When CEOs ask employees to return to the office, it seems that remote work in one way or another is still there. Property developers have taken note, and many are now designing new apartments with remote workers in mind.
About 35% of US job holders work full-time, and 28% work part-time, according to a McKinsey & Co. survey. which was published last year. Meanwhile, many companies, in response to changing workplace habits, are freeing up office space that is larger than necessary as work is done less in the office and more in the homes of employees.
But remote work can be a drag in small, or thoughtlessly designed apartments. During the pandemic, employees living in small apartments often struggle. Carmine Di Sibio, CEO of consulting firm EY, said fortune in November 2020: “We have many young people who are in small apartments all over the world, and being in small apartments in this neighborhood is not good. We have more people calling the hotline asking for help, just from a mental state.
Today, many developers and designers have a remote workforce.
Near Walmart’s headquarters in Rogers, Arkansas, an architecture firm called Verdant Studios is designing a multifamily development with a focus on remote and hybrid workers, including community spaces for co-working.
“We’re designing home workspaces in a way we never did before COVID,” said CEO Jessica Hester. Business & Politics Talk. “Ensuring people have access to comfortable, well-lit desk space has been a priority.”
Even the way the unit looks on the video call is taken into account, he added: “Three years ago, we would never have thought about the background on the Zoom phone. This is something we think about when we put it in the home environment.
A high-rise development in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver — called Key in the Flatirons Apartments — will have co-working units. Similarly outside of Dallas in Garland, Texas, an upcoming 340-unit apartment project called iThirty will give tenants access to remote workspaces.
Meanwhile, many big businessmen are abandoning office space that is now useless.
For example in the Twin Cities, Thomson Reuters is giving up its sprawling campus in Eagan where about 5,000 employees worked before the pandemic. Now the company will use smaller and more flexible office space with hybrid work in mind, according to Star Tribune.
“We want to create a modern, energized and collaborative work environment that fully supports our hybrid approach to our office-based roles,” said Paul Fischer, president of Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals and co-site leader for the company’s local campus, last year.
“Because of the vacancy rate in our buildings,” he said, the campus is “too big for the company’s current needs.”
At Slack, a San Francisco-based Salesforce subsidiary, chief of staff Robby Kwok said last month that the occupancy rate in some Salesforce offices “is still below 20%” and “some are below 10%. He added, “It’s hard to justify all these places .”
And Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who last year slammed a mandate to return to office, said real estate “will be a major part” of the software giant’s efforts to cut costs by up to $5 billion.
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