For three years now, the two catchwords of Corporate Real Estate have been hybrid and collaboration. Hybrid captured the idea that employees would work from home (much) more often. Collaboration captured the idea that employees would be together, talking, brainstorming, innovating, and not doing heads-down activities in the office. Neither worked out quite how many leaders thought.
Hybrid is the first that ran into definition issues. It worked out differently because it turned out to be MORE hybrid than people expected. However much you thought people would not come back to the office, even fewer people were in on average. The hybrid workplace quickly became a mostly remote office. Three days a week became three days a month. Fridays disappeared as days anyone was in the office. And the world did not stop spinning.
Collaboration followed because it turned out that when employees came into the office, they still worked with their heads down. The high rates of collaboration never materialized. But video calls from workstations skyrocketed in frequency; sometimes with others sitting next to them. Where desks had been replaced with collaboration, the demand came roaring in to change it all back.
It turns out, our ideas of collaboration were wrong. In-person collaboration is not about several people gathered around a whiteboard. It is all about collective problem-solving. And proximity to the other solvers is not quite as critical as expected. The real issue is establishing regular communication. The more often employees speak in person (whether in-person or virtual), the better their ability to collaborate. There is an efficiency improvement for in-person communication, but it is not as insurmountable as expected.
The real challenge is that the more comfortable employees are with what they are doing, the better they are at communicating. If working from home gets them into a better headspace, they will be better collaborators. If shorter bursts of togetherness reduce total stress, then it is helpful that it is hard to do multi-hour video calls (although too many of us did multi-hour conference room events that were probably less effective than we thought at the time).
All this means it is time to rethink our collaborative spaces again. Maybe those normal conference rooms were closer to the real need than we expected.