The impact of the pandemic on office life has been dramatic, but as we learn to live with Covid-19 what will the future hold. Luis Suarez, Neil Usher and Rob Cottrill join CILIP President Paul Corney for this issue’s President’s Musings.

Join CILIP’s third Presidential Debate on Wednesday 29 September, featuring Paul, Luis, Neil and Rob.

Over the last 18 months, people and organisations have shown remarkable adaptability and resilience. Daily routines have changed dramatically for many and, in the main, those who have been able to work from home have found the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Yet there are those who, perhaps unable to exert the same level of control in a distributed work environment, can’t wait to get their staff back to the office.

In August, the Daily Mail reported that one unnamed cabinet minister had suggested those who refused to come back to their desks should forfeit some pay. “People who have been working from home aren’t paying their commuting costs, so they have had a de facto pay rise, so that is unfair on those who are going into work.” The minister added: “If people aren’t going into work, they don’t deserve the terms and conditions they get if they are going into work.” This seems a long way away from February when the Financial Times ran a piece in its New Workplace series that noted, inter alia, that many organisations were reviewing their working practices.

Deutsche Bank said plans were being developed “towards the implementation of a hybrid future working model, combining the benefits of flexible working with the benefits of spending time together in the office”. Aon, the insurance broker, said it would undertake “an in-depth analysis of what the ‘future of work’ will look like ... which will involve a hybrid of working from offices, from home and other locations”.

In previous columns, I suggested that, until humans develop virtual peripheral vision and the ability to replicate the serendipitous exchange that comes from proximity, organisations would find it difficult to resist a return to previous ways of working.

Seth Godin in a recent blog noted: “As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems.”

Is the genie out of the bottle? Have we come too far in the last 18 months to go back to the old model of working? What will work look like in 18 months’ time? What will the place of work look like then and what, if anything, will the impact be on urban centres if the shift away from mass commuting continues?

In this column, timed to accompany the next Presidential Debate, on 29 September, I am asking three highly qualified practitioners to respond to a different, but linked question. Luis Suarez, who lives and works in Gran Canaria, is a prominent commentator on different ways of working – he has been at the forefront of the adoption of distributed working for the last two decades. Neil Usher, author of the acclaimed The Elemental Workplace, previously transformed the physical working environment at Sky. Rob Cottrill, Chief Executive Office of award-winning Eastbourne Borough Council, is overseeing the transformation of an urban centre.

Luis Suarez – Is the genie out of the bottle? Have we come too far in the last 18 months to go back to the old model of working? What will work look like in 18 months’ time?

In 2020 we, finally, learned the main reason why the vast majority of organisations didn’t adapt to digital technologies at the workplace was mainly motivation. It wasn’t a lack of funding, resources, time, manpower, adaptability, purpose, etc., etc. It was purely a lack of true leadership to anticipate what is now the “new-normal”. One where we are finally coming to terms with the fact that work has stopped being a physical space and, instead, it’s a state of mind. Work happens anywhere where you may well be with the digital tools as your disposal.

If there is anything the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us, it is that working from anywhere (usually, in a distributed manner) is no longer a dirty word. It’s OK. It’s just one other option we are growing fonder of, as it keeps reminding us that we still have a life, after all. It has shown us our incredible adaptation skills as human beings – literally switching from working in an office to working from home in a matter of days without our productivity suffering much as a result.

The genie is, definitely, out of the bottle. Eighteen months on and we are all now coming to terms with the fact that we need to decide for ourselves if we want to jump into the 21st century with all of these emergent business practices of working distributedly that the isolation economy has brought us. Or still linger around in the early 20th century, romanticising about the dreaded commute, corporate politics, bullying, bureaucracy, never-ending meetings and the almost unbearable posturing of face to face conversations, of keeping up appearances with a fancy status quo, influence, power and what not.

Throughout all of these past few months we have learned that the vast majority of knowledge work we do can be performed away from the traditional office. We have different social, digital tools that allow us to connect, learn, share and collaborate – perhaps even more effectively, to the point where we can, finally, spare ourselves of the many burdens of the physical workplace. Opening up instead, a whole new world of diversity and inclusiveness (for introverts or people with disabilities) from the comfort from our home offices. Our new limit? The whole business world, literally, not just our next door colleague(s).

The reality is the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a unique opportunity for us all to accelerate the adaptation to digital technologies that have been with us for the last 25 years and that we’ve decided to ignore and neglect. It sparked the development of new business models, as organisations adapted in order to keep afloat. And through the implementation of these new ways of working, we have finally understood the importance of localism with a global reach.

