Employees’ reluctance to return to full-time commuting after a year of Covid means change is afoot for companies
A rare human presence in the City of London this year. Photograph by Hieu Vu Minh
Susanna* has spent most of lockdown in back-to-back Zoom meetings. It is a major change for the senior banker, who used to commute to London from her home in rural Lincolnshire and regularly travelled across the country to meet business customers face to face.
The 55-year-old does not miss the 5.30am alarms or spending three nights a week away from her husband and son. And she appreciates the way the bank’s management has banned calls between noon and 1pm – now dubbed “golden hour” – and cuts video meetings off after 50 minutes to give staff a brief buffer. But working from home has felt relentless, and after nearly a year she is longing to return to some sort of normality.
Following the pandemic, Susanna is hoping for a middle ground where she can experience the buzz of central London and cross-country travel, while enjoying the extra downtime remote working permits. Her ideal scenario would be to meet her team of six just once a month in the office, and she would not be afraid to challenge bosses if they asked for more.
“Why would we need to do that,” she said, “with everything that we’ve proved over the past year in terms of how we’re able to conduct our business, and do it much quicker?”
Susanna is not alone in her desire for more flexibility in her post-pandemic life. Indeed many analysts believe a shift to remote working was already under way, with coronavirus accelerating it by around a decade.
Seven in 10 UK employees who have been working remotely during Covid-19 told a survey by Boston Consulting Group that they felt as productive at home as in the workplace. More than half (53%) of workers said they would prefer a hybrid model in future, splitting their time equally between their desk and a remote location.
Boris Johnson provided little new guidance on managing the return to workplaces last Monday when he presented his roadmap out of lockdown, promising only to review the advice on working from home by
late June. Most social restrictions are expected to be relaxed in midsummer, but businesses are not anticipating a large-scale recolonisation of offices before September, provided coronavirus case rates continue to decline.
By then, office-based workers will have spent almost 18 months away from the watercooler, and few expect work to return to the way it was.
HSBC will keep its London HQ but reduce office space in the capital. Photograph by Nigel Tadyanehondo
Some of the largest firms in the financial sector, for decades a bastion of an office-based corporate culture, seem ready to rethink the way things are done. They are also seizing the opportunity to cut costs by reducing the amount of office space they use.
Banking group HSBC revealed last week that it was taking advantage of the booming popularity of home working by cutting its global office space by 40%. Its floor-space footprint looks set to shrink in London: the lender said it was committed to its headquarters in the Canary Wharf financial district, but may not renew leases for other sites in the capital.
Competitor Lloyds followed with an announcement that it would slash its own desk numbers by a fifth over the next two years, following staff requests for home working to be made permanent.
The issue of remote working has divided opinion within the financial sector, however, with the chief executive of Goldman Sachs calling the trend an aberration. Although the US bank has operated successfully while its staff remained at home, David Solomon said this did not represent “a new normal” because firms like Goldman Sachs required face-to-face contact to foster innovation and collaboration, and to train and guide the next generation.
