The DNA of Work

Global trends in hybrid working: AWA's Hybrid Working Index separates facts from hype

• Season 1 • Episode 52

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Curious about how hybrid working is transforming organisations around the world? AWA’s Hybrid Working Index reveals the truth about what’s really going on. We look at different types of hybrid working policies, the volumes of people coming into office, the impact on the usage of workspace and the ultimate decisions being taken to resize real estate. 

The most recent results reflect a population of 150,000 people across 15 sectors and 22 countries. We reveal the latest findings and the trends across the data captured since June 2022 – and ask whether we are heading to some sort of steady state?

There is also a fascinating interview with a contributor to the survey, Steve Chapman from the UK Government’s Home Office about how the Index and the wider utilisation data they gather are helping inform decisions about their estate, and changing their approach to planning accommodation for their staff.

Discover how this powerful tool can inform organisational decision making, providing valuable benchmarking data across locations and industry sectors.

Mentions:

 

AWA Host: Karen Plum

Guests: 

  • Josh Sumner, Workplace Strategist, AWA
  • Andrew Mawson, Founder & Managing Director, AWA
  • Steve Chapman Head of OFW Estates Strategy, Estates Intelligent Client Function, Security, Estates and Information Directorate

 AWA Guest details: https://www.advanced-workplace.com/our-team/ 

 

CONTACTS & WEBSITE details:

AWA contact: Andrew Mawson 

AWA Institute contact:Natalia Savitcaia 

Music: Licensed by Soundstripe – Lone Canyon



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Karen Plum:

Hello there. As organisations navigate some of the challenges of hybrid working, many of them want to know what other organisations are doing so, whether they are requiring their people to be in the office, how well their space is occupied and whether they are planning on resizing their portfolios. AWA's latest Hybrid Working Index covers over 150,000 people operating in 15 sectors and 22 countries. Let's find out what it shows about the evolution of hybrid working. Welcome to AWA's podcast, which is all about the changing world of work and trying to figure out what's right for each organisation, because we know that every one is unique. We talk to people who have walked the walk, who've got the t-shirt and who've learned lessons that they're happy to share with us.

Karen Plum:

I'm your host, Karen Plum, and this is the DNA of Work. If you're a regular listener to the show, you'll have heard about AWA's Hybrid Working Index in previous episodes, or maybe you're already a contributor. In this episode, we're going to share the most recent results and what the year-on-year comparison has shown us. I'll also be talking to a contributor from a UK government department about how they use the data. But firstly, let's set the scene. I asked AWA's Workplace Strategist, Josh Sumner, to give us a bit of background.

Josh Sumner:

So, really, Karen, this began as an idea in the spring of 2022.

Josh Sumner:

So organisations were coming out of lockdown and the end of COVID-19 restrictions.

Josh Sumner:

Many of our clients were eager to know what others were doing and, equally, we were curious to see if we could get a picture of how office space was being used post COVID and the types of hybrid working policies and strategies that organisations were employing.

Josh Sumner:

And really, as the only independent player in the workplace market, and again because we are a global business and in touch with many organisations across the world, we felt we were well placed to start looking at this. And so, in June 2022, we launched the AWA Hybrid Working Index, focusing primarily on two metrics, number one being attendance, which is the percentage of an office's population who are physically in the premises on any given day; and desk use, which, if we assume that everyone in the office on any given day uses one desk, what percentage of the office desks are therefore being used? We're now on our third iteration of the Index. We also ran one in January 2023. And now this third cycle marks one year from our original report in June of last year, so that we can track the development of office use and hybrid work practices over that time.

Karen Plum:

It sounds like that's a really important milestone, because having year on year data, or having you know data over a long period, is really important. You can't really tell a huge amount from a snapshot, can you? But when you can start to build up a picture, then it's much more powerful.

Josh Sumner:

Absolutely, and I think the key takeaways really that we're getting from this cycle are all around those changes over time and the picture that's starting to emerge as we get back into kind of a BAU state.

