What’s the role of the office in today’s hybrid world?

Decorative image — Workplace culture: a moving feast
The role of the office in our lives remains one of the most consequential considerations about the evolving nature of work. Will the office become less important for our jobs? Is it due a five-day comeback? Or are we in need of a rethink?
Written by
Bruce Daisley

Changing dynamics require a flexible mindset

Conjuring up an energised workplace culture can be a complex challenge. Mandating group activities can feel counter-cultural. Forcing a team to do anything can feel like the recipe for disaster. But we all instinctively understand that culture is innately collective - it’s about feeling like we’re all in it together. In the time before the pandemic the collective parts of culture often happened accidentally. Someone produced a cake on a Thursday afternoon, or a meeting to announce good news turned into a spontaneous celebration. In the era of hybrid workingwe’ve learned that such moments of team cohesion need to have a touch more planning to them.

This evolved thinking also has implications for our workspace. From the perspective of the office we might find the whole team in the office for a company meeting on a Tuesday while the need for desks is smaller on a Friday. Having the option to expand into bigger spaces for key moments - or to increase our footprint as our business grows are just a couple of the reasons why flexible providers like Fora are gaining attention.

Through my conversation with Fiona, it became clear that Fora has a singular insight into how workplace culture is changing. Its offices serve more than 30,000 members, primarily made up of business customers, providing it with a representative snapshot of the thoughts and actions of modern London workers. Fiona confirms what we might instinctively have guessed, that the contemporary working week has a distinctive shape to it. There is a buzz to office days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - colleagues are hitting the office to collaborate and connect. In contrast Fridays are quieter and more likely to be characterised by team members coming in to make progress on solo tasks without the distractions of laughter and chat.

Mondays also see lower traffic in the office - those who venture in on Mondays are often seeking to enjoy prime setting to run their busy meeting schedule that day - for some the big screens and on tap facilities make a day dedicated to check-ins flow more seamlessly.

Interestingly Fiona has observed that the freedom to take meetings in different Fora locations has proved a huge pull. Sometimes a brainstorm with colleagues can benefit from a change of scene, alternatively the freedom to take the last call of the day nearer to the train station can serve to make the commute significantly more bearable.

As patterns of work continue to progress, Fiona believes that it is important that the office itself adapts and evolves. The big, open-plan spaces of the first two decades of the 2000s are on the way out. Fiona confirmed that the Fora experience is that businesses have a need for a range of options in each space. Yes, desks are still important, and so are meeting rooms, but there are more breakout areas now than there used to be, as well as way more phone booths for the private calls than you’d have seen even five years ago.

Looking ahead, employers who want their team in the office more frequently will need to think about the best way to do that. Some of that might be by trading more days in the office with more flexible start and end times, or by articulating how certain times of the week will be used more strategically.

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