One Developer’s View: Fears of Companies Shedding Large Amounts of Space are Overblown

Everyone has guesses about when people will come back to the office and what percentage of the workforce will be allowed to telework long term.

“I think there’s some of us that think it [telework] will remain,” says Lincoln’s Senior Vice President of Management Services, Shane Froman. “There’s some of us that think that it’s going to be forgotten.”

In the immediate future, teleworking should remain popular.

“I think it’s going to be around in the near future based on conversations that we’ve had,” Froman says. “All of a sudden, everybody can operate from home. That’s all great.”

But at the end of the day, Froman thinks that companies will look at functionality. “I think they’re going to see that working from home for some areas of their business is probably fine, but they’re ultimately going to need their staff back in,” Froman says.

Froman says one of the main advantages of being in an office is interacting with others.

“There’s just something to that human element of having that interaction—collaborating and talking,” Froman says. “I think it [telework] is going to alter the collaboration model that we’ve seen in the last couple of years—where we have all these open environments and everybody just hangs out and sits in the same recliner or the chairs.”

While a move to more telework could reduce the need for office space, other COVID trends could force occupants to reengineer their spaces.

“I think that mentality [for open spaces] is going to ease up on the smaller footprints that they’ve been able to get away with because they had collaboration areas,” Froman says. “This [COVID] is going to cause them to rethink that. They won’t necessarily need more space, but they’re probably going to have to rework their space.”

But Froman thinks fears of companies shedding large amounts of office space are probably overblown.

“I think there’s fear in the industry that all of a sudden all these people can work from home and that everybody is going to reduce their square footage sizes,” he says. “But a lot of us think that is not necessarily the case. Once everything settles down, there will probably be an internal rework of the space that companies occupy.”

This isn’t the first time that flu concerns have forced office operators to rethink their spaces. Froman says the industry went through a similar process, though to a much smaller degree, with H1N1 bird flu in 2009.

“Everybody was nervous for six or eight months,” Froman says. “But this [COVID] is something that was unheard of. I’m hoping that it was a one-off and it won’t happen again, but I also don’t necessarily think it’s going to make drastic changes. I think it will cause people to step back and retool and rethink, but that’s probably the extent of it.”