Karen Plum:

Thanks, Josh, and we'll be hearing more from him later when he'll be sharing the latest results - so stay tuned. Having set the scene in terms of the purpose of the Hybrid Working Index, I thought it would be interesting to hear from one of the participants to see why they chose to get involved and how they use the results. So here's my chat with Steve Chapman, Head of OFW Estates Strategy in the Security, Estates and Information Directorate at the UK Government's Home Office. So, Steve, you're a participant currently in AWA's Hybrid Working Index. What made you decide to take part in the Index in the first place?

Steve Chapman:

Well, I've known Andrew Mawson for a number of years now and I really appreciate the work that he does in this field. And when this opportunity come up, we were already looking ourselves at utilisation figures and occupancy levels and didn't really have anything to measure against. So it was an ideal opportunity to look at what other organisations are doing, to see whether we were doing the right thing, or do we need to start looking a little bit more detail about how we get people back into the office?

Karen Plum:

Right and that comparison, the benchmarking aspect of the Index, were you particularly concerned to look at yourselves against other Government departments or were you interested in looking more widely at organisations in different industries, different sectors?

Steve Chapman:

I shared this with my team as well and, from our point of view, we think there's real good value to compare our attendance data against other organisations and, in particular, the private sector, to see what they're doing.

Karen Plum:

Yes, because it gives you a good sense of how other organisations are managing.

Steve Chapman:

Exactly, and the findings from the first survey we participated in were very eye-opening and very reassuring that we were doing the right thing as well.

Karen Plum:

Right, interesting. Are you including all of your estate in the Index or just specific buildings or locations?

Steve Chapman:

No, we're one of the bigger government departments. In total, we've got over 250 properties, so we focused on five of our larger buildings, the ones where we needed to get people back into the office and where we thought we'd get the best data.

Karen Plum:

When you say needing to get people back into the office, what was the driver for getting people back?

Steve Chapman:

Well, I think being government there's lots of drivers, really. We've done a lot of internal work with our HR department about why people were not coming back into the office, probably like a lot of other organisations, but there is this desire for government departments to come back in. There are multitude of reasons, to be honest, but we've gone from well-being to supporting the environment in shops and etc. of where you work.

Karen Plum:

And also, I guess, adapting some offices to a new way of working, so that the places that people have to work when they come into the office are more in line with what they're doing these days. Perhaps more collaboration, that sort of thing.

Steve Chapman:

Yeah, very much so. We've got a transformation team, we've got a team that works on workplace experience as well, so we've learned from other departments and from other institutions about how they're dealing with the issue. So we are changing our working patterns, reviewing our layouts, bringing in more collaborative meeting furniture and really engaging with teams to understand how they work from an operational point of view and it's very difficult from my perspective because we have a lot of different working personas so we're having to look at all of those and go out individually to speak to them to find out how we can assist them with providing a better workplace experience for those coming to the office.

Karen Plum:

Yeah, gone are the days of the vanilla office, aren't they? There's a lot more refinement and fine-tuning for each individual group.

Steve Chapman:

Well, I can see a gradual shift away from conventional desking and more into work points, and in that work points I mean different areas where people can work, not necessarily a desk, it could be a touchdown table, it could be a quiet zone and it could be an area where people need to go to do Teams calls or Zoom calls.

Karen Plum:

Yes, and it makes the environment a lot more interesting, I think, when you don't have rows and rows and rows of desks.

Steve Chapman:

That's what we're finding, yes, and as we're going out. But I think there is a two-way thing, and I just touched on it earlier is that I don't think that the customers know what they want and what they need. So I think it's for us to go out and we're developing a spatial design guide whereby, when we go out taking briefings for accommodation and what we can actually say to the department concerned you're an operational team, we think that you would benefit more from this type of layout and then have a debate with them about how we change their environment around and remove desks, because desks are precious and they still will always be precious for the foreseeable future. But we're trying to get them to look in different ways, to say you don't need conventional desks anymore, you might be better off with a different range of furniture.

