Episode 158: Survey Shows Return to Office Trends and Employer Attitudes

Welcome to the Workplace, a podcast by Cal Chamber. I'm Matthew Roberts, Labor Law helpline manager and Employment Law council for the California Chamber of Commerce. Hello listeners. As we sit here today, we are nearly 30 months removed from the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. During this time we have navigated an absolute whirlwind of workplace issues, from safety measures to leaves of absences, to managing employee retention and recruitment through what has really been the toughest job market for employers most of us have ever seen. I think though, the most enduring change from the pandemic we'll see moving forward is where our employees are going to be performing their work. Remote or hybrid work arrangements are now the norm instead of the exception. And as we enter a relative period of stability with COVID 19, employers are now at that stage of deciding whether to end remote hybrid arrangements and what to do with their commercial real estate and their workspaces that they had pre pandemic. Sensing this shift, commercial real estate firm CBRE conducted a wide ranging survey on current employer attitudes towards in person work and returning those employees back to the office. To discuss the findings of this survey, we are privileged to welcome CBRE's global head of occupier thought leadership, Julie Whelan. Julie, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Matthew.

So I want to get into the survey and really from a high level perspective, what did the survey that CBRE performed reveal overall about an employer's attitude towards returning employees employees to the workplace?

Absolutely. So interesting that we had been doing the survey since 2016, so this we had quite a bit of longitudinal data to go off of. And when we started to see the results come in throughout the pandemic, it made it even more interesting for us because we had trend lines to really focus on. And I would say what the survey revealed in April of 2022, which is the last survey that we did, is it really confirmed what we were all feeling in the market at that, which is that return to office was so slowly happening, but employers were ramping up efforts to get people back in. Now it was slow because what the survey results told us is that many employers were allowing people to come back at their own discretion and that was causing somewhat of a traffic jam because people weren't really arriving at the wrong conclusions yet. Organizations weren't really influencing that behavior of needing to come back. And it was also has been slow obviously because of Summer now. But it also revealed some similarities to past surveys which was really interesting. Number one, it's that hybrid work or these employee work patterns that are changing, that are allowing people to work in and out of the office are here to stay. Organizations are supporting that evolution. And most importantly, executive leadership is acknowledging that that evolution is happening and that they are supporting it now. It also continued to reveal that the office is not an afterthought. The office is still a very important piece of company culture for most companies. And what was interesting is that finally the survey revealed something different than past surveys had revealed during the pandemic. And that's that organizations are starting to make moves in their real estate strategies to satisfy these changes that they were seeing. Things like new space design, enhancing technology, tracking utilization, looking for different spaces, lease catalyst activities come up. So lots of different things that the survey revealed, but all along the lines of what we had been expecting as we were surveying throughout the pandemic.

So, Julie, something that I've heard from members a lot over the last couple of years is this same kind of deal just anecdotally, right? Employers are looking to slowly bring people back and they get some pushback from employees saying, you know, well, I can do my job from home now. There's not this real reason for me to come back into the office. So what are some of the stated reasons that that you saw that employers are using to justify their return coming back into the office?

Yeah, so great question. And it's interesting because in the last survey that we did, we didn't even take up any survey real estate to ask this question because we knew that based on past survey results, the reasons that employers wanted people back in the office were so consistent. It is to build culture, it's to promote collaboration, it's to allow for knowledge sharing and innovation, and all of that stuff is believed to best happen in the office. But these are super generic statements at this point in the journey. And what's really interesting is what those buzzwords mean for every company and what they need for every company is so different that it's really hard to get to an objective multiple choice question that's going to answer that. So what we're finding right now is that most companies are really trying to take time to understand what those words mean to them and then spending time translating that to employees in a way that actually creates an appealing value proposition for employees to come back to the office.

Excellent. So as they start to sell the messaging to their employees as to, you know, why we want to be in the office, I know you had said at the outset that a lot of employers are trying to Allow this to happen organically. Like you come to the office when you're ready to come to the office. But what are some of the other ways you've seen companies facilitating a return to the office for their employees?

Yeah, so in the beginning it was very much event based, right? We're going to have everything from welcome packages on your desk when you come back, to major things like bands and concerts playing when you come in. And then when we started starting and stopping that return to office because of the Omicron variant, there was this realization that, okay, doing these major events is time consuming, it's expensive and it might work for that period of time, but it's not going to create anything that's sustainable. And so now what we're seeing is that organizations are really looking at much more sustainable things that are going to get their employees back to the office. The very most important thing, which is extremely basic, is just communicating, right? Either through memos or videos or any of the above to get people to really understand from the words of their organization, why do we want you back? What is the value proposition of the office then that top down messaging is then leading in most cases to organizations allowing the dictation of that to happen at the business unit level. So at a business unit level, how are we going to then work with our employees to come to an equation that actually works in keeping with the top level messaging? Many are also asking executive leadership and managers to lead by example. Because if we don't have the executives and the leaders and organizations coming in themselves, then certainly the lower ranks of the organization aren't going to feel compelled to do so. And then also we're starting to create offices that people want to be in. Now that's going to happen slowly, but I think that depending on how employees come back to the office and how happy they are, is going to really dictate how often they come back also. So if the messaging is right, if all the leadership behavior is correct, and we are really talking to our employees, that last piece of the equation is do I have an opposite of making people happy? And that's going to really depend on what they left before the pandemic those 30 plus months ago. Right. To determine how much different you need to make that office, if it was a really bad office environment then it's going to be an even worse office environment now. And so we really need to make changes to make sure that our employees are happy when they come in.

