|
|
Brief: Will We Ever Go Back to the Office?
The Short Answer is “Yes,” but Much Will Change and Video Conferencing Will Help
13 Sep 2020
by
Craig Durr
Going into The Office Will Look Different
With many businesses still wondering how the worldwide pandemic will impact their workplace experience, some have already started returning workers to the office.
Consider the corporate real estate office in southern California that is offering workers a return to the office via a shift-based process: marketing on Monday, sales on Tuesday, HR and IT on Wednesday, and so forth. Or the global pharmaceutical headquartered in the Midwest that also is using a shift-based model designed to facilitate onsite interactions with lab equipment as well as with colleagues. But to adhere to new social distancing standards, the IT administrator had to reconfigure an eight-person conference room for four people by removing chairs and spreading out the remaining seating. To accommodate the other four meant to be in that meeting, he is now setting up more onsite meeting rooms, with the same distancing protocols, for them to be able to join the conference as well.
The Reasons We Go into the Office will Change and Workspaces Will Evolve to Accommodate
A lasting result of the pandemic will be a drastic change in how employees utilize offices. It will be less about going into a building to “work” at a designated desk, evolving into trips to the office to meet, collaborate, and reconnect with fellow employees and the business itself. These “dynamic interactions” were already part of a typical worker’s day, but in the future, we expect they will be central to the workplace experience.
There are several drivers for this conclusion.
Many workers will want to continue to work remotely at least part of the time - By April, only a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe’s work-from-home population went from about 5% of the workforce to approximately 40%, an eight-fold increase.1 Likewise, in the United States, more than two-thirds of US workers were now working from home.2 But what will really change the office workspace is that 80 percent of these employees say they’d like to continue to work from home half-time or more3 once they do return to the office.
More rooms deployed to meet social distancing goals – When employees do come into the office, social distancing will be a driver for how rooms are configured in the future. In a June 2020 Wainhouse survey of North America IT decision-makers (ITDMs), 71% indicated they are planning to remove chairs within meeting rooms to accommodate new social distancing guidelines.4 Like the example cited earlier, many of these same ITDMs will either convert private offices into huddle rooms or split a large meeting space into smaller meeting spaces to keep their meeting capacity constant with these density changes.
Satellite offices may play more into the corporate real estate mix - For corporate real estate planners, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have emphasized that location now matters more than ever. In Japan, a 40,000-person study conducted by the Ministry of Land Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism concluded that the most common location for those who worked remotely was a satellite office. Satellite offices are a compromise when a company values employees coming into the office, but those same employees want to avoid the pitfalls of downtown locations such as long commutes or crowded public spaces. In a crowded market like Tokyo, this translates into more offices in the outer lying areas of the metro area.
Workspaces will evolve to address these new dynamics. Look for less office space to be committed to permanent personal use like a cubicle or desk, and more of it converted to accommodate day-long visits to the office. Personal spaces will now be where employees “hotel” for the day and then be sanitized each evening.
Group spaces still will enable you to participate in dynamic interactions but will now align with new health protocols and location preferences of employees. For many enterprises, the net effect will be more group spaces – huddle rooms and focus rooms in particular.
1. Source: ”Living, working and COVID-19: First findings – April 2020” European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, Published 6 May 2020 https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2020/living-working-and-covid-19-first-findings-april-2020
2. Source: “Remote Work Increasing Exponentially Due to COVID-19” Netskope, Published Mar 16 2020, https://www.netskope.com/blog/remote-work-increasing-exponentially-due-to-covid-19
3. Source: “Will Offices go the way of the DoDo after COVID-19?”, Journal of Facilities Management, Published May 2020, Anita Kamouri & Kate Lister, Data collected by Global Workplace Analytics
4. Source: “Survey Insight: Meeting Room Video Conferencing Trends, Drivers and COVID-19 – MRDMs Q2 2020” Wainhouse Research, June 2020. n= 219 North Americas IT Decision Makers
Video Becomes Essential to the Next Version of the Meeting Room
In the next paradigm of the workplace, ITDMs will be tasked with connecting everyone, whether they are in the main office, a satellite office, or working from home. Wainhouse expects these ITDMs to leverage one of the standout technologies that got them through the first half of 2020 – video conferencing. During that worldwide work-from-home experiment, virtually every knowledge worker had a crash course in video collaboration. Not only were we pushed to evaluate the validity of every meeting on our calendar, we were also challenged to figure out how to interact when a meeting was required. Enter “video” – pushing all of us to turn on our cameras and share, interact, and work through visual communications.
