(gentle instrumental music) - From international design firm Hassell, this is "Hassell Talks". Hi, I'm Domino Rich, I'm a designer and commercial and workplace sector leader at Hassell. I love creating workplaces that connect organisational culture and performance, that bring joy and inclusivity to all that use them, and make us happier and healthier when we experience them. Imagine that.
The last two years have brought a particular scrutiny to the very purpose of workplaces for all organisations. And it doesn't matter whether they're workplaces for tech firms, finance, professional services, legal, all sectors are sure that the one thing we need to focus on is how to get the most value out of space, how to get people back in and how to make sure that culture stays strong, connections are reinforced, and that their people are thriving. At Hasell, we're also thinking about this.
Since early 2020 we've been focusing on building up a body of data from our annual workplace survey, which informs clients and our own design teams, actually, about what people are looking for in returning to work. And it guides us during this incredible time of change for employers and employees alike. This year the 2022 survey is bigger and better than ever, and this time it includes insight from China.
It also reinforces the approach to hybrid working, the role of flexibility in retention and cultural development, and surprisingly, the role of home in a workplace. With me today is our survey author and senior researcher, and all round great guy, Daniel Davis. Hi Daniel. - Hey there, Domino, good to see you. - Good to see you too. You've been in the thick of it and you know this data inside out and back the front.
So tell us a little bit about what was different in the way you approached this year's survey to the other years? - So it's the third year that we've run the workplace survey. And when the pandemic was just kicking off in 2020 and we were running a survey back then, we were really interested in just sort of how people were doing and what was happening in Australia at that time.
The next time that we ran it in 2021, we became more interested in kind of what was going on globally and how people were doing in these different regions. And then this year really when we ran the survey, the question that we were asking, it wasn't so much focused necessarily on like where people were and what was happening, although we were interested in that. We're really trying to get into like why things were the way they were and why people wanted to work in the places they worked.
The other difference this year is that we included China. So this year we surveyed in Australia, Singapore, China, the US, and the UK, and it gives a really good feel for what's happening around the world, 'cause all those countries are culturally quite different and there's interesting things happening in each one of them. - So Daniel, this year is the first time the survey has been run in China.
Can you talk a little bit about how that was done in terms of the mechanics of it, but also any of the, you know, things that needed to be different to include China? - Yeah, so China's one of the most challenging places to survey, just given the regulations and stuff over there. So the way that we survey all the other countries is that we work with a third party provider, and they go and find all these people to answer the survey for us.
So we tell 'em that we wanna survey office workers and that we wanna represent your sample of people between these ages, and that work in these industries, and they go and find people that fit that description and get them to take the survey on our behalf. And so we work with them as well in China to do this. One of the biggest challenges that we had is that China actually blocks a lot of apps that do surveys.
They don't want people, particularly from America or Australia, going over there and surveying their population and finding things out. So they're very controlling over how that happens and to the extent that for some surveys you need a government licence, basically, to send out a survey. So we ended up having to translate the survey into another software to get it done and work with another provider over there to actually even host the survey.
And then we also had to translate it into Chinese so that it's obviously understandable for people over there. So it was a lot of work to get it done in China, but I'm really happy that we were able to do that. It's such an interesting market when it comes to the workplace.
There's obviously a lot of different projects going on there, there's a lot of companies from outside China that are coming into China, and there's a real kind of mixing of different ways of thinking about the workplace happening in that country. And so it's really interesting to see what's happening now.
- Yeah, even the language that we use, you know, the word lockdown isn't used in China, you know, so even talking about the shared COVID experience globally is, you know, we need different language, right? - Yeah, and when we ran the survey it was sort of March and April of 2022, and that was really the first time that it's just at the start of China having a large COIVD outbreak in the country.
So I think part of what's going on there is just the experience of COIVD's been really different for people over there. They haven't necessarily had the same danger or the experience of danger that people in places like America might have had, but at the same time they've had these government regulations that have controlled a lot of how people behave.
So it's just a different way of kind of experiencing that and maybe some of the things that we are experiencing in the states, like two years ago, they're beginning to experience that same thing over there now. - So what's new in the actual data and the preferences? Can you share some of the really key findings that we've discovered? - There were six insights that we found, and today I'm just gonna focus on three of them.
The thing that jumped out at me the most when I was doing the analysis was the role of the office in terms of people's engagement. So in the survey itself we asked people a series of questions about how engaged they were at work, how much they trusted their colleagues, and other things related to that. And those were scientific questions that, like researchers had established in scientific papers, and we asked those questions in the same way.
So we had these benchmark ways of measuring engagement. Also in the survey we asked people how much time they spent in an office and how much time they spent at home? And we had a series of questions that teased it up, 'cause it's actually quite complex working out where people are working.
And what was interesting is that when we took those two data sets and we combined them together, is that there was this real relationship between them, that people that worked at home 100% of their time, their engagement, it might have been around like 60-70%, but you saw on the graph that as people spent longer and longer or did more and more of their work in the office, their engagement tended to increase, their trust in colleagues tended to increase.
