No plan for a return to the office for millions of staff

Fifty of the biggest UK employers questioned by BBC have said they have no plans to return all staff to the office full-time in the near future.

Some 24 firms said that they did not have any plans in place to return workers to the office.

However, 20 have opened their offices for staff unable to work from home.

It comes as many employees return to work from the summer holidays with the reality of a prolonged period of home working becoming increasingly likely.

The BBC questioned 50 big employers ranging from banks to retailers to get a sense of when they expected to ask employees to return to the office.

One of the main reasons given for the lack of a substantial return was that firms could not see a way of accommodating large numbers of staff while social distancing regulations were still in place.

Many companies said they were offering choice and flexibility to those who want to return, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.

A few firms have already announced they have no plans to return to the office until late autumn, and Facebook has said it does not plan a return of employees until July 2021.

Some smaller businesses are deciding to abandon their offices altogether. Tara Tomes runs a PR agency with an office in the heart of Birmingham's business district.

Her team of eight cannot fit in the space they have if they are to obey social distancing guidelines and she will not be renewing the office lease in September.

"I personally don't want to force my team back onto public transport," she told the BBC.

"Not having four walls around us won't change the dynamic or culture of the team. If anything it will make us more pioneering in the way the world of work is going."

She said that the money saved on rent and utilities and the time spent not commuting were other benefits to giving up the office.

Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street acknowledged that the challenges facing city centre businesses were grave but said he was hopeful the climate would gradually improve.

"This is undeniably a very difficult situation for businesses that thrive on the back of the big office occupiers being there. What we are trying to do is steadily build confidence that it is safe to return to the city centre."

He said Birmingham's transport system was currently carrying about 20% of pre-covid numbers but that he hoped this would rise to 50% over the autumn.

Still, that means that city centre footfall - which is the lifeblood of businesses that rely on office workers and commuters - would in the best case scenario be half of what it is in normal times.

Naomi says the pandemic has been 'devastating' for her business

That may be cold comfort to Naomi and her brother James who opened up a new coffee shop in the heart of Birmingham's business district earlier this year. They are now getting less than a fifth of the trade they were banking on.

"It's been devastating really," Naomi told the BBC. "Office workers are absolutely critical to us. We are hoping things improve in September but if they don't we will have to rethink the whole business."

It is, however, too soon to announce the death of the office, according to Rob Groves from office developer Argent, which has just completed the construction of 120,000 feet of office space in Birmingham's Chamberlain Square.

While he admitted that some would-be tenants were pressing the pause button, he also insisted there would always be a need for a workplace where people could congregate and collaborate.

"I'd like to challenge people saying they will never need an office and ask them in 12-18 months time whether that was the right decision or just a reaction to what's happening now."

Matthew Hammond, chairman of the Midlands region for PwC

One of Argent's blue chip tenants agrees. Accounting and consultancy firm PwC has just moved into the property next door. It is supposed to house 2,000 people but is currently catering to just 150 each day.

Nevertheless, Matthew Hammond, chairman of the Midlands region for PwC, said that the office was a must have, particularly for younger workers.

"We have colleagues who may be working at the end of their bed or on a return unit in their kitchen. That is not sustainable or healthy for the longer term. As employers we invest a huge amount in providing the right environment, the right seating, the right technology so people can be at their most productive."

Not everyone has deep enough pockets to afford such flexible working spaces. While many employees want the option of coming to the office, many now see home working as a right, according to Midlands recruitment specialist Kam Vara.

"For many candidates it's now a deal-breaker if there isn't an option for home working, and some are saying they want 100% home working with no physical contact with the office whatsoever."

The knock-on effects of these changes to the world of work could be enormous and long lasting. If people don't need to be in the office, they can be anywhere. And the cost of commuter season tickets and expensive suburban housing within commuting distance of big cities is an expense employers could deduct.

Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street is optimistic that what we are witnessing is simply an age old tale of urban evolution, with Covid-19 holding down the fast forward button.

"The calling of the death of the office is very premature. Cities have repurposed themselves before over decades... the coronavirus has just speeded it up."

That may be so, but the short term shock to the city business model feels more like a cardiac arrest than a gentle evolution. And the reluctance on the part of both workers and employers to return to the office poses a grave economic threat to the future of city centres.

