The key role of the office in a changing working environment

COVID-19 required most countries to impose lockdowns as a way to limit contagion. This forced companies to widely and quickly embrace remote working solutions for their workforce. During the emergency period, offices have thus been largely underused, creating some debate about their usefulness in an attempt to reduce company overhead costs. But what has been the effect of remote working on the workforce productivity, creativity and energy? Coping with living arrangements and with the way tasks are performed from home is significantly influencing productivity. Extended remote working is reducing energy levels among teams and making it difficult to train junior resources and live the company culture. This is why companies, when developing medium term plans, are more cautious in discussing dismantling offices, as they represent an irreplaceable working tool. Human interactions are needed for most of business and roles, and there are some tasks with no or very limited possibility to be efficiently performed remotely. In the post COVID-19 world, remote working could be integrated as a component of office life, generating two different forces. The first involves corporates reducing their footprint, decreasing the number of premises (where possible) and requesting staff to spend fewer days in the office. The second involves providing more space per capita as social distancing, employee safety and wellbeing will re-gain importance. In this context, investors and investment managers need to re-adapt their strategy according to the final user: the corporate tenant and its own way of working. With our guest speakers from Saint-Gobain and Boston Consulting Group (tenants in the Generali Real Estate portfolio), we will discuss the policy that the company is currently adopting to balance safety, wellbeing and productivity. We’ll also talk about how the office will need to transform in order to stand the new challenge and way of work demanded by tenants and the job market.