Do you imagine that companies opting for hybrid-work environments will adopt smaller commercial footprints?
Only 28% of Americans report that post-pandemic they go back to exactly the same activity as pre-pandemic. The other 72% report that at a minimum, they’d refuse to get into crowded elevators or lifts. So you’ve got a serious problem for what to do with high rises. In some sense that strikes me as the biggest issue for property is how to deal with skyscrapers. There are creative solutions but it’s not easy.
You found that work from home in the longer term will bring a 5% productivity boost post-pandemic. What are the components that contribute to that?
Three to four percent of that is saving on time that you spend commuting. The minority of it is, if you’re working from home two days a week, if it’s well managed you can be more productive. The reason is, basically, there will be a reorganization of work.
A well-organized company will set this up from the center and say, for example, the industrial team is going to come in Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. And then the industrial team has all their face-to-face meetings and training and clients on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Wednesday, Friday you’re now at home and you do all your quiet stuff like reading, writing, reports, expenses et cetera and that stuff turns out to be done more efficiently at home because it’s quieter.
There’s research that shows remote work makes it more difficult to get promoted. How will longer-term adoption of work-from-home impact that? Especially for women or parents in general who choose to work from home five days a week?
Who would choose to work from home more days post-pandemic is not random. For people with children under the age of 12, you find almost 50% more women than men choose to work from home five days a week. Already, among graduates with young kids there’s a big gender divide among who would choose to work from home five days a week. You hear it for people with disabilities, people who live far away. Working from home in a team where there are other people coming into the office is extremely costly in promotion.
If you let people choose [how often they work from home], my fear is the biggest cost in the long run is all the single young men come in five days a week, and college-educated women with a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old come in two days a week, and six to seven years down the road there’s a huge difference in promotion rates and you have a diversity crisis and, honestly, for companies you have a legal minefield of quite justifiable lawsuits.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.