Over a third of UK office workers have no dedicated workspace at home, and only 6 percent have been trained for hybrid meetings, claims a new report from Leeds University Business School. The report is an interactive tool and suggests practical measures based on evaluation of stakeholders and employee interviews, industry workshops, cross-industry surveys of UK office workers, employee diaries and case study corporations.

Offices across the country are struggling to claw back pre-pandemic occupancy rates after two years of remote work. Now we are learning that offices in cities with longer commute times are having a much harder time.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed combined data from the U.S. Census Bureau and access control platform Kastle Systems and found that offices located in urban areas where employees tend to live closer to where they work have a higher return-to-office rate. Out of the ten major cities with the biggest drop in office occupancy during the pandemic, eight of them had an average one-way commute of thirty minutes or more (circa 2019).

Ever wonder why we work eight hours a day, five days a week? Or why we clock in from 9 to 5? It started with the shift from agriculture to manufacturing during the industrial revolution. Originally, factory workers clocked in long hours six days a week. A 70-hour workweek wasn’t uncommon.

 

With the shift in working arrangements during the pandemic, businesses are taking a closer look at their schedules.

The hard part isn’t sitting at your desk, but sitting in traffic day after day.

 

Onerous commutes are the real sticking point when it comes to returning to the office, and some companies are starting to meet employees where they are.

Employees were less likely to have returned the office en masse in cities that had longer average commutes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Census Bureau and building access company Kastle Systems data from 24 major metros.

In what's got to be one of the dumbest moves in the history of business, many companies are demanding that their employees come back into the office, even when they have jobs that can be done remotely.

A recent article in Slate cited the example of a 500-person company that is demanding the employees come into to the office, even every though all the work can be done remotely, as evidenced by the fact that all but 2 percent of the employees had been working from home since March.

While remote tech workers hold the advantage in the short run, they will need to constantly upgrade their skill set in order to prevent their replacement by automation.

Hybrid work is hard to define. Suki Reilly of MovePlan explores why each business will need to define how they want to work very differently.

Silver Art Projects runs an artist residency program on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center. Developers around the country should take note.

The pandemic has catalyzed an undeniable change in office use, but many companies still have questions and uncertainties about how these changes will take shape and how to plan workplace strategy for the future. Urban centers have, perhaps, been the most disrupted by these changes, with the majority of office space located in the urban core. Data from Dr. Tracy Loh, a fellow with the Brookings Institution, shows that 71% of US office space is located in a downtown market. This is going to be among the biggest challenges for office users and office owners going forward.

“That represents a lot of eggs in one basket for a CRE industry that’s adapting to greater telework and hybrid work environments. The question that this raised for me is how resilient is a city center that is dominated by one form of real estate that is vulnerable to disruption,” Jamie Henderson, head of commercial real estate at Capital One, tells GlobeSt.com.