But you also saw at the very end of those graphs, the people that spent 100% of their time in the office actually weren't doing too well in terms of things like engagement and trust.
And so there was this real sweet spot of people that were in the office, maybe 60-80% of their work week, they weren't there full-time, sort of doing this hybrid mode of working, who tended to be the most engaged people in the survey, the most trusting of their colleagues, and all these important outcomes that we measure in terms of things that ultimately lead to productivity, and retention in the workforce.
- And Daniel, do you think from that we can also infer that perhaps given there's a lot of survey data out there at the moment that says almost nobody elects to be at work five days a week anymore, that the people who are there five days a week maybe haven't got choice in that, and that's what's driving that, you know, difficulty in feeling connection and being trusted by the organisation? - Yeah, there's definitely something odd going on with the people that they're like five days a week.
- Yeah, that's odd, right? - Yeah, no it is. I mean, even before the pandemic it was common for people to do work in the office but also to work at home. And we maybe didn't think of that as hybrid working in the way that we think of it now, but it was a form of hybrid working. And so there's people that are in the office doing 100% of their work there. There's something about the way that they experience that that isn't positive.
And the thing that I think really draws that out is when you look at, we ask people about their workplace policy, and so we ask them, like, are you required to come into the office? Are you allowed to work in this hybrid manner? Are you working at home completely? And what we saw there is that people that were required to be in the office full-time were about twice as likely to be thinking about resigning as people that had some degree of flexibility.
And this is well known in workplace research, but people that are given autonomy and flexibility, they tend to be happier in what they're doing because they have some choice in it. And so we see that when you take away that choice, people tend to have these negative outcomes, and you also see it in the other direction as well.
People that are forced to work at home and don't have the option of working in another place, they often are more likely to be thinking about resigning than the people in the middle there that have this choice about whether they're working at home or the office, and change that choice throughout the week.
- So it sort of leads us to conclude, I guess, that policies, procedures, and protocols that organisations are wrapping around, you know, flexible work have a massive contributing factor to the culture that ultimately they end up with. So that's such a key finding, isn't it? - Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think some of these organisations are potentially getting themselves into a bit of a tricky spot, you know?
Like we're seeing companies coming out very strongly one way or the other in terms of working from home or working from the office, and pushing employees in a particular direction. And I think long term that's not a positive thing for their cultures. - When people are electing to come to the office, I suppose, Daniel, from the data, what is it that they're looking for do you think?
What is it that's attracting them back or that they're seeking that they're not getting in working from home, obviously beyond their interpersonal and sort of face-to-face and social elements? - Yeah, so we asked people what it was that they wanted to see from the workplace when they returned. And we gave them a list of items and we asked them, kind of like, which ones of these would you most like to see in your office when you return, or if you're there currently, what would you like to see?
And the first one or the most popular option was free food and lunch. And that's something that's come up. - Of course. - Yeah, it always comes up in our surveys. And I mean, it is funny, but it's also serious in some ways. Because you think of free food and lunch, and you're like hmm, it's just like someone wants to have like a $10 lunch or whatever given by their company.
But I think more than that it's that they want to connect with their colleagues and spend time with one another and to socialise with people. - I've been thinking a lot about this data point, 'cause it's come up in all three surveys, as if not one of, - Yeah. - but the actual highest, you know, thing on the list of things that people would like in returning to work.
My theory, is similar to yours, Daniel, in that, you know, we're human creatures, we've evolved over millennia to, you know, be stronger as in groups. And you know, whether that's family units, or tribes, or you know, small cities and towns through much of history.
And when we're forced to live alone or just to retreat to our kind of nuclear families through lockdowns and so on, what we miss is that sense of being together, breaking bread, you know, sharing a meal, that's traditionally how people would choose to come together in a work environment, that's obviously less traditional unless you live in Scandinavia and you have a cafeteria lunch, which is quite common over there, together as a group.
And I think that's what's driving this desire for, you know, the food at work, because it's a metaphor, I think, or a vehicle, for reconnecting with people. So I don't think it's so much about the food, I think it's the activity of food that's putting that so high on the list. - I've read recently that the word company, like the origin of that word, like pan, is bread, and it means sort of coming together to break bread, essentially as a group, which I think is interesting in that sense.
(gentle instrumental music) The next sort of most popular things that we saw this year were fresh air from outside and gardens and green space.
And I'm not sure if that's something you've been hearing from your client's, Domino, but I think it makes sense to me that like we've been spending so much time inside that people want to have connection to the outside, and I also think that there's this thing going on where we associate the outside with being safe at the moment and inside with some element of danger. And I think there's something going on there that's important. - 100%.
I mean, I think our survey doesn't really ask a whole lot of questions about how people feel about COVID, because that's such a rapidly changing scenario. It's really hard to pin things down and the data's irrelevant almost immediately.
But I think there's a current of COVID, or you know, maybe a lack of trust in the built environment that's arisen over the last couple of years, understanding that it's an airborne disease, and filtration and mechanical air conditioning systems have a really big role to play in keeping us safe. And so I wonder whether the desire for fresh air, gardens and green space is twofold. First is, you know, that idea of a safe environment outside, mask-less particularly, often outside.
