Can We Vaccinate Our Businesses, Too?

The Office Providers Talking Office Space and Flexible Workspace

This is an audio version of a blog post written and published by Managing Director, Mike Gardener, on 29th June 2021. Apologies for the newsjacking-style title, however, the mainstream press has been running with clickbait headlines such as ‘the office is dead’ and ‘will we ever return to the office?’ and so on, since the Covid-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns in March 2020, so, we thought it was fair game. In our last post, we spoke about how businesses are once again examining how they can best make themselves recession-proof and how adding flexibility to office space occupancy agreements may make businesses less vulnerable in the future. Making office space agile, to us, feels like the case for the inoculation program but there will always be disagreement. We can see on every social media platform that there are disagreements over how various governments have dealt with the pandemic, how they have or have not supported businesses, how they have removed individual freedoms, how they are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of closed businesses, the millions that have had their roles made redundant and, of course, we have heard the arguments against vaccines. There have been grand sweeping statements about how businesses should be run in the future, and there is a large contingent that believes that we should now WFH completely and forever. The thing is, this just doesn’t work for every business, nor for every employee. Every business is different, even businesses within the same sector or market vary significantly, as do the individuals within those businesses. This is due to so many factors including the age of the company, the size, the location, the legacy, the management structure, and many other nuanced elements within each company’s business model canvas. Covid-19 did not invent working from home – businesses have known about it for decades. Many had experimented with it and many had already incorporated it into their operations models, however, others had decided it didn’t work for them, their clients nor their employees. The pandemic saw many things grow – online workouts gained millions of views, however, it didn’t mean that people wouldn’t prefer to get to the gym or do a group boot camp session in the park when they got the chance. Peloton saw its subscriber numbers more than double to 4.4 million between Q1 2020 and Q2 2021, yet, surely, cyclists would prefer to be out on the road or in the forests when the lockdowns eased. We all started baking bread and cooking at home – recipe kit companies such as Blue Apron and Hello Fresh saw numbers rise significantly (excuse the pun). Founder of UK-based Mindful Chef, Giles Humphries, advised of a 425% increase in orders in the first few months of the UK lockdowns. Yet this doesn’t mean that we won’t return to restaurants when the lockdowns lift. Online alcohol sales increased significantly as more people drank from home but surely we’d prefer to be in a bar or country pub when we can be. We know that eating and drinking out is more expensive and slower than partaking at home. But it’s a lot better, isn’t it? Businesses knew all about working from home, too. The companies of Silicon Valley have, collectively, spent billions on physical office space in the last decade. We’ve all looked on with envy, or curiosity, at least, at images and videos of the Google and Facebook offices with their meditation rooms, sleep pods, cafeterias that put Whole Foods to shame, slides, creches, gyms and so on. Apple, alone, spent $5bn on creating One Apple Park in Cupertino. Silicon Valley, collectively, did not accidentally forget that there was an internet that could facilitate a remote workforce. (The full blog post can be found on the link above)