Now you said it seems based on the survey results, at least where we are Today that the hybrid arrangement where you spend some time in the office and some time away from the office is really here to stay. So what are employers saying about that mix of office versus remote work? Is there a sweet spot that you're seeing in terms of how often when they're in and out of the office?

So it's all over the place, I would say. But generally what we're finding is that employers do want their employees in the office at least half the time, if not more. So they're really erring on the side of we expect that people are going to be in the office more than they're not is basically what that says. Now, you had asked me sort of what did the survey results reveal this time around? And what was interesting about this particular point is, is that that sort of focus on, if not more. Right. So maybe being in the office more than half the time has actually lost a little bit of steam. I think that a lot of organizations and employers are realizing that there is a gap between maybe what they desire as an organization and what their employers, employees desire as people. And so in order to close that gap, I think that many organizations now are realizing that maybe it's going to be more of an equal mix, not necessarily that, if not more so. That's really tricky right now. Right, because there's a lot of guidance that I think organizations want to provide. I personally think they need to provide it because we need to jumpstart getting people to come in on a more regular basis than they are today. However, providing that guidance while still allowing employees to have a sense of autonomy, which is something that they really value and that we don't want to take away from them, is frankly a piece of the equation that organizations are really still struggling right now with and still trying to figure out.

So if we sit in this hybrid environment, it seems to me that the employers are committing to this commercial real estate space. They've decided, you know, we're not getting rid of it. We heard a lot of that early on in the pandemic, but I think we've gotten away from that. And people want to keep their space, but the employees aren't in all the time. So are we seeing creative ways that the employers are allocating the space, whether it's the creation of something called hot desks, I believe I had heard, where people just kind of shared desks whenever they happen to come in, or making the space available to other people outside the organization. Julie, what have you seen there across those issues?

Well, so like I said, we've been surveying since 2016. And what's been really interesting is that organizations have known that they have needed to change space design principles for a long time, but there really hasn't been a huge catalyst of activity to make them change it quickly. Because behaviors were changing so slowly in the workplace. A sudden behaviors have changed really fast because of the pandemic and they're not going back. And so all of these things that they had been thinking about, they're now able to really implement because of necessity. They have to. And where is that necessity coming from? Well, that necessity is coming from the fact that if they continue to operate space the way that they used to, it's going to be grossly inefficient. There is not going to be space that's heavily utilized and there's not going to be a good vibe in space. So what they're realizing now is that if people are only going to come in part time basis, that maybe half the time, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Well, now if we have people assigned to desks in cubes like we used to, that's not going to work anymore. And so what we're seeing first and foremost is space sharing. Even within current footprint, current layout, current design the way that it is today, we're going to have people share their space because it is just more efficient to do it that way. Which leads to a whole lot of policies around clean desk policies and how do you know if they're in use or not and everything else that has to be attacked and dealt with. Additionally, I would say that space design is changing, right? So moving towards spaces where people have more command over their space. So instead of walking in and going to your cube or desk that you might have been assigned to that you were going to spend two thirds of your day at now allowing somebody to walk into the office, into a shared environment and be able to go into any number of locations that may work for them on that particular day. Or LinkedIn just had a big video that came out that said that they have 75 different station types that people can work at throughout their day. And I know we have believed that in our own space design principles for a long time also is that you need to give people optionality and how they work. And in addition, I would say that just part of that is more collaboration space, right? So we know that people are going to be in the office to do less me work and they're going to be in the office to do more we work. So being able to create Spaces that allow them to collaborate with people that are both in the office and out of the office are certainly really important. So those are all the ways that we're seeing that employees are allocating space differently in this kind of environment.

I think one of the most important things you've highlighted during this discussion, Julie, is how much there is to think about what the future of our workforce and workspace looks like when we bring them two together. So from your perspective, what is the biggest takeaway from your survey for HR professionals and company decision makers to take away from this episode as we conclude here today?

Yeah, so this is a really interesting angle for me to take because I actually started out as a human resources professional 20 years ago when I came into my career. And at the time, the reason that I left human resources is because the particular function that I was in, I actually, I didn't think that I was helping people as much as I was helping the organization get what they needed. And so I also had a penchant towards real estate. And so I ended up going into real estate and could have never known at that time that real estate was actually going to become more people focused about what really made employee experience tick. I could have never known that coming into this. But I think that that is the biggest takeaway from this survey and the dozen surveys that we did before even are that we are realizing and organizations are realizing that their business is run by people. And so they can't only focus on how those people are impacting their business, but also on how their business and their culture and their policies are impacting those people in turn. And I think that that has been a huge takeaway from this survey because if you look at the thread of every answer in this survey and every major response in the survey, it was always based on people and what they need to be happy in their space, to be productive in their work life, and to do ultimately the best for the organization that they work for. So it is always a two way street and we realize that. But I think that most organizations can be very well suited right now to really realize that the people side of their equation and how their business impacts their people is really something that can be looked at and learned from going forward.

Julie, this was such an insightful conversation for me personally and I think for everyone listening in today. So, Julie, thank you again very much for joining us.

Thanks Matthew for having me and thank.

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