Karen Plum:

Yes, you make a really good point when you ask people. Or if you ask people, what sort of settings do you want? They don't necessarily know because they've not necessarily experienced them before, but if you focus on their needs, then you, as the experts, can come up with some alternatives for them that you think would meet those needs.

Steve Chapman:

Yeah, one of the examples I use is one of our operational teams. They come in for briefings in the morning and back in the day they would all come and occupy a desk with a monitor screen and a keyboard and a mouse. But now I'm saying, well, do you really need? You've got laptops. I've seen none of you using your monitors. You're only coming for half an hour, you get your briefing and you go out. Would it be best if I give you a big touchdown table with power on the touchdown table so you can come in, y ou've not got monitor screens obscuring your vision across the table. And I'm finding when I explain this to people they're actually quite receptive to this,

Karen Plum:

Yes, and then you haven't got all of those desks empty for the rest of the day, because everybody's off doing other things.

Steve Chapman:

Yes, and also from a sustainability point of view, you look at moving monitor screens and a cost point of view if you don't need the monitor screens and when you have a tech refresh, you won't be replacing as many going forward.

Karen Plum:

Absolutely. Just coming back to the survey, it asks you to gather specific items of data, and you mentioned earlier that you were already monitoring utilisation and occupancy, so were you monitoring everything that the Index was asking for?

Steve Chapman:

Yes, I think so. Yes, we started to monitor data around the same time as the Index was launched and we started to monitor occupancy as we came out of lockdown to better understand the buildings and the utilisation rates and the adoption of hybrid working. We looked at different ways of doing it and I think everybody has. At the moment, we've landed on the logging on of laptops to monitor occupancy levels. We find that's the most accurate and, as opposed to we haven't had the manpower to actually do the old physical utilisation surveys. It's quite difficult, you know, monitoring people coming in through card access system. We've tried out lots of different ways and we've landed on this one at the moment.

Karen Plum:

Right, okay, and how are you using the results that you're getting from the survey? You said that the first one that you took part in was an eye-opener and reassuring in terms of the levels of occupancy and attendance across other organisations. So is it a useful benchmark, is it a nice to have, or are you actually using the data to inform decision-making?

Steve Chapman:

Yes, we find the data extremely useful as a benchmark and being in a government department, you can see from the press that we are encouraging people to come back into the office. So the survey helps us understand where we've got space in the office and so we're looking at utilising the space a lot more. So it helps us articulate department's office attendance rates to senior leaders you know in the wider context of the office attendance and into the wider public and private sectors.

Karen Plum:

Is it actually being used to change the shape and the size of the overall portfolio? Do you think?

Steve Chapman:

It is indeed, y es. Y ou know we've actually saved millions of pounds on e state and this has allowed us to improve the efficiency of our estate by consolidating teams and sweating the assets of our existing buildings. A good example of this is our new building in Croydon, where we've changed the level of occupancy that we were looking to move into our new building, because we think we can increase the number of people now by not really using desk sharing ratio s any more, but looking at utilisation of the building and how frequent people are coming to the office.

Karen Plum:

And, in terms of the data that you're gathering, is this doing it more frequently than the survey asks for, so that you have a more granular understanding of how occupancy is changing?

Steve Chapman:

Yes, we definitely are sort of stepping up and more senior directors are looking at their areas and areas of growth. So when we get the figures, we really analyse them and look at ways of how we can look at the bigger picture rather than just a specific issue, because we have things all over the country. So we've also got other initiatives, like places of growth, that we need to look at. So the data that we're getting from the benchmarking is critical now to looking at places of growth and our London plan.

Karen Plum:

Yes, so you've got other organisations taking part in the Index in similar locations to the ones that you're operating in, and that's again, as you say, giving you that benchmark to give you confidence that you're in line with what others are doing as you push forward with your strategy.

Steve Chapman:

Exactly yeah.

