Thought Leader: Where is my office? Embracing our new workplace reality

We now have real choice over our working lives, writes Chris Kane, author of Where is My Office?: Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century.

In recent years, the binary debate of working remotely or from home versus working mostly from the office has attracted endless media commentary.

Yet I suggest that the ‘home versus office’ debate is only part of the picture. We now have real choice – and this has also opened up many other questions.

For example, on the business management side, there are concerns about team building, collaboration, inducting new joiners into a virtual office and filling the vacuum of not having everyone together in one place.  

From an employee perspective, individuals are asking themselves: what's the purpose of the office? Why do I need to go there to work? Especially given the costs associated with commuting.  

In my view, there has to be some innovative approaches to help us navigate this situation. 

A new workplace dimension

There is much to commend the office in terms of its capacity for collaboration, creativity and the social aspects of how we work.

A key question is the fixed nature of the pre-pandemic system – before, everything revolved around a physical place with four walls. What about the potential of multiple workplace dimensions, rather than the traditional binary either or choice – the office or work from home?

We are placing undue focus on the physical workplace purely as a destination where work is carried out. Isn’t it about time that we consider not only the option of a distributed workforce but distributed working? 

Maybe we need to start thinking about the ‘individual as the workplace’. After all, the most significant element should be the outcome of the work produced and not where and what time it was done.

We need to accept that as everyone adapts to a different way of life, leaders, work processes and work locations also need to adjust accordingly. Many people hanker for a return to life as it was pre-pandemic, but COVID-19 ushered in a new reality.

Moving away from siloed thinking

To support people to do their best work, we must move away from siloed thinking and join the dots in aligning people, process, and place, thus enabling them to work holistically as a more effective entity.

We must try to build understanding between departments and consider the wider perspective of the business. Therefore, HR has to go beyond its focus on just ‘people’ and take in the views of other organisational functions – after all everybody working for the enterprise is there to support and add value to the entire business, not just to their particular sector.

In order to motivate people entrenched in narrow 20^th century thinking around traditional workspaces, we should frame a strategy based upon the old adage – “necessity is the mother of all invention”.

Now is the time for all stakeholders to come together to innovate and design a new fit for purpose, people-centric and sustainable model of 21st-century working.