Office

We spoke to 4,000 office workers all over the world for JLL’s Workforce Preferences Barometer and found hybrid was overwhelmingly the most popular way of working – only 26% say they are working exclusively in the office. With recruitment and retention of talent at a premium, this presents new challenges for employers. Employees now expect the hybrid model will be supported with financial assistance, tech and office equipment.
But there are opportunities, too. It is a chance to show you are a flexible and empathetic employer, and our research shows an increasing number of people feel more engaged and empowered in their role. Forward-thinking companies are using hybrid working to reinvent their employee value proposition.
But rumours of the demise of the office have been greatly exaggerated – nearly three quarters of workers are in the office at least once a week and just 16% exclusively work from home. Half of our survey respondents said they missed social interactions when working remotely, while 44% missed the common understanding and bonding that go with collective face-to-face work.
The office of the future must become an inviting and inclusive destination where each member of the work community can seek mental wellbeing support, peer recognition and a sense of belonging.
It must also become the anchor of an organisation, one that enables shared achievements while allowing individual fulfilment and multiple workstyles to flourish. Hybrid has created a pivotal moment for employers to redefine the way we work and socialise. However, its sustained success as a work style will mean a rethink of managerial cultures and community dynamics.
The responsibility for making these new arrangements work for employees and the business falls on companies, particularly balancing the positivity of home working with the mental health consequences of employees who physically interact less. Our research shows that while this work style is empowering, it also requires a ‘perpetual change’ mindset to constantly adapt to different work environments, work rhythms and co-workers.
This new landscape is complex. While hybrid working is the choice of the majority, employers have a responsibility to everyone on the payroll and one size does not fit all. Our research found that while a third of the workforce was strongly enthusiastic about the changes taking place in the workplace today, another third felt left behind.
The responsible employer will be the one that helps hybrid workers to manage healthy boundaries between their professional and private lives, maintain their social connections and redefine their healthy routines and rituals. The prize of getting it right is an empowered and fulfilled workforce.
Flore Pradère is global work dynamics research director at JLL More

A set of values has been presented as if they were uniquely about them, when they are in fact common to everyone: a longing for meaning in work, a loyalty to purpose rather than productivity and a desire to have balance and harmony in life.
I think if you quizzed people aged 25 to 85, they would all want these same things. In fact, in 2018, Gallup did just that and asked baby boomers, Gen Z, Gen X and millennials what they looked for most in an employer – and their answers were surprisingly similar. These are universal human conditions. So the word ‘millennial’ got banned in our office.
This year, we have trained our sights on ‘collaboration’. Collaboration is thought of as the activity when a diverse team come together with a shared understanding of goals, collectively generating solutions, the result being greater than any one individual could achieve on their own – a kind of ‘kumbaya’ of corporate culture.
Post-pandemic, we have come to think of collaboration as the magic ‘why’ that we have been seeking to drive the need to
visit the office, the holy grail to bring people back to work. It is seen as a necessary and sufficient condition to corporate and personal success, or the unifying theory of the cosmos – as though collaboration is the solution for the crisis of connection and loneliness we are all feeling. Come to the office, collaboration will happen, and all will be good again.
To me, that just feels like lazy shorthand. We use the term without really understanding what it means, what underpins it, jumping to the conclusion without first having thought through why collaboration matters – and if we even need it at all.
Research shows that most people would actually rather work alone, despite the fact that for almost every company, projects require teamwork, and sharing experiences helps individuals innovate and grow. A recent University of Phoenix study found that 75% of people would rather not work in teams, and more than 70% have worked within teams that they described as dysfunctional.
Collaboration is hard. Why is something as basic as working together so difficult? Often there is a lack of clarity about goals, and a conflict between an individual’s goals and those of the team. Group work requires good leadership and, especially when collaborating across departments or between firms, there may be too many leaders, with the loudest voice in the room filling the role even if he or she is not equipped to lead.
Bring out the bias
Collaborative sessions can bring out the worst in terms of cognitive biases and systematic patterns of irrational judgement, as individuals create and reinforce their own subjective reality, derived from personal perceptions that have become deeply ingrained over the years.
Collaboration is a sophisticated skill. It does not spring up on its own. It requires individual confidence. And for this, we need to focus on psychological safety; on empathy, emotional intelligence, curiosity, calmness, safety and equanimity.
We need sensitive engagement and mutual respect. We need to reward co-operation over competition, and to reduce ego friction by making sure everyone involved equally shares in the value of the end goal and is willing to compromise their ego to get there.
Collaboration is not about consensus; it is more about diverging perspectives. It is how we bring start-up thinking to established organisations. And it can be the catalyst for significant personal and corporate growth.
The office – the stage on which this drama plays out – has a huge role to play in creating this kind of environment, as a space that fosters these values. Whether in person or online, synchronous or asynchronous, where we interact has a tremendous influence on how we interact. We need to create a physical environment that cultivates the psychological outcomes we are after.
Great work – and great workspaces – are not at all about collaboration. They are about all that other stuff that makes an organisation thrive, collaboration or not.
Basil Demeroutis is managing partner of FORE Partnership More