Karen Plum:

Excellent. So as far as AWA is concerned, we're trying all the time to encourage more organisations to take part in the Index. Is that growth of organisations, is that important to you?

Steve Chapman:

It is, yes, I value the work that's done by AWA. I don't pay for the service, but I think it's good to understand what other people are doing and I'm waiting for the results now from the last survey, but it's just useful to know, its reassuring to know that organisations are moving in the right direction, and we've certainly seen an increase since the last survey, I think so, which is good. This is where we can do the survey over a year, participating every time that we can gradually see that we're moving in the right direction.

Karen Plum:

Yes, and it gives you that periodic touch point, doesn't it? That whatever else is being said in the press and whatever other rumours you hear or things that are said to you by other people, it is data rather than opinions or hearsay or whatever.

Steve Chapman:

Exactly, yeah, and people are gradually accepting that we're in a new world now. We're finding like every other organisation and a lot of people are liking these work-life balance, but we've got to make sure that it's right for us and us as an organisation. So that's what we're doing, and this is why the data is very, very important at the moment, and we use the data all the time for a different range of initiatives that we're doing.

Karen Plum:

Yeah, so I guess what I take from our conversation is that, obviously, however often the AWA survey runs, you'll take part in it, but you're really focused on using the data on a much more frequent basis and given that that's the case the importance of understanding that data is that something that you would recommend that other organisations try to get a handle on, if they haven't already?

Steve Chapman:

I think so, yes, I think, and the good thing about it is that we're not comparing figures, I'm not just comparing them with financial institutions from the private sector. There's a whole range of organisations - pharmaceutical, and that's the beauty about it is that you're not just comparing sort of apples with apples, are you? You're actually looking at a big wide range of organisations. I get pleasure of saying when I look at the data and actually thinking well, actually we're not doing a lot different to what everybody else is doing in the private sector. We often get criticized for lots of different things in the public sector, but in respect of, in terms of the workplace, we are probably on par with the majority of the private institutions a nyway.

Karen Plum:

Great. OK Steve, we ll, thank you very much indeed. It's been really interesting hearing why you got into the survey and how you're using it and I think the message of really understanding the usage of the workplace, I think is the key message that I, and hopefully our audience, will take away. So thank you very much.

Steve Chapman:

Pleasure Karen.

Karen Plum:

It's really great to know that the data is proving to be really useful for those taking part. And now it's time to pick up my discussion with Josh and AWA's Founder and Managing Director, Andrew Mawson. Firstly, I wanted to pick up what Steve said about his senior leaders being interested in their own results, but also in how they compare with other organisations and across sectors, not just within the public sector. I asked Andrew if the ability to compare results across the sectors was one of the drivers when he first established the Index.

Andrew Mawson:

Yeah, I think so. I mean we were looking to try and give people the truth about what was really going on with an unbiased lens. A lot of leaders in organisations, of course, they're very focused on what their own organisation is doing, but often don't really have much understanding in any real sense of what's happening in other organisations. So we felt it was important to give people that visibility. As an independent player, we're really on the side of the occupier, and so we wanted to get the honest truth from the organisations that we work with all around the world and to try and provide it in a form that was going to help people to have meaningful conversations within their organisations.

Karen Plum:

OK, well, the suspense is killing me, so can we have a look at the latest results? What are the standout messages from the latest results, Josh?

Josh Sumner:

So we're seeing that kind of coming up to three years after the pandemic, on average, office workers are still spending less time in the office than out of it. So on average, office attendance is about 35%, s o around one and three-quarter days spent in the office per week, and that employees would prefer to be in the office midweek, with nearly 80% of people working from home on a Friday. But underlying this, and perhaps the most interesting takeaway, is how attendance and desk use have developed over the past year. So we've seen a steady incremental increase in both attendance and desk use over the three Index cycles.

