What to expect in the workspace of the future

It’s not a great time to be in corporate real estate. With offices gutted first by the pandemic and then upended by the sharp rise in flexible working, there is a growing acceptance in the industry that demand for office space will likely never return to pre-pandemic levels. 

The Property Council of Australia’s latest survey revealed office occupancy rates of 52% in Canberra, 57% in Melbourne, 59% in Sydney, 67% in Brisbane and 74% in Adelaide. It’s easy to spot the link between COVID impacts and the popularity of flexible working in different cities – Perth, which successfully staved off the need for major lockdowns, has an occupancy rate of 80%, climbing to 88% on peak days. 

Flexible working takes several forms, with many organisations embracing a hybrid model of on-site and remote. 42% of employees in Melbourne are working in the office one to two days each week while only 19% are on-site for the full five days. A significant cohort of 14% has not returned to the office at all since restrictions were lifted. Technological advancements and shifting expectations have enabled a remote hiring boom where managers are hiring staff in other cities, interstate or even overseas with no expectation that they will ever set foot in the company HQ. The project economy is also gathering steam and catalysing new ways of working. Inflationary pressure and the rising cost of getting to work are further influencing workers’ decision to go remote.

What to expect in workplaces of the future

What do these trends mean for employers? How will it affect their future planning and the day-to-day experience of their teams? Let’s unpack these changes and put together a clearer picture of the future of the workspace.

Office footprints are likely to keep shrinking

Employers are shrinking their office space across Australia. Westpac recently subleased approximately six floors of its office space in Sydney’s Barangaroo, Telstra vacated its Collins Street offices in Melbourne and Pitt Street in Sydney. Large law firms Norton Rose Fulbright and Ashurst both shed approximately a quarter of their office space. Smaller organisations are taking advantage of the rise in subletting to move into prime locations. Hit hard by COVID, shared office spaces (also known as coworking hubs) used to be the domain of start-ups and individual entrepreneurs. Today, larger organisations with shrinking space needs are increasingly taking advantage of the cost savings found in sharing serviced office spaces with other businesses.

There’s a refurbishment boom on the horizon

Companies are investing some of the money saved through downsizing into office refurbishment. Telstra has transformed its Exhibition Street headquarters into an agile, efficient working space that occupies a smaller footprint. NAB announced its new “collaborative space” built to accommodate the new reality of hybrid working. This refurb boom is being driven by:

• efforts to attract top talent amidst an ongoing shortage (particularly in tech),
• companies attempting to entice workers back to the office, and
• the need to facilitate collaboration between on-site and off-site employees in the hybrid environment.

Hot desking is the new norm

Hot desking has been around forever in some form but is now exploding in popularity. Managers are getting increasingly serious about moving away from assigned desks to embrace an allocation system. This ensures efficient use of shrinking office footprints and avoids empty desks while employees spend some of the week working from home.

Hot desking does have its challenges. The shift may feel a little unsettling for employees who may have grown used to having a personalised workspace, while office managers are embracing hot desk booking software to combat overbooking and confusion in larger organisations. Employees may also need some initial reminders about “hot desk etiquette” (don’t leave crumbs!).

The rise of property management tech

With such fluid office traffic, property owners are enticing corporate tenants with pre-installed smart tools in their office space, including smart office hubs/digital toolkits, energy-efficient technology, and automated solutions targeted to specific challenges such as proximity monitoring during COVID. Large organisations that have difficulty keeping track of hot desking may benefit from real-time occupancy monitoring tech.

Team pods and hybrid conferencing are becoming commonplace

One day we’ll probably all be conducting our meetings in the metaverse. But for now, organisations are creating collaborative spaces where on-site workers, remote employees and their clients can work seamlessly together using high-quality conference room technology. 

While traditional offices had a single conference room for this purpose, offices of the future will build multiple team pods, or huddle rooms, each equipped with hybrid conferencing capabilities. 

Importantly, a lot of complex face-to-face engagements, like workshops, are adapting to hybrid modes of work as well. Attendees need to be able to see or follow everything that is happening in the conference room, which means post-it notes are making way for a new era of digital tools such as online whiteboards including Miro, Stormboard and Mural.

Technology and perks shifting to accommodate remote workers

One of the keys to managing a hybrid team is to ensure everyone – no matter where they are located – has visibility of the things that matter. This means that a quick check-in with the team shouldn’t take place around someone’s desk, but should happen on a collaborative platform such as Slack or Teams. Similarly, reward and recognition should happen online so that everyone sees it; not just those present in the office that day. Ensuring online visibility takes a little forward planning and investment in the right tech stack. 

Employee perks are also evolving as companies work harder to attract and retain remote talent. Office-centric perks such as ping-pong tables and on-site baristas offer no benefit to people who rarely or never visit the office, which is why organisations are offering a different suite of benefits such as L&D subscriptions, membership reimbursement for a worker’s local gym, or home office stipends.  With the future of the workforce in a state of flux and the work-from-home debate far from settled, it is difficult to make major investment decisions about the workplace. At present, the best strategy could be to keep a finger on the pulse of workforce trends, explore the many different options for accommodating your workforce, and optimise your current arrangements.