Seminar: How to make working in your office a better option than home?

Offices and office life has changed dramatically in the last five years.

But what are the factors that encourage people to choose to take on the commute instead of working from home?

Taking a deliberate approach to the needs of different teams and individuals, and supported by the right technology, can create a more productive and content working environment.

But how is this achieved in practice? How can collaboration, connectivity, culture and comfort combine to make your office the real engine of your operations?

A seminar staged by TheBusinessDesk.com and sponsored by audio visual solutions provider, Universal AV, heard how the experts and leading employers are approaching the challenge and getting results.

On the panel were Dr Helen Hughes, associate professor at Leeds University Business School, Shelley Townend, marketing manager at Universal AV, Mark Grayson, partner, head of logistics and manufacturing at RLB and Sandip Khroud, head of office in Leeds at Hill Dickinson.

The discussion was chaired by Michael Taylor, North West editor at TheBusinessDesk.com

Addressing the technological challenge, Townend picked up on how advances in video conferencing have been a game changer in influencing where people can work and interact.

She noted video conferencing “used to have a bad name” because there wasn’t enough bandwidth, but added the pandemic has changed this.

She said: “At our offices we used to have problems with the acoustics for remote calls. But once we rectified that it was fine.

“From our own mistakes we see what can go wrong with other people’s workspaces. For example, we had one client who wanted everything at their offices to be Google, which meant they had no way of accepting a Teams call.

“People should think about things like this. And we need to have interior designers and architects who can collaborate to make spaces work better for business owners and staff.”

Hughes was asked how companies can encourage people back into the office without being too rigid and prescriptive.

She stressed “the genie is out of the bottle”, with people now expecting to be able to spend at least part of the working week at home.

And she said people who do return to the office want their effort to be worth it, and do not want to spend all day in the office on Teams calls.

She said: “There’s not really a one-size-fits-all answer – the context matters. People need to believe they have some autonomy over where they’re working.

“Its not necessarily a bad thing to tell people you want them in the office two or three days a week, if they can decide which days of the week they come in.

“We’ve collected data that shows a majority of people now would like some kind of combination of working from home or in the office. Just under a third of people still want to work from home.”

Grayson agreed with Hughes that staff respond better to being given a choice over when they work in the office.

“If you say ‘you’ve got two days when you can flex where you work’, that resonates well with people,” he said.

And he reiterated the importance of office design, saying his own business had ensured its workspace had more to offer than just desks.

“When we designed our office in Leeds post-Covid we looked at the density of desks,” he said. “So instead of having 55 to 60 desks we have 30 desks, and also collaboration space.

“And we have larger spaces where you can lay out paper drawings, because people in construction still like to use paper drawings.”

Commenting on his own firm’s approach, Khroud said: “We don’t mandate people to come back into the office, but since Covid people have wanted to come back.

“It’s about having flexibility – not just saying to people, ‘you have to come to the office and sit at this desk.’ It’s good for people to have freedom not to come in.”

He said his business has launched new offices in Leeds which are designed to be attractive and comfortable for staff.

He said: “We have breakout areas, ‘silent rooms’, and rooms which are Teams enabled.

“We’ve made our new office like this in order to attract and retain talent. Two years ago when we were recruiting new lawyers we wouldn’t bring them to see our serviced offices because they weren’t that impressive.

“Now, we do bring them to our new office and show them round – by doing that we’ve done half of our job.”