Josh Sumner:

In June 2022, attendance was around 26% on average. It's now at 35%, as I mentioned, and this increase can be seen in every major geography in our data set. Desk use has increased even further, from 33% to 48%, so a 15% increase, and one of the key reasons for this is that organisations are reducing their desk numbers in relation to reduced demand, resulting in a higher desk use percentage. And then, on the topic of reduced demand, a new question which we added into this third iteration of the Index was whether organisations were planning on consolidating or releasing office space as a reaction to the reduced attendance that they were seeing post-COVID. A nd 37% so well over a third of organisations said that they were going to either reduce or consolidate space. Of those that are, only 11% are repurposing space for their own use and the rest are trying to release the office space, either by marketing for sublet or waiting for a lease break in order to move to a new premises and right size.

Josh Sumner:

One other interesting data point that I'll mention is in relation to hybrid working policy.

Josh Sumner:

So, first of all, we've seen that 46% of offices still have no hybrid working policy, which is possibly a strikingly high number, but it's down from 60% in the first iteration of the Index, and we've also seen a large increase in the number of organisations that are mandating three or more days a week in the office.

Josh Sumner:

When we first started the Index, this number was down at kind of 12%, and we're now seeing that a quarter of offices in our data set are mandating that people come in for three or more days in the office. And I suppose that the last thing I'll say on policies is that, as we've seen in the previous two iterations, mandating that people come into the office is no guarantee that they will, and for pretty much every number of days that the organisations are mandating that people come in, the real attendance that they're seeing is lower. So office s, for example, that mandate that people come in three days a week, are seeing that, on average, people come in just over two days a week. And people that mandate that people come in four days a week are only seeing that people come in for half of that time - s o two days a week.

Andrew Mawson:

There's a visible movement in some organisations to get people to come to the office more and it se ems to be having some kind of an impact. But I mean, I don't see this whole thing going backwards and people coming back into the office full time anytime soon.

Karen Plum:

Well, I guess the thing is that people have been experimenting and, over the period of time since organisations have started to put hybrid arrangements in place. If they've taken our advice, they will have been developing team working together agreements and revising them and reviewing them over time, depending on how well things are going. So you can expect that sort of testing and experimentation period to reach some sort of a reasonable, steady state.

Andrew Mawson:

You would, and I think that steady state must be coming soon. I mean, if you look at some of the inquiries we're getting or we've had over the last six months, it's predominantly come from a discomfort that hybrid working arrangements aren't solid, not being defined properly, and I think that's right and this no policy thing will, I would expect it over the next 12 months to disappear.

Karen Plum:

So we're definitely starting to build up a picture of what's happened, at least over the last 12 months, and we can see some things increasing and other things decreasing. And, as you said, Josh, you can mandate people to come into the office, w hether they do or not is another matter. Do the results differ markedly between either industry sectors or different geographies around the world?

Josh Sumner:

Some of the interesting differences when you look at the data by geography, one of the first interesting points is desk provision. So when we look at this person in North America, for example, they typically have more desks than they have people, so for every 100 people, they have 107 desks on average. On the other side of that picture, the lowest desk provision that we see is in the UK, where typically there's 59 desks per 100 people, so nearly 0.5 desks per person. The irony, however, is that in the US we're seeing the lowest average attendance percentage, at 29%, compared to 32% in the UK. The highest that we've seen is in the European Union, which is around 55%, although we need to caveat that that's a slightly smaller data set than we have for other geographies.

Karen Plum:

So, in terms of the geographical differences, you mentioned the difference between America and the UK, so it sounds like American organisations have got many more unused desks in their offices at the moment.

Josh Sumner:

Correct, and it's therefore no surprise that half of the offices that we have in our North America data set are looking to either consolidate or to release space. In terms of sector, one of the interesting stories that we've been focusing on, as with our overall data set, is change over time, and we've done something of a mini case study looking at the difference between Professional and Financial Services versus the Technology sector. What we can see is that when we ran our first Index in July 2022, the Technology sector had a very low attendance of around 15%, which was the lowest of all of the sectors that we had in the data set, and the Financial and Professional Services sectors averaged at 36%. What we've seen is that over the last year, the Technology sector has been steadily increasing and is now at around 32% attendance, whereas the Financial and Professional Services sectors have remained very static at 35% attendance.

