We’re never going back to the office for 40-hour working weeks but don’t tear up your office lease just yet. It’s time to turn your office space into a collaboration, or gathering, space so your employees want to return to the physical workplace.

It’s a twist on the traditional office space. While most employees are never going to want to return to the office fulltime, they do want a place to meet with other colleagues, to feel energised, to nut out important work together – all while face-to-face.

For some people, that could be a day or two a week. For others, a day or two a month. Really, a lot will depend on the type of work each person is performing, which decides what sort of workspace is best for them when they do make the trip into the office.

Which is why it’s time to declare the type of work that is expected in every employee’s job descriptions.

At real estate management consulting and managed services firm RealFoundations, each job has a description about the type of work they’re expected to do, which they have broken down into three categories.

1. Solo work – A given task to be completed by yourself. Think of work like coding, when an employee puts on headphones and tries to block out distractions going on around them so they can focus on their work.

2. Interactive work – Typically work that can be done asynchronously. For example, you’re working on a budget with someone else but you don’t need to be in the same room to work together, and you don’t need to interact in real time.

3. Collaborative work - Where multiple people need to be interacting in real time to get something done.

“Imagine if every job description outlined what type of work needs to be done,” said RealFoundations founder and CEO Chris Shaida.

“You might have a job that’s 70% solo, 20% interactive and 10% collaborative, or if you take a collaborative role, you could expect to come together with your people 70% of the time.

“If all enterprises did this, you could do all kinds of space planning.”

It’s this shift in thinking towards “space planning” that will make the office building a vibrant place once again. Not in the same way we used offices pre-COVID, because in the post-COVID digital workplace there’s no need for everyone to be together all the time, and many roles (think solo and interactive work) are more suited to working some days at home, if that’s want what employees want.

Of course, provisions also need to be made for those who still want to be in the office while doing solo work.

Pre-pandemic: Offices were used only 24% of the time

Since the post World War era, the economics of office space has been predicated on offices being empty 76% of the time. Sounds crazy, right? Do the maths.

Most office buildings are used for eight hours a day for five days a week – that’s just 40 hours a week from the 168 hours in each week, leaving offices mostly empty for 128 hours a week.

“The reason there hasn’t already been a cataclysm in the office market is because the economics are already established for offices to be mostly empty,” Chris said.

“So when we say offices are half empty from COVID, we’re really saying they’re empty from 76% of the time to 88% of the time. This is why there hasn’t already been huge bankruptcies.”

With the potential for another global recession and ongoing debt on office leases, Chris said some business owners may be thinking about handing back the keys and reneging on their office leases in favour of working from home.

But let’s face it, there are times when employees need to come together to get energised and do the collaborative work. Spaces need to be provided for this, but there’s every chance the current spaces are not conducive to collaborative work.

Chris believes successful enterprises will acknowledge people are not ever coming back to the office 40 hours a week.

But instead of tearing up their lease, they will instead invest more money into their real estate to design their offices as a place for people to return to when they want to collaborate in person.

The offices will become collaboration, or gathering, spaces. A place to come together to feel energised and to collaborate.

“The winning enterprises, or those enterprises who believe they’re in a battle for talent, need to provide reasons for people to physically gather in a place,” Chris said.

“What we’re beginning to see are leadership teams who get that we can’t just make everybody come back into the space as it’s currently configured, but people want to be together sometimes.”

To make a return to the office successful, spaces need to be designed to allow people to interact.

Chris said asking people to do solo work, like coding, in an open-plan office with cubicles will face huge backlash.

“They don’t want to be in the noisy room full of people poking them in the back of the head every five minutes,” he said.

“So they end up sitting in a cube, with a blanket over their heads and headphones on. They feel miserable for a good chunk of that time.

“A lot of people don’t need to collaborate every minute they’re at work. They need to get work done, but now you’re asking me to sit in this giant open plan office and it’s not conducive to work that I do for 25 hours a week.”

And having groups come together in a huge, open-plan office to collaborate and bounce around ideas won’t work either. It’s time to repurpose the space. Perhaps have movable walls to segregate small and larger spaces as needed.

Enterprises who recognise that good things happen when people are physically together – sometimes – and know the money they’ve spent on configuring open-plan offices isn’t conducive to encouraging small groups to collaborate together in a safe space, realise the cost of retro-fitting their office space to make it a collaboration space are the ones winning the fight for talent, Chris says.

“The cost of providing people a physical environment that’s conducive to them coming together sometimes is not monumental,” Chris said.

“In a time of uncertainty, why should I spend more money on space? But once you get over that and you realise a whole bunch of your people are tired of being at home all the time, particularly younger people, the cost to give them space that is conducive to that kind of work isn’t monumental.”

What a hybrid work office looks like

Following Chris’ model, you’ve acknowledged what type of spaces are needed in your enterprise through job descriptions and reconfigured your office to suit. But there are still going to be times where you need to do collaborative work when some people are in the office and others are online – true hybrid working.

Digital platforms like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage mean collaborative work can continue to happen online, and organisations don’t want to be limited by things like geography or accessibility to find their talent.

The solution is to design collaboration spaces that give equality to all. For example, if there are six people in a room at the office and six people dialling in online, the six people online would each have a screen displaying their face, at human scale.

“You want people on the screens to be subconsciously the same size,” Chris said.

“You need to get past this one size fits all idea. Smart enterprises can do a lot of things physically to encourage that.”

Chris says the understandable misconception about hybrid work is around each individual and where they work, whereas it’s time to start thinking about actual interactions being hybrid.

“Actual interactions themselves will become more and more hybrid,” Chris said.

“We’re in an actual real-time interaction and some people will be physically together and some people will be digitally present.

“What we’re looking at over the next 10 years is seeing a lot more physical spaces that are tuned to fostering that kind of collaboration.”

Tracking when to meet face-to-face

While the COVID-19 pandemic has proved most people and teams can work well and successfully using digital tools, few would deny the benefit of working face-to-face at times, especially if there’s brainstorming or true collaboration required.

Chris said that’s where using data from SWOOP Analytics can help. Using SWOOP measurements like Activity By Time could help identify when there are troughs in collaboration and when it might be a good time to get together in person to energise people.

In summing up, Chris recommends:

1. Embrace the idea people are going to work from different physical places and you need to lure them to come to a place – whether it be an inviting office environment, a café, a meeting room, a retreat - when you believe they should be together with their colleagues.

2. Acknowledge not everyone can always be together at the same place so make allowances to include them with things like human-size screens for those joining online.

3. For office real estate, if you already have an ongoing lease, consider reconfiguring the space to make it inviting for staff to come back and meet, or for those doing solo work, give them an environment they can comfortably work in. If you don’t have an ongoing lease, realise you can lease a space a day, a week, a month, six months, two years and ensure the space is conducive to coming together to collaborate.