I don't think fear of diseases will drive it. I will be driven by profits. Companies have realized that you can have 1,000 people in what used to be a 200 person office by having them work from home most days. The savings are substantial.
Employees too will save. You can easily live 50-100 km away in a suburb if you only need to commute to work once a week or maybe less.
Of course, when employees don't have to pay dearly to live downtown NYC or centrally in London, companies will soon realize that they can pay them less as well.
You could argue that this could have happened without corona, but culture is hard to change. What many companies have seen now, is that virtually entire offices can work remotely, and that even sales people and mid level managers can do their jobs remotely.
Also, technology has improved. Bandwidth is far better today than 10 years ago. Companies use cloud solutions to a larger extent where before employees were hooked up to a local server room. The work station is now a laptop connecting via WiFi. 10 years ago, most used desktops with cat cables.
It has already started by companies continuing the lock-down by offering limitless or plentiful work from home days for employees. Then, they will fund proper chairs and desks at home, maybe part of the electricity bill. It's far cheaper than having to pay for your cubicle in NYC.
Growing companies will delay the plans of leasing more office space. They will introduce work-from-home policies in stead. Companies in financial trouble will get rid of the office more quickly than otherwise.
I thought that at least employees in their 20's would want to work in an office. After all, office life is a large part of your social life when you are a young professional. But in the companies I know of that did surveys in the last weeks of the lock-down on who wanted to return to the office first, even the young employees chose to continue to work from home. These were surveys involving hundreds or thousands of employees and more than 60 percent of the young employees wanted to work from home although the offices were in new class A buildings.
Yes, you will miss out of the part of your social life that offices did provide. But that will free up time for social life elsewhere. On your own terms. Yes, there are certainly things that are more efficient face-to-face. But how many hours did employees waste commuting to the office, talking to colleagues at the water cooler, attending meetings, going for lunch breaks etc.? Office life was never super efficient either.
I dunno, one of the big reasons to have employees in an office (in tech and knowledge work in particular) is for serendipitous interactions to spawn new ideas. A couple million a month in rent can be worth that next $100m idea.
Employees too will save. You can easily live 50-100 km away in a suburb if you only need to commute to work once a week or maybe less.
Of course, when employees don't have to pay dearly to live downtown NYC or centrally in London, companies will soon realize that they can pay them less as well.
You could argue that this could have happened without corona, but culture is hard to change. What many companies have seen now, is that virtually entire offices can work remotely, and that even sales people and mid level managers can do their jobs remotely.
Also, technology has improved. Bandwidth is far better today than 10 years ago. Companies use cloud solutions to a larger extent where before employees were hooked up to a local server room. The work station is now a laptop connecting via WiFi. 10 years ago, most used desktops with cat cables.
It has already started by companies continuing the lock-down by offering limitless or plentiful work from home days for employees. Then, they will fund proper chairs and desks at home, maybe part of the electricity bill. It's far cheaper than having to pay for your cubicle in NYC.
Growing companies will delay the plans of leasing more office space. They will introduce work-from-home policies in stead. Companies in financial trouble will get rid of the office more quickly than otherwise.
I thought that at least employees in their 20's would want to work in an office. After all, office life is a large part of your social life when you are a young professional. But in the companies I know of that did surveys in the last weeks of the lock-down on who wanted to return to the office first, even the young employees chose to continue to work from home. These were surveys involving hundreds or thousands of employees and more than 60 percent of the young employees wanted to work from home although the offices were in new class A buildings.
Yes, you will miss out of the part of your social life that offices did provide. But that will free up time for social life elsewhere. On your own terms. Yes, there are certainly things that are more efficient face-to-face. But how many hours did employees waste commuting to the office, talking to colleagues at the water cooler, attending meetings, going for lunch breaks etc.? Office life was never super efficient either.