In the United States, a PwC study of flexible and decentralized work in the financial services industry confirms the ideas of many about what major changes will take place in working life once the pandemic is brought under control. According to the respondents, only 29% of company employees had the opportunity to work from home at least once a week before the pandemic. This same percentage is assumed to be 69% after the pandemic.
Another survey conducted by The Grossman Group on the subject continues along exactly the same line, and in practice half of the respondents want to continue working from home even after a pandemic. What is also remarkable is how satisfaction with one’s own employer has increased at the same time, when it has been possible to do work from where it suits oneself best.
For myself, though, perhaps the most eye-catching was this post that hit my eyes on my own LinkedIn feed. In it, Jacobo had done a survey of his network and asked them to choose the reaction that one liked the best. If you chose a thumbs up, you hoped that the whole work week will happen remotely, if four days you chose an applause, two days with a heart, and so on.
Over 20,000 responses a week and only about 2% of respondents hoped to work from the office every day in the future! Instead, 35% hope to be able to work three days a week remotely and 29% would not return to offices at all. The results are also startling in the sense that Spain has not been a pioneer in teleworking and in most companies teleworking was not even possible before the corona.
There is indeed such a big change on hand now that it will be really interesting to see how companies and their management come to respond to this. It is clear that many have realized that the importance of huge offices in the future is very questionable.
At the same time, it’s “interesting” to see what will happen to all the office space that has been built and is still being built around the world. In Finland alone, there is more than a million square meters of vacant office space in the Helsinki metropolitan area, and as you can expect, it will only grow after a pandemic. Mandatory telework experiments and the good results obtained from it are a clear reason for this. In addition to this, new forms of offices, such as co-working solutions that have been steadily growing in popularity and also increasing in Finland, are another reason that challenges and strongly questions traditional working from the office concept.
After all, the world is by no means new and globally there are very big players in this field like WeWork. However, it has been in place for so long (founded in 2010) that, with years of strong growth, it has now run into problems.
Many companies today also offer Co-Working facilities for free. In Madrid, the “Google Campus for Startups” offers facilities and a community where startups can take the first steps without having to immediately invest in spaces where they sometimes join and come together to work:
Because it’s wildly popular, to get in to Google Campus nowadays you need to apply and get access granted if the company you present already has operations and a clear business and growth plan. Previously, the Campus got full of freelancers sitting alone with a computer and a cup of coffee, but now this has changed and they have returned to Starbucks and other coffee shops as Google wants to make more room for genuine startups.
Written by,
Teemu Ruuska
CEO
InHunt World