Karen Plum:

So there's some convergence, as again, as things settle down. I mean, I guess the attendance isn't necessarily driven by people going into the office to sit and work at a desk, perhaps more likely to be people coming in to collaborate because they've figured out what they're going to use it for, and coming in to be with people. So it's hopefully that's a positive trend, rather than it being the organisations dictating a fictional number of days for no specific reason.

Josh Sumner:

Precisely, and I think the other thing that we're seeing is that when we focus on the larger sectors that we have in terms of data set responses, we're seeing a much smaller variance in attendance between those than we were previously. So previously there was a very large delta between the highest attendance sectors and the lowest attended sectors. Now that picture is starting to flatten a little bit as we get further away from the pandemic.

Karen Plum:

Certainly feels like a settling down, doesn't it? And probably not too surprising given the trajectory of the pandemic and how things are now? Steve mentioned that monitoring utilization and attendance has helped him to improve the efficiency of the government estate they've b een consolidating teams, as he says, sweating the assets of existing buildings. Are you hearing similar things from other contributors using the data in this way?

Andrew Mawson:

I would say that, for sure, data is being used by real estate leaders and workplace leaders to make the argument for consolidation and for, you know, even, maybe, the relative location of different units, but I'd say that most of that is actually quite high level data. A lot of it is associated with badge swipes, you know, taking an aggregate view as to how many people are in the office, and maybe also if you've got data that relates to specific departments and units using that as opposed to people using sensors, and so more sophisticated and higher granularity techniques. But you know, for sure, data is a really important part of this, really, and, in a sense, the data that we're using here is coming from a number of different sources and, of course, we ask people to declare that, what that is, but most of it is coming from data that's coming through the badge swipes.

Karen Plum:

Right. So final question is really around what we are advising organisations to do. Clearly hybrid working - you know we didn't have the term a couple of years ago and lots of organisations are working their way through it and hopefully trying to hold their nerve and get through whatever teething problems they're seeing. What do you think organisations should be doing to ensure that their hybrid is working for them?

Andrew Mawson:

Well, hybrid working changes everything really and I think to this point, some organisations have recognised that and have addressed it from a holistic standpoint, looking at policies, practices, leadership skills, space, technology, and really embraced the whole idea of hybrid working as a kind of organisational strategy, really.

Andrew Mawson:

I think others have lagged behind and have just seen it as being to do with people turning up or not in an office, and I would say it's time that people realise that actually this isn't going away and it's time to look at all those sorts of things. And, funnily enough, we have recently developed a thing called the Hybrid Working Health Check, which looks at 35 factors associated with an organisation through a series of interviews with different people in different places within the organisation, to try to provide some kind of a guide as to how organisations should move through. It's a relatively quick service that we provide, but I think people are looking for a little bit of guidance across these different elements and also to see how the different factors and elements link together, because you've got a real estate component, a technology component, an HR component, a leadership component. All these things are interlinked and should be seen that way.

Karen Plum:

So the evolution of hybrid working marches on. As Andrew said, some organisations are trying to row back and reinstate a world that existed before the pandemic, and others are embracing the new world but aren't quite sure how to make the most of it. While AWA's data suggests that we may be approaching some sort of steady state, it feels like there may be many more bumps in the road as organisations try to find their new normal. If you'd like to see the latest Hybrid Working Index results or to find out more about the Hybrid Working Health Check that Andrew mentioned, head to our website advanced-workplace. com and get in touch. If you fancy joining the next Hybrid Working Index survey, there's no charge and contributors get a report and an invite to a webinar where we discuss the results. More details on our website.

Karen Plum:

Thank you to my guests Steve Chapman, Josh Sumner and Andrew Mawson for taking part in this episode. There's always something to learn about hybrid working. If you'd like to hear future episodes of the DNA of work, just follow or like the show. You can contact us on our website, advanced-workplace. com. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.