defeat the virus. When will we get back to normal times, or will we? Will we have a vaccine soon? Will big businesses keep up the trend of downsizing or altogether getting rid of office space, saving millions in office space leasing.
If you have read the papers you see big companies such as REI have put up their brand new building for sale in Bellevue that was to be their headquarters until Covid hit. Credit Karma in San Francisco signed a lease for 106,000 square foot office that was going to be their new corporate office, right before Covid hit and decided not have their people move into it. They are now looking to offload the space and keep their people working from home.
I recently played golf with a couple of guys from CB Richard Ellis and I asked how business was, their response was that they are playing more golf now than ever.
Mckinsey & Company says that estimates suggest that early this April, 62 percent of employed Americans worked at home during the crisis, compared with 25 percent a couple of years ago. According to Mckinsey research, 80 percent of people questioned report that they enjoy working from home. Forty-one percent say that they are more productive than they had been before and 28 percent that they are as productive. Many organizations think they can access pools of talent with fewer locational constraints, adopt innovative processes to boost productivity, create an even stronger culture, and significantly reduce real-estate costs.
I say all this because the next normal will most likely be some kind of hybrid work environment. Maybe your workforce will be split, 50 percent working from home and 50 percent working in the office environment. The one thing we know for sure is that we don’t know what will happen. I have no idea if we will ever go back to life as it was pre-covid. What I do know is that many of our customers and businesses in general may have put together a solid plan in case we have to work from home again and some have not. There is the old saying hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
If you have prepared for the worst, kudos to you, if you have not, we need to get you up to speed. By we, I mean business owners that will be affected by not being prepared. When I say prepared, what strategies have you put in place to communicate with one another in a distributed work force? How will your people communicate with your customers in a work at home environment? Will they use their cell phones or will they have tools in place because of the work from home strategy? We ask these questions because in the last 7 months we have seen it all, and helped customers get to where they need to be to maintain business in a challenging environment.
I know I have written about this at nauseum and I am sorry, but I am not sorry to hopefully encourage folks to get ready and be prepared for the worst. If you want to be prepared and create a strategy to put your employees in a position to succeed during these challenging times, please reach out and let’s plan!