Changing Workspaces: Conflicting dual nature of hybrid offices

The Post-Pandemic Office.” “The Distributed Age.” “The YOLO Economy.” For the better part of a year now, management experts, business journalists and the high priests of the LinkedIn blogosphere have been telling us that the pandemic killed the traditional white-collar workplace and was replacing it with … well, something else. But reports of the office’s death have been greatly exaggerated before, and conservators of the old ways still remain — those who, like the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, believe the shift to remote work is “an aberration” to be corrected as quickly as possible. And sure enough, demand for office space, though still not what it was before the pandemic, seems to be on the rebound. So how different will the future of work really be from its past, and what will it look like? Here’s what people are saying. 

As of March, American workers were supplying about 45 percent of their labor services from home, according to research from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute. That’s a significant decline from the beginning of the pandemic, when more work was being done at home than on site, but still almost 10 times the pre-pandemic rate. And there are good reasons to think things won’t simply snap back to the way they were: 

For one thing, the researchers note, the stigma of working from home — which used to be seen by some managers as a form of shirking — has now effectively disappeared. 

While about a quarter of employees say they never want to work remotely after the pandemic, about three-quarters want the option, a Microsoft report finds. The preference is so strong that most workers say they would even take an 8 percent pay cut to maintain the ability to work from home two or three days a week. On the whole, bosses want workers back in the office, but many understand they will have to compromise. If they don’t, many fear they’ll lose employees to other companies, Amy C. Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, told The Times. And between the lower overhead and increased productivity that accompanied the shift to remote work, there’s a business incentive, too. 

At the same time, workers aren’t entirely satisfied with the way things are: 

About two-thirds say they want more in-person time with co-workers — a preference that seems especially prevalent among those under 25, most of whom lack a dedicated home office space and have struggled to connect with colleagues, Emma Jacobs writes for The Financial Times. Productivity may have increased during the pandemic, but that’s in part because the line between work and leisure, hardly sharp before, has gotten even blurrier. In fact, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the shift to remote work lengthened the work day by about an hour, even as it reduced the amount of time spent in meetings. 

“Just because we’ve managed to weather this storm doesn’t mean it’s an optimal way to work,” Ms. Edmondson said. “If you’re in a shipwreck and a piano top floats by, it becomes a lifesaver. But it’s not the way you would have designed a lifesaver.” In an effort to design a better lifesaver, as it were, a majority of employers plan on offering an “office-centric” hybrid model where people have the option of working from home for part of the week, Lionel Laurent writes for Bloomberg. 

By the numbers: In all, the researchers at the University of Chicago estimate the share of work done remotely will level off at about 20 percent after the pandemic restrictions end. That’s about half as much remote work as is happening right now, but still four times the pre-pandemic share. 

Many think the hybrid model will change white-collar work for the better, especially once the pandemic abates. “Your options are not ‘in the office, with other people, 9 to 6 every day’ or ‘miserable and alone in my small apartment,’” the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes. Instead: “A day or two or three in the office, depending on the needs of the week. A day in your actual home. A day with friends, in one of their homes, and/or a day at a co-working space or a coffee shop or, one of my personal favourites, a bar at the end of the day, with the clatter and chatter of other people around you.” But others are less bullish. “A lot of people assume that because we know how to work together [in the office], we know how to work apart, then we can do hybrid,” Kristi Woolsey, an associate director at Boston Consulting Group, told The Financial Times. “But hybrid is a third way. It’s incredibly difficult to do.” 

Sid Sijbrandij, the chief executive officer of GitLab, argues that the hybrid model will create a cumbersome and potentially discriminatory system of tiered communication: “Eventually, remote workers will find that they are not getting promoted at an equal rate, because they are less visible, and the productive remote employees will leave for all-remote companies that invest in their remote team members.” 

For the same reason, the hybrid model could end up worsening gender inequities in the workplace, as college-educated women with young children are much more likely than men to want to work from home full time. “Adding this up, you can see how the let-them-choose approach could lead to a diversity crisis,” says Nicholas Bloom, one of the University of Chicago researchers. “Single young men who generally opt to go into the office five days a week could rocket up the firm while employees with young children, particularly women, prefer to work from home and are held back.” At companies reducing their physical footprint, employees won’t be guaranteed their own desk every day of the week. That could maximise the number of people dissatisfied with their arrangements, irritating both those who would prefer to work entirely in the office and those who would prefer to work entirely at home. It’s also a way for employers to pass on the cost of real estate, a burden that will be disproportionately borne by younger and lower-income workers. 

Bosses, too, have apprehensions about the logistics of a hybrid model. “If Monday and Friday are likely to be overwhelmingly popular, what then?” Mr. Laurent writes. “If employees are told to pick different days, when will they collaborate with colleagues face-to-face? This will take time, effort and investment to manage.” 

A cautionary tale: “At its worst,” Bryan Walsh writes at Axios, “hybrid work may resemble the subpar hybrid schooling too many American students have endured over the past year, with overworked teachers struggling to simultaneously handle in-person and remote students.” 

As David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded in a report last summer, a reduction in office time and business travel will mean steep declines in demand for “myriad other workers who feed, transport, clothe, entertain, and shelter people when they are not in their own homes.” 

The effect will be especially pronounced in cities. Given that the service industry has provided the primary source of job growth in recent decades for urban non-college-educated workers, they wrote, “these changes in the economic structure of urban life would again fall heavily on the employment prospects of urban low-paid workers.” 

According to McKinsey & Company, more than half of displaced low-wage workers may need to shift to higher-wage work requiring different skills to remain employed. 

Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor with NYT©2021 

The New York Times