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Nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, the future of office space is still an open question. Vaccines are being administered, but as a return to the office becomes a more realistic possibility, opinion varies widely on what office workers, especially tech and highly skilled workers used to an array of amenities, will want from office space in the future — or whether they will want it very much at all.
Even as surveys show that 60% of businesses plan to shrink their office footprints and with the likes of IWG CEO Mark Dixon saying offices have changed forever, companies are making plans. Some, such as Salesforce.com, have already decided remote work will be a permanent feature going forward for their tens of thousands of employees, with about 65% of Salesforce's 54,000 employees in the office no more than one to three days per week.
“We’re not going back to the way things were,” Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Brent Hyder told The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t believe that we’ll keep every space in every city that we’re in, including San Francisco.”
With different corporate cultures, disparate communal space requirements and varying views on the effectiveness of remote work, finding a consensus on the future of office space is going to be a drawn-out process in which office owners and managers are going to have to pay attention to tenants like never before, experts say. It won't be easy.
"There's a lot of cognitive dissonance right now," Newmark Vice Chairman Liz Hart said. "Companies want to cater to the needs of their employee base, but they're finding that individual employee preferences on the matter of work from home are changing month to month and…
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