The wellspring of wealth conferred by the state granting permission to build bigger is going to become harder to source. Planners now want carbon counting, skewing the sums in favour of refurbishment. Worse news for those planning splendid new-build offices in London – a US occupier is rumoured to be seeking refurbed-only space. 
It was, therefore, cold comfort to hear from Knight Frank last week that total office returns over the past 70 years have averaged 8.3%, compared with average inflation of 5.1%. A Platinum Jubilee-inspired reminder that “during this period, offices have provided a remarkably stable inflation hedge for investors and landlords”. Cotton mills were no doubt viewed as stable investments at the time of George V’s Silver Jubilee in May 1935.
Chris Brett, head of EMEA capital markets at CBRE, warned the FT on 21 May that “aside from the upper reaches”, what’s coming “is the biggest truck hitting the office market you can imagine”. A declaration as welcome to his peers as cursing in church. The party line is to keep chanting ‘green is good’ and publicise space where plants outnumber people. Done to focus attention on the net zero minority, not the majority of carbon-chewing clunkers.
To be fair, the dangers are constantly discussed: ebbing occupancy thanks to working from home; and rising costs from green conversion. Those occupying the ‘upper reaches’ are well aware and will, of course, remain afloat. The tip of any iceberg remains above water. Less discussed is the fate of secondary offices developed between the 1960s and 1990s – most built to provide space for jobs now either banished by IT or done from home.
Scattered and dimming like fading stars, many blocks lie in  the belt between the M25 and  the London Congestion Zone; others stand forlorn in cities and county towns. Some will be saved by the inventiveness of owners testing out the planning angles; others will undergo gimcrack conversion to residential, by way of permitted development rights. But the fate of many in this constellation is that of the cotton mills: to lie empty for years.
Shine on – and sue for £1.5bn
You have to admire the sticking power of 70-year-old Ardeshir Naghshineh. Older readers will remember the irrepressible Iranian-born engineer and one-time owner of Centrepoint, who had a £1.2bn property empire wrenched from his grasp by Lloyds Banking Group in 2011. In March this year, he filed a £1.5bn ‘false representation’ claim against Lloyds, or, to be more precise, its subsidiary Bank of Scotland. 
“I was destroyed because I trusted this bank,” he says. Naghshineh was finally given permission by the liquidators last August to have a pop at Lloyds. No doubt they would like to get back £408m still owing. 
The chances of his success are on the rise. Naghshineh has just hired the London office of specialist US litigator Hausfeld – a scary-looking outfit, which boasts that it “is driven by its bold approach and pioneering experience”. 
Lloyds is resisting with determination. Its defence and counterclaim at 62 pages, put together by Addleshaw Goddard, is nearly three times the length of Naghshineh’s claim, put together by his original lawyers in Norwich. The case revolves around costly-to-redeem swap rate contracts tied to alleged bank-manipulated Libor. Further details are beyond my understanding. 
The lessons of 2008 have been learned at the speed treacle flows down a glacier. Last week, the Bank of England announced that if one bank collapses it can do so without fear of the contagion that led to blameless Lloyds being forced to absorb the toxic BoS in 2008. 
The case scheduled for Q1 2024 will be the biggest relating to the 2008 crisis. If it comes to court, it will make an interesting final chapter to all that has been written. 
PS: Naghshineh’s Targetfollow Group survives. The 30-strong group owns 81,000 sq ft in The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells – and is currently eyeing another retail centre in the town…
Peter Bill is a journalist and the author of Planet Property and Broken Homes
Offices: abandon hope values More

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