According to a Roy Morgan Research survey released in June 2020, 32 per cent of working Australians were working from home at the peak of the economic lockdown. The figure was much higher for businesses whose employees typically worked in offices, led by finance and insurance (58 per cent of employees), public administration (51 per cent) and communications (47 per cent).
Nick Deligiannis, managing director of recruitment group Hays, says the success of the enforced working-from-home model – employees generally welcomed the flexibility, while many employers were pleasantly surprised that productivity levels were maintained and even improved – does not signal the death of the office.
“The office environment provides something that is hard to pinpoint, but which is really important to the health of an organisation,” he says.
“There are many positives in having people working together from a central location. The workplace is a place to foster a feeling of connectedness and collaboration, an environment in which to create and innovate, to coach and be coached, to celebrate success, and to develop a culture that defines the organisation.“
Deligiannis believes the future of white-collar work lies in a hybrid working model – a combination of working from home and from a central office location.
“We now know that a large percentage of the workforce can work productively and successfully from home,” he says.
“For many employees, overall performance, job satisfaction and work-life balance increased as less time was spent commuting or dealing with the distractions of office working.
“At the same time, some employers want to bring staff back into the one central office for the cultural and collaboration benefits that face-to-face working offers.
“A longer-term shift towards a hybrid working model could be the ideal middle ground that allows employees to work flexibly on certain days of the week, then come together with colleagues in a central workplace on others.”
A survey by Hays of 2500 “working professionals” in November last year found that 61 per cent believed a hybrid working model was the most productive.
Hays’ research also discovered that 47 per cent of employers were open to retaining working from home as part of their workplace mix.
“Employers are looking to the future and how they and their staff can benefit most effectively from this new way of technology-enabled working,” Deligiannis says. “Organisations everywhere will be going through this process.“
Hays is also on that journey.
“We were able to very quickly mobilise our people to work in a non-traditional way, away from the office,” Deligiannis adds. “In that brief time, the workplace fundamentally changed and we’re now looking to embrace a model that combines the best of both worlds.
“From our clients’ point of view, dealing with people remotely has…
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