(Source: BBC)

Always have three beverages

The correct number of drinks to keep at your desk

The phrase rule of three is a Rorschach test. When people hear it, it can conjure an array of disparate guidelines. Celebrity deaths. Rhetorical technique. Aesthetic pleasure. Free markets. Joke writing. There are so many rules of three across disciplines and superstitions that the concept requires its own disambiguation page on Wikipedia, which lists 17 different options.

Some of those rules are more important than others. Pilots have one for landing airplanes that advises descending 1,000 feet every three miles to ensure that the plane doesn’t drop too quickly for passengers to adjust to changing cabin pressure. Outdoors-people use one as a guide for how long people can usually stay alive in extreme conditions: three minutes without oxygen, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. More broadly, groupings of three pop up everywhere: the Holy Trinity, the three branches of the U.S. government, the number of data points required to determine an unknown location, the number of partners needed to corner people at a party to talk about polyamory.

JAMES LEYNSE / CORBIS / GETTY

Relatively little is known about why people enjoy and invoke triads so frequently. But after more than a decade of personal research, I’d like to present a new rule of three for your consideration: If you work at a desk in an office, three desk beverages is the ideal number to keep by your side. The first is water. The second is a source of caffeine. The third is something fun—a juice, a soda, a glass of wine on Friday afternoon (if your office is like that), a kombucha (if you are like that).

The case for having any beverages at your desk in the first place is one of basic human biology. Your mom was right when she told you to drink some water: Mild dehydration isn’t a notable health risk, but the spotty research done on the topic suggests that being thirsty is distracting. Slaking that thirst might help you return to your spreadsheets and get out of the office on time. Even if you’re not thirsty, people tend to report feeling more alert after having some water. Water is the foundation of your beverage kingdom.

And then there’s caffeine. Research has shown that it improves alertness in moderately sleepy people—for instance, those who underestimated the size of their sandwich and are now slowly slipping into a food coma at their desk. Maybe you stayed a little too long at happy hour last night and need a coffee to help ease your headache. Or maybe you’ve just been riding around on the planet with the rest of us for long enough that you need a Diet Coke on a spiritual level. Add it to the lineup.

Completing the desk-bev triumvirate is where the magic happens. A third beverage is your wild card, a chance for a little bit of random pleasure in a period of the day that is otherwise not your own. One of the reasons people go so wild for random snacks in the workplace is that popcorn or cookies allow a moment of disengagement from work that feels autonomous. Since water and coffee are the only drinks many workplaces provide, tracking down a third can be an excuse to leave the office for a moment, even if it’s just to run to the nearby corner store. Small, regular pleasures have real psychological value in any part of life. During the workday, acquiring a mango seltzer or green juice can return some humanity to the cubicle farm.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that three is my personal sweet spot, according to Kurt Carlson, a marketing researcher at the College of William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business. As far as I can tell, he’s the only person who has done significant research into why and how human brains sort things into groupings of three. “People believe they’re observing something special when they see the third instance of it happen,” he explains. “After making three shots in a row, the person’s hot, and four doesn’t make them more hot. If you miss three traffic lights in a row, the world’s out to get you.”

Carlson references shots because he began his research by looking at data from the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. He found that when players make or miss three shots in a row, both they and their competitors believe that they are on a streak, which actually changes the probability of a player making or missing the next shot. If a guy is hot, he is “going to take shots that he shouldn’t take, the defense is going to double-team him, his teammates are going to force him the ball in places they shouldn’t have forced him the ball,” Carlson explains. Counterintuitively, that makes a player with “hot hands” less likely to make a fourth shot than under baseline circumstances. The inverse also happens for players who miss three: Everyone takes that as a sign that a player is no longer a threat, and the player’s chances of sinking a shot end up improving.

When it comes time to make decisions or process new information, people often default to problem-solving shortcuts called heuristics, many of which are so ingrained in human thinking that it might feel like you were born with them. Carlson believes that groupings of three spring out of our brains’ efforts to be simultaneously organized and complete. “The least cognitively challenging way to categorize things is to put them into two buckets, and the hardest way is to treat everything as an individual,” he says. The middle-ground approach to distinguishing between concepts without driving ourselves mad with nuance is to put things into three categories. In that sense, at least, the theory of hydration, caffeine, and pleasure is time-tested and psychologically approved.

Unfortunately, academia stands in the way of testing my desk-bev theory any further. “That is as far as I got,” Carlson says. “I moved on. You can only publish so many things that are cutesy like that before you damage your reputation as a real scholar.”

(Source: The Atlantic)