Productivity

The pandemic stay-at-home orders that emptied office buildings have many employers questioning their future square-footage needs. As businesses struggle through 2020, the lost benefits of having employees gathered in a single environment are becoming clearer, especially in terms of productivity.

Employee homes and apartments were never designed as work spaces. All of life’s distractions are within a 20-step distance in the typical residence. That COVID-19 weight gain? It happened while employees were working from home and making frequent trips to the kitchen. While offices may also have their distractions, removing employees from the focus-draining conditions in their homes allows them to fall into “the zone,” where they do their best work.

All business leaders should carefully consider how to enhance their productivity zones as workers return to the office because—for many employees—the zone is not at their kitchen table.

Collaboration

The pandemic has thrust business owners into survival mode, forcing them to slash budgets and allow staff to work from home. Months into this crisis, the cost of having a dispersed workforce includes a diminished ability to collaborate.

Most businesses can’t succeed unless their employees work together effectively. Collaboration is built through workplace relationships, which tend to breakdown when workers are remote. The simple act of two or three employees sitting down for coffee or lunch strengthens workplace bonds and enhances collaboration.

For more than a century, companies relied on face-to-face collaboration to achieve business strategies. As questions arise about the future of the office, executives must look beyond real estate costs and carefully consider how their organizations’ ability to collaborate will be affected by remote working.

Creativity

Working from home is not a replacement for the office. In fact, it’s becoming clear that businesses across many sectors need congregated employees to remain creative.

Great ideas might emerge during online meetings, but those flashes of inspiration might occur more often when a couple of employees bump into each other by the office coffee machine. Anyone who has ever sat in a room full of excited employees knows that the best brainstorming happens when people are together in a room, riffing on each other’s contributions.

Creativity is essential to innovation and new ways of doing businesses. Often, it is casual conversation amid cubicles or in the break room that lead to revolutionary ideas. A business owner must consider the risk to their company’s wellspring of creativity when weighing the value of office space.

Training

Companies have successfully used webinars and other virtual platforms to train or educate employees. When the pandemic and stay-at-home orders forced everyone into remote mode, virtual training wasn’t a big leap for many.

However, just as the shortcomings of remote learning have become obvious to parents with young kids, employers recognized years ago that the best training is in person. Training in a conference room requires a higher level of engagement from employees than a remote webinar, where an employee can easily ignore the training while directing their attention to an off-screen device or some distraction in the home.

Training in an office is more valuable because, as with classrooms for children, the attendees have entered a learning environment and they must shift into a learning state of mind. The home is an environment for family, relaxation and play, which is why so many children have struggled with remote learning. Similarly, adults need a learning space at work, not in the home.

Momentum

In order for a successful business to keep growing, there has to be a culture of institutional energy that motivates employees and propels the company’s momentum.

Maintaining an exciting purpose for what employees do is essential to momentum. Promoting a unity of purpose happened in offices through employee huddles, rallies and training sessions. The pandemic and remote working have upended the traditional forms of momentum building, but as stay-at-home orders ease many business leaders are looking at how their offices can once again become forums for staff motivation.

Remember that energy is contagious. Many employees will be happy to return to the office because the return marks the end of their social isolation. It’s a good time for businesses to plan how they will harness their employees’ pent-up energy to revive or accelerate momentum.

Culture

Office culture is an essential ingredient for a company’s success because offices are where diverse points of view are shared, impromptu meetings occur and relationship building happens.

The pandemic and remote working pose an existential threat to office culture because virtual platforms don’t foster vibrant cultural environments. Remote employees are not interacting to the degree that they were in the office, and that separation has a cost.

Without the office culture, there are no shared company values and there is no unity of purpose. Business leaders should consider how they will preserve office culture as they plan their future real estate needs.

Productivity

The pandemic stay-at-home orders that emptied office buildings have many employers questioning their future square-footage needs. As businesses struggle through 2020, the lost benefits of having employees gathered in a single environment are becoming clearer, especially in terms of productivity.

Employee homes and apartments were never designed as work spaces. All of life’s distractions are within a 20-step distance in the typical residence. That COVID-19 weight gain? It happened while employees were working from home and making frequent trips to the kitchen. While offices may also have their distractions, removing employees from the focus-draining conditions in their homes allows them to fall into “the zone,” where they do their best work.

All business leaders should carefully consider how to enhance their productivity zones as workers return to the office because—for many employees—the zone is not at their kitchen table.

Collaboration

The pandemic has thrust business owners into survival mode, forcing them to slash budgets and allow staff to work from home. Months into this crisis, the cost of having a dispersed workforce includes a diminished ability to collaborate.

Most businesses can’t succeed unless their employees work together effectively. Collaboration is built through workplace relationships, which tend to breakdown when workers are remote. The simple act of two or three employees sitting down for coffee or lunch strengthens workplace bonds and enhances collaboration.

For more than a century, companies relied on face-to-face collaboration to achieve business strategies. As questions arise about the future of the office, executives must look beyond real estate costs and carefully consider how their organizations’ ability to collaborate will be affected by remote working.

Creativity

Working from home is not a replacement for the office. In fact, it’s becoming clear that businesses across many sectors need congregated employees to remain creative.

Great ideas might emerge during online meetings, but those flashes of inspiration might occur more often when a couple of employees bump into each other by the office coffee machine. Anyone who has ever sat in a room full of excited employees knows that the best brainstorming happens when people are together in a room, riffing on each other’s contributions.

Creativity is essential to innovation and new ways of doing businesses. Often, it is casual conversation amid cubicles or in the break room that lead to revolutionary ideas. A business owner must consider the risk to their company’s wellspring of creativity when weighing the value of office space.