Back to the Office, or Not?

­Since the beginnings of the COVID pandemic, one thing that I have heard regularly is that when it is over, things would never return to what they were before. There would be a whole “new normal”. Hopefully, as I said in my ViewPoint column earlier, the success of PCIM last month showed that it need not be the case. Nothing can replace face to face meetings and seeing technical demonstrations in person. In other situations, that may not be true and our usual way of doing things may no longer exist.

In my opinion, one of the biggest changes may be in the workplace. There has been a real backlash in some areas against returning to the office. As normality returns, many employers want to get back to business as usual, and that means bringing their workers into the office. However, a great many people have got used to working from home over the last two years and the last thing that they want is to spend hours on a daily commute, spending good money, when they could easily do the job in the comfort of their homes. As more evidence is produced saying that productivity hasn’t suffered at all, and even risen in some cases, it is a hard sell for employers to convince workers to  return to the workplace. This is especially true in times like these, when there is a real shortage of educated and experienced people around the globe. To make things worse for those businesses, other companies have also noticed this trend and are using working from home as a perk when attempting to recruit new staff. I’ve even read reports of deliberate attempts to target disaffected employees directly when they hear that a rival has ordered staff to return to the office. It could be a tough time for companies that believe that everyone being present in the workplace is essential to their business. If they want to keep their staff, then they are going to have to be very creative with perks, salaries and other enticements.

Another area where things may change in the workplace is also to do with recruitment. With a global skills shortage, recruitment of graduates is becoming both very difficult and expensive. Hopefully, this could lead to companies putting more time and effort into training their own employees, rather than recruiting externally. Before the pandemic, it seemed that degrees were essential for almost every worthwhile role. Now, as graduates are harder to find, companies will have to look at a wide variety of job functions, and decide which are the most important and the focus on those roles for graduate recruitment. For the rest, training up their current staff into semi-skilled positions will be a much more viable strategy than joining the bidding wars for graduates in non-critical positions. The prospect of training and advancements should also have the benefit of making recruitment for ordinary jobs much easier.