But also I think, and this is a really interesting one I heard the other day, my husband went and had an eye check, 'cause he's been working from home a lot as well. And the optometrist said that people's lack of getting outside regularly over the last couple of years is contributing to a rapid degeneration of eye health across our entire societies, because we're not getting exposed towards much sunlight.
We know we're not shifting our focal lengths as often during the day when we're, you know, at our dining room tables looking at a screen and not moving around the office as much. And so there's some sort of knock on effects to all of that, aren't there, in terms of health and wellbeing? And I think the desire for fresh air and green space is really just, again, another metaphor for wanting to be out in the open.
- I think everyone listen to that probably just looked up to change where they're looking. (laughing together) - And the kitchen's probably not far away enough, just a helpful hint, you wanna look outside to the horizon. - So the things that we saw after fresh air and gardens, green space, the kind of four elements, they all go together, and it was good coffee, enough space to focus without distraction, a private gym, and a space to take a nap.
And I think that's an interesting list just because they're all things that people had access to in their home environment. Like, well, we had hopefully good coffee there, a lot of people worked out in their home environment somehow, a lot of people were able to take a nap if they got exhausted during the day and recharge in that way.
And so these are all kind of domestic elements that I think people are wanting to take back with them in some way to the office that they've had this experience at home of working there and enjoyed some parts of that freedom and that amenity package, and they wanna see some of that come back into the office.
- So when people are giving us answers that they want their office to bring in some of those elements of home, I don't think they're saying they wanna feel like they're working in their house again. What do you think are the kinds of settings or solutions that would help people feel like work is a little bit more homelike? - Yeah, I think, like it can be done through design.
So domestic elements of furniture, you see that a lot in co-working spaces, the way that they're laid out and the way that the furniture is organised and selected often has a domestic kind of element to it. And I think also putting in some of these spaces like things like coffee and amenities like that, like a cafe, are all things that can be done to make the office more attractive to these employees coming back.
- One of the things that I'm often hearing in the return to work, as numbers really ramp up, is that it's turned good, open plan workplaces into kind of really bad call centres, because everybody's sitting next to each other in the open plan on Zoom calls, and often on the same Zoom calls, and you get that horrible echo, echo, echo situation.
So you know, from a design perspective I think we can really hand on heart say we're going to see a rise of maybe retreat spaces, quiet rooms, small Zoom rooms, things like that where small groups of people can get together and share the same conversation without all being on their own individual laptops. But I also think commensurately we'll see less workstations.
I've got my fingers crossed there's someone listening to this out there who really wants to work with a design team who are keen to push the boundaries and maybe create the first desk-less office, slightly controversial.
I had a conversation with a client the other day who, you know, we were proposing this series of spaces that weren't gonna be having dedicated screens or monitors on desks, you know, they were places that were more for short-term working people who were dropping in between meetings, or you know, who wanted to talk to their team members but didn't necessarily need full, you know, 32 inch monitors, and dual screens, and all the rest of it.
And you know, the comment was, but actually don't we need places for people to work? You know, people can't be productive at places like that.
And so I think we've still got a while to go, don't you, on understanding, you know, that productivity at work isn't all about sitting in front of a screen anymore, and maybe one of the things that has to happen in the world of workplace design and strategy is an acceptance that concentrated, individual work maybe isn't best in big fields of wide open space but needs to be in places where people can really get into that sense of flow and be sort of uninterrupted in their thinking time.
And that maybe the sorts of spaces that that will replace are places that, you know, actually encourage people to bond, to have fun, you know, to have a cup of coffee together. Because as my response was to the person who I was having this conversation with was, well, just 'cause they're having coffee together doesn't mean they're not working, you know, that's still work if they're talking about work or even if they're just figuring out how to be friends, that's still an element of work.
You know, team members have to know, and like, and trust each other, and building those bonds is critical to success of organisations. And stop thinking about work as purely a workplace maybe as being a factory for individual productivity. And it's gonna be a lot more than that in the future, which is part of the way I think we'll encourage people back to work by saying, maybe there's no workstations anymore. - Oh I like that idea. Yeah, it would be so fun to work on that.
- What about differences across different regions? You know, where were the similarities and where were the differences in the data? - Yeah, probably one similarity that surprised me actually was where people are working at the moment. So we asked people, you know, like are you working at home, are you working in an office? How much of your time is spending in those things? And actually when we ran the survey this year, most people were working in a hybrid manner.
And the reason that that surprises me is that like last year when we ran the survey, there's actually a lot of variation between all these different countries that all sort of dealt with the pandemic a little bit differently, and because of how the pandemic was evolving in each of those countries, you saw these different rates of working from home. So working from home was really high in places like the States and the UK, and a lot of people in, say, Australia were working from an office.
You saw a lot of variety and like where people were working. And this year it was actually remarkably consistent between all of the places. For the most part where people were working tended to be a hybrid of the office and the home.
And that sort of settling down seems to me sort of be indicating that maybe