Video Conferencing will Help Keep us Connected During the Transition
And there is evidence that this increased adoption in personal video will carry over into the meeting room, too. In that same Q2 2020 survey, Wainhouse asked ITDMs how they thought their organization’s post-pandemic utilization of video conferencing from meeting rooms would be compared to pre-pandemic levels. A total of 78% expect meeting room video conferencing to increase compared to pre-pandemic levels. Notably, 43% of the respondents expect room-based video to increase significantly.
Technology for Tomorrow’s Rooms
For room-based video to succeed, it will need to stay in sync with the new shared workspaces of tomorrow. Video conferencing devices will need to deliver on the unique requirements of these dynamic group interactions while adhering to safety and personal wellness protocols.
Below is a chart of common challenges you can expect in this new world where video collaboration becomes a central part of how we interact.
"Return to the Meeting Room" Challenges and Technology to Address
The Path Forward
Video was already on a path of higher adoption, but the last six months have dramatically accelerated its acceptance as a way of doing work. For many businesses, not only has video become the new normal for how work gets done, but video will be important also in the transition back to the office.
In this transition, there will be a marked increase in room-based video to meet the increased demand for video conferencing in general. End-users, having been hurriedly baptized in this technology, will be knowledgeable consumers of video conferencing and will expect more in the next version of the meeting room. They will come to understand that not all meeting room hardware devices are created equal. The right device will significantly enhance productivity - whether the meeting is with colleagues in the same room or with those working-from-home, from a satellite office, or another room down the hall.
We will go back into the office, and video conferencing will help make this transition possible.
About Us / Document Notices
About Us
Craig Durr is a Senior Analyst at Wainhouse Research who focuses on Meeting Room Collaboration technologies and solutions. He provides research on market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end-user & buyer expectations. Craig brings nineteen years of experience in leadership roles related to product development, strategic planning, P&L management, value proposition definition, and business development of security, SaaS, and Unified Communication products and services. Craig’s experience includes roles at Poly, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM. cdurr@wainhouse.com
About Wainhouse Research
Wainhouse Research is an independent analyst firm that focuses on critical issues in the unified communications and collaboration market. The company provides end-to-end coverage of the UC&C industry, with areas of focus covering unified communications, enterprise video, meeting room collaboration, personal & web-based collaboration, and audio-conferencing market segments. The company acts as a trusted advisor providing strategic advice and direction for both the UC&C industry and its enterprise users. For further details, contact sales@wainhouse.com or see http://www.wainhouse.com.
Copyright Notice
Copyright ©2019 by Wainhouse Research, LLC. All rights, including that of translation into other languages, are specifically reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any method or means, electrical, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the express written permission of Wainhouse Research, 34 Duck Hill Terrace, Duxbury, MA 02332 (Tel 781.312.6015) www.wainhouse.com. This publication is protected by United States copyright laws and international treaties. Unauthorized distribution or reproduction of this publication, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent necessary to protect the rights of the publisher.
License Notice
This document may be distributed within the licensed organization only. The following acts are strictly prohibited:
Transmittal to others outside your immediate organization including partners, resellers, external consultants, etc. in any media format
Posting on a web site which is accessible to others outside your immediate organization
The possession or use within an unlicensed organization
Limitation of Liability Notice
The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Wainhouse Research shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.
|
|