We are no longer taking for granted what we always had, but that we pretty much decided to obviate because we needed to go to work (i.e. the office): our spouses, our offspring, our pets, our neighbours, our favourite coffee shop, restaurant, our long walks in the neighbourhood, casually meeting and conversing with other people; in short, our local communities that give us all a sense of belonging, fulfilment, a true purpose.

As we approach the end of this tragic and rather dramatic pandemic, we should not forget that it’s not going to be the last one, nor is it going to be the last time we will have to face a global catastrophe (i.e. climate change extreme events). Throughout all of this time, we have learned how we need to be better prepared for next time around. The traditional concept of work happening in a physical space away from our local communities may well have its days numbered. Work has shifted into becoming a state of mind and, we now have the power to decide when, how, with whom, with what, and why we would want to work either from anywhere – including the office itself. The difference now? It will be more deliberate and purposeful. We will be going back to the office, but only because we want to, not because it’s the norm. Working distributedly from anywhere has already become the new-norm and it’s here to stay, so we better adapt accordingly. And pronto!

Neil Usher – Minimum viable workplace: our future office

For office dwellers, it hasn’t been a home working experiment. There’s been no hypothesis to test beyond survival. No time parameters. No feedback loop. Participation has been compulsory. And no-one has been monitoring, recording, or adjudging when enough has been learned, ready to call time. Governments have drawn boundaries with wildly differing interpretations of risk. Yet while the majority of workers continued to attend their place of work, exposed to viral whim and chance, the minority seized the narrative and thereby liberated us all.

As the possibility of resuming a recognisable working life has emerged, across borders and sectors, the enthusiasm for doing so has ranged from muted acceptance to outright rejection. As CEOs clutch at relevance with vague suggestions of their intentions on physical presence, we find ourselves once again pondering the ‘future of the office’.

There’s been a curious surprise that the pandemic has seen an increase in productivity for most. Yet for those who have long been committed to location-independent working that was never in doubt – it was just that many organisation’s weren’t too keen on taking the chance when the present model seemed to be working just fine. Why volunteer for catastrophe? That’s because productivity is doing what we know how to do today, co-ordinating and co-operating with our colleagues. Doing so online rather than face-to-face was hardly ‘digital transformation’. It was simply a pragmatic response. Those who crowed about the incredible effort they made to get everyone up and running out of the office were admitting to an embarrassing lack of appreciation of how and where much of their work was being done.

Pre-Covid, for several decades the function and form of the office had been converging on a model, of sorts – varied, amenity and service-rich (fully or part) shared spaces, consolidated into urban transport hubs. They tried to do everything for everyone, given the idea was we spent a portion of our life way beyond that contracted within its confines. Where tenancies were small, landlords were persuaded to act in loco parentis. More, more of everything.

It was growing rather dull, ‘workplace strategy’ was copy and paste. Each of these homages to internal flexibility, however, revealed a broader appreciation of the opportunity as they were usually half empty at any point of any day; a quarter empty on Friday. It wasn’t called-out as waste, but waste it was. Some was due to natural non-attendance – holidays, illness, meetings off site – some to the ebb and flow of work and interaction. However, some was clearly due to not needing to be there at all to get stuff done. The emergent post-Covid world was in glorious evidence pre-pandemic, only most accepted it as being simply the way of things.

It’s easy to forget, too, that the image of the modern office we conjure is of the frozen foreplay of steel, glass, timber, sunlight and foliage. The materiality of wealth and the preparedness to divert a little to its representation. Those for whom the aesthetic is both important and meaningful, where the human component is the positive survey response, a fragmented and amalgamated ‘like’. For most, out of super-A grade metropolitan chic, its fifty or more shades of crap that we never see or hear about.

What, therefore, of its future? The workplace has long trailed and mimicked the tech industry for its ideas and terminology. “Perpetua beta” – or the “banana principle”, as it was originally known – is just such, having been articulated by Tim O’Reilly who had earlier given us ‘open source’. The organisation is in perpetual beta, an unfinished entity, listening to those within (or at least some) in co-creating its purpose, composition and form in constant evolution. And so too must its workplace, always adapting to ensure it remains relevant and appropriate. Not the result of a huge-scale cash-incinerating intervention that spends the next decade feeling progressively less so, but small and necessary changes as determined by those within. The actual occupants.

To which we turn for clues as to substance and form to another tech term – the minimum viable product (MVP), the workplace as the product: MVW. That is, only what’s needed rather than what’s wanted, functionality, reliability, usability and beauty, developed together, in proportion. Needed in this case not for productivity, what we do today, but for what we’ll do tomorrow: innovation. Most organisations have no idea what they’ve lost while absent from their offices. It’s most likely to be compulsion free, inter-team, personally driven, inefficient and chaotic collaboration. All a far cry from the grandiose, indulgent and wasteful ‘maximum possible product’ (let’s call it MPP) of the pre-Covid decades, everything for everyone, just in case.

The office of the future should therefore be the minimum necessary to achieve maximum innovation, evolving as the needs of the organisation and its people change, highly sustainable and deeply connected to its host community. We’ll know how many days we’ll need to spend there; the hope is we’ll want to spend more. For most organisations they’ll be able to evolve what they already have. The office of the future won’t look much different to today, for some time – but if it follows this path, it’ll begin to mean so much more.

Rob Cottrill – The city centre in a minimum viable office world

The twists, turns, tragedy and upheaval of the past 18 months have been accompanied by predictions of doom for the centres of our cities and towns. The dramatic stories of retail empires collapsing, and images of closed shopfronts create a powerful narrative of inevitable and unstoppable decline.

The habits of being wary of close contact, social distancing, greatly reduced use of public transport, online transactions, and the uncertainty of how much of this is permanent, leads to increased investment in out-of-town retail and leisure assets. Add in the shift to hybrid working and it’s easy to be pessimistic.

After the enforced workplace experiment to which many of us have adapted, the prospect of everyone returning to work in the same place at the same time, when we have vastly different roles, strikes many as absurd. And what of the billions invested in buildings that are rarely ever full and transport networks that are at capacity for a couple of hours in each peak period.

The past 18 months also proved that the shift from ‘my’ information, in the file on my desk, to the organisation’s information, was perhaps more resilient than anticipated.

I am indebted to all my colleagues who quickly enabled and adapted to this new approach to work, almost overnight. That said, apart from the few curmudgeons among us, we still want to congregate, engage, share and collaborate in a work environment with all the wellbeing and career benefits that this tried and tested culture brings. The two local authorities I work for were hit hard financially. To recover, we needed to adapt fast, investing in people, not buildings that were surplus to our new requirements. We moved out of our main offices by the end of last year and instead utilised space in an historic, but under used town centre building, and similarly, in our cultural quarter, which is now providing an ideal base for our teams. In another location we are breathing new life into a vacant, shuttered former technical college for our main office base, a move that will also help boost one of our underperforming town centres.

Is this not a retreat? Quite the contrary. The savings made from this more efficient footprint has allowed us to recruit to several key roles. The principles of community wealth building also compelled us to retain the buildings in public ownership; one of which is now occupied as an office base for more staff than were hitherto located there. Another will become an arts, culture, and education centre, generating new jobs, training, apprenticeships and with significant appeal to national and international visitors, creating greater footfall that will enable the town centre to thrive.

Perhaps these moves are part of the journey to a Minimum Viable Office. Although the transition is creating the inevitable teething problems, unfamiliarity, and a sense of dislocation for some, there are many positive signs. As Luis sets out above, the choice of how and where we work, whether it is online or in person is now firmly established. Both solo work and collaboration is taking place outside of the office, whether it’s online, in cafes, quiet corners of an empty theatre foyer, ‘a walk around the block’ and, yes, the library. There is an energy associated with these interactions and a newly found enjoyment that they are different spaces, in very different times outside the corporate walls.

Office boundaries become more permeable as a result of the Minimum Viable Office. So what role can libraries play in the new normal – as centres for information, accessible to all, safe, often centrally located, excellent connectivity, and staffed by informed and helpful hosts? As a place for exchanging information and collaboration are these roles integral, additional, or discordant with the literary core of the offer?

Outside of our major cities, the public sector is often the anchor institution and largest employer. Perhaps now is an opportunity to consider libraries as an integral part of this workplace evolution, rather than as so often in past, a peripheral player, with little or no presence when final decisions are taken. To do this, the speed at which the workplace and town centres are changing needs to be embraced. Our libraries are cherished and often the strong vocal support for the “as is” as an understandable response to service reductions may impede that participation.

Our experience of the past 18 months gives us an appreciation that connectivity and interaction with our friends and colleagues is less dependent on road and rail. The shift from mass commuting and the opportunity for our local urban centres to provide a more sustainable option whilst also improving our personal wellbeing is a prize not to be given up lightly. Libraries combine a familiar presence, connectivity, and a wealth of knowledge, maybe the epitome of Localism with a Global Reach.

Paul – I hope you enjoyed the thought provoking comments/calls to action from Luis, Neil and Rob. This Presidential Debate promises to be a belter!

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