It is not just the impact of Covid and Teams/Zoom that is driving the trend towards workhubs and new ways of working.
It may not be stretching a point too far to ask whether the now well-accepted change on the high street (long term decline of retail/banking premises caused by online shopping/banking) may be replicating itself in the workplace. Is homeworking (and the workhub sector that supports this by plugging the downside gaps in homeworking) changing the workspace world? Are ‘offices’ becoming outmoded?
In many big cities this may seem fanciful. But even in London some large corporates such as BT have chosen to radically reduce their desk-based office provision, preferring to bring mobile staff in to meeting spaces (in-house workhubs) rather than expecting workers to be at their desk every day.
In towns and cities across the UK it is not only the high streets that may never return to their former role. The parts of these places set aside for offices are potentially going to go through a similar shock to the system. It looks as though reported loss of demand for speculative out-of-town offices in many locations may be the product of something deeper than a temporary economic downturn.
Perhaps, from a social trends perspective, other factors should usefully be considered in the context of predicting the future place of work for staff and small businesses.
Some examples to consider:
- Young people are learning to multi-task (use PC, device and watch TV/listen to music/game/insta at the same time) – they expect instant diverse connectivity
- This lifestyle control, the ability to avoid time-wasting and ‘down time’ may make it harder to expect younger staff in the future to expect/enjoy a rigid 9-5 commuting approach to work
- ‘All about me’ – Instagram, Tik Tok and other tools are encouraging a strong sense of self-importance. Could this feed into self-employment preference?
- Technology, particularly Teams/Zoom etc video conferencing have already made face-to-face meeting less essential
- The next phase of this advance could make hologram-based 3D group meetings more real than those of us who once watched Star Trek could have ever imagined
- Jobs for life are becoming less common, as are the perceived advantages of jobs over self-employment (security, large pensions, early retirement etc)
- Environmental concerns and resistance to time-wasting could cause an increasing revolt against the costs and hassle of paying for/fuelling separate premises and a non-productive commute between them each day
- Globalisation means working with and selling to/buying from people who we will not meet often if at all. If this is the case, why travel to a traditional office space to communicate with them?
These are merely questions for consideration. The answers are not known. But those who ignore the possibility of these social trends changing the way people see workspace may be the ones taking the biggest risks. Yes, these trends are already impacting on market towns. There is likely to be a solid and growing number working at home or closer to where they live.
