The WFH versus office debate isn’t done yet

EDITOR’S COMMENT Anyone who thought arguments over the future of the office were a thing of the past must not have seen the spat under one of my LinkedIn posts earlier this week. I say “spat”, but let’s charitably call it a healthy debate peppered with some blunt language.  On Monday we published a story about the rise in London office lettings from banks and other financial services firms, digging into research from the team at agency DeVono. I topped a LinkedIn post about the story with the line “Banking on a return to the office”. Maybe I should have known better, but I’m not one to turn down an obvious pun. “I just find this insane,” came an early comment. “No one wants to return to the office.” That was from Tania Jennings, net zero carbon manager at Lewisham Council in south-east London. She said encouraging employees back to their traditional workplace was “completely unnecessary and only being driven by developers and speculators”, adding: “I would literally never agree to go back in more than one day a week, and even that is a HARD sell. These companies will have their buns handed to them in the next decade, and rightly so. When housing is so desperately needed in the capital, building more offices is downright criminal.” Lots to unpack there. It won’t surprise many that dealmakers in the commercial real estate market disagreed, some pretty directly – “What an utterly ridiculous statement,” said Compton co-founder Shaun Simons – others getting a little more into the detail. “In terms of the work-from-home situation, it’s clearly reverting a little, and it needs to,” said Gavin Lacey, chief operating officer at consultancy CHPK Group. “All hardcore proponents of full work-from-home take that position based only on what’s best for them. Few arguments are around what would be best for the company. The benefits from working in the office are obvious to me as an employer: training, collaboration, team building, effectiveness, reactiveness. I don’t for one minute think five days is coming back, but firms will see the benefit if they move to a ‘three or four days of in-office’ policy.” My view? I quite enjoyed working at home during the lockdowns. Saw more of the kids, got points from my wife for putting washing out. But I got over it. Today I spend at least four days a week in the office, often five, and most of my team does too. Lots of this discussion comes down to the role, as I said in a follow-up to my LinkedIn post.  As a journalist, my love of my job is tied to being around people – talking, listening, catching up with contacts. I don’t think working from home can ever compare to being in a newsroom or on the ground uncovering stories. And there will be plenty of other industries in which people have a similar story. But Jennings’ take was not based solely on preference of working practice. Arguments around the environmental impact of building new offices and encouraging people to commute to them have to be taken into account, she reasoned, and then comes the question of whether we already have enough office buildings without adding to the pipeline. “My biggest issue is the absolute waste in the building industry,” she said. “There is just no justification for building new offices in London right now; we should retrofit the existing spaces to be more efficient and appealing to people who are working from home, or repurpose them entirely to be housing. Let those industries that grew up around offices become neighbourhood shops.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a back-and-forth on LinkedIn that ended with everyone agreeing. And so although I should probably wrap this up with an easy answer and come down on one side of this argument, there isn’t one and I’m not sure I can. And I like that. More than four years on from the first pandemic lockdown, regardless of what anyone tells you, the ‘WFH versus office’ debate isn’t done. Some might be tired of it, but I think big discussions about how and where we work – and how that affects our towns, cities and suburbs – are hugely important. We will take this conversation and many more about the transformation of the office further in our The Future of the Workplace event in June. Insights will come from Nokia’s head of workplace strategy and development Ana Stanojevic, Oxford Properties’ Joanne McNamara, GPE’s director of flex workspace Simon Rowley and more. Click here to secure your ticket. Until then, catch you in the comments.