The Purpose of the Workplace Has Changed

Sanjay Rishi, Americas CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL, is the latest workplace expert to assure office owners that the workplace hasn’t suddenly become obsolete—but he tells GlobeSt.com that it has changed. People want to go back to work and preserve the flexibility that they gained during the pandemic, and organizations are accommodating those needs.

“People like the idea of flexibility,” Rishi says. “People have proven to themselves that they can operate remotely. In our surveys, 90% of people say that they don’t want to get back to an environment that is five days a week at work—but 80% say that they do want to get back to work at least some days during the week.”

There are an amalgam of reasons why workers are asking for both lifestyles. Many want to return to the office because their homes don’t provide enough space for full-time work. Others miss the mentoring, collaboration and growth opportunities that come more easily and readily with face-to-face interaction. Demographics are also playing a role. Rishi has found that parents and single-parents are often more anxious to get back into the workspace.

Rishi and his JLL colleagues Benjamin Breslau and Peter Miscovich recently wrote a book on the topic, The Workplace You Need Now: Shaping Spaces for the Future of Work where they explore how the workplace has changed in the last year, and what organizations are doing to address employee demands. “One of the things that we write about in our book is that the purpose of the workplace has changed,” says Rishi. “The purpose of the workplace is all around this idea of culture and connectivity and collaboration. We are going to see office spaces evolve in this post-pandemic world.”

There are also generational divides that are emerging. For some of the older members of Gen-Z, the pandemic has occupied their earlier years in the workplace. To them, flexibility will be inherent, and in-office experience a luxury. “They are going to be shaped in a very different way, but they want to get back into the workplace because they miss that affinity,” says Rishi. “They want to learn from other’s experiences, and they want mentoring.”

However, the generation is also much different that its millennial predecessors. “Gen-Z is very intolerant about the speed of change, and they are much more portable,” says Rishi. “There are differences between millennials and Gen-Z, and organizations want to be aware of that.”