COVID 19” has not only called into question some of our certainties, but it has also upset the real estate, mobility and managerial capacity of certain leaders.
Let’s forget about the health consequences - too many experts or pseudo-experts have spoken on this subject - and let’s concentrate on a few questions related to the world of work, particularly in the service sector, even if we must not forget the many workers whose activities require face-to-face contact.
Let’s go back to “administrative” activities. Commercial and private real estate must reinvent itself because staff mobility has changed significantly over the past 18 months. Some employees have not hesitated to move far from their place of work, public transport has seen its customer habits change and managers have learned, for the most part, to manage remotely. Digitalisation has also made great strides in many companies.
As a result, workspaces have been completely reinvented, often out of obligation. We can now take part in a video conference from our kitchen without it shocking anyone, we take public transport at unconventional times and only 2-3 times a week if possible. Finally, office workspaces seem to us to be particularly ill-proportioned, austere, and even inappropriate for less physically present staffs. What can be done?
A few examples for reinventing the world of work:
• Learn to differentiate and organise face-to-face and remote activities.
• Set realistic and quantifiable objectives for distance learning and make the virtual team “live”.
• Empower employees by giving them confidence and by assigning rewarding activities while setting limits.
• Reorganise office spaces by focusing on interactions and human relations: fewer individual spaces in favour of exchange spaces.
• Think about integrating the commute as a conscious, voluntary, and positive act, while opting for more virtuous means of transport.
• Finally, seek to automate and “virtualise” unproductive and unappreciative tasks.
We believe that while landowners and investors will be under pressure over the next few years, it is above all the user companies that will have to reinvent themselves. In addition to new dimensions - not necessarily reductions - in space, flexibility, mobility, interactivity, and continuous training will be the key issues.
HR would be well advised to integrate all these parameters by proposing innovative and attractive solutions to senior managers in the weeks - oh yes - to come. A conventional approach is no longer sufficient for most companies let’s hope that HR will be able to get out of its comfort zone.
Finally, the law will have to evolve rapidly to ‘stick’ to a reality that will be established for a long time to come. In the future, it will not necessarily be “more” but “better”: we are getting closer to controlled growth, but that is another debate that many people do not want to have (yet)…
Good luck, good thinking, and good reading.