The future of the SA office under scrutiny

In response to lockdown restrictions imposed in 2020, many organisations moved their staff to working from home. Even as restrictions have eased, some companies have opted to move permanently to remote working, while others have opted for a hybrid model between working from home and time in the office. In some quarters there is a reticence to returning to the office full time.

A recent Business Day Dialogues LIVE discussion focused on what the future holds for the SA office.

The SA Depression and Anxiety Group chair, psychologist Dr Colinda Linde, said most people soon started to miss human connections during the hard lockdown. Enforced social isolation has resulted in a mental health pandemic.

Working from home suits some people, she said, while others prefer an office environment or a hybrid arrangement. The challenge is not everybody has the luxury of a dedicated space to work at home where they will not be interrupted.

Irrespective of where people choose to work, work-life balance will always be a challenge, she said.

Rob Kane, CEO of Boxwood Property Fund and a board member of the South African Property Owners Association (Sapoa), said declining demand for office space has had a devastating impact on certain commercial property sector nodes, including Sandton and the Cape Town CBD. However, this was a trend that was apparent even before Covid and was merely worsened by the pandemic.

He believes the work-from-home honeymoon is over as more employees return to the office. Though the expectation is that the office market will ultimately shrink by about 20%, he said evidence indicates that office spaces will continue to exist. However, they will become less sterile and warmer environments than in the past.

Linda Trim is a director at Giant Leap, a company which helps companies get the best out of their people by creating award-winning workspaces. Innovation, creativity and speed to market are all harder to achieve when staff are working remotely, she said.

According to research conducted by Giant Leap, more than 80% of employees want to get back into the office. However, she stressed that there is no one- size-fits-all solution and that organisations need to find a middle ground that suits them. The future office, she predicted, will offer greater flexibility and less rigidity. Work spaces need to become spaces where people want to be, offering great coffee, ergonomic furniture, enticing meeting spaces and state- of-the-art technology.

Francois Viruly, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town and a non-executive director of the Accelerate Property Fund, said the danger of looking at global trends, where people are returning to the office more rapidly than locally, is that you lose the local context. He agreed that working from home suited some more than others but was less than ideal for first-time workers who had not had the opportunity to pick up on workplace culture or to receive the necessary support.

What the pandemic has shown us, he said, is a trailer of the future and what is possible. However, in transitioning through these possibilities, there are uncertainties as we adapt to a new environment and a new normal.

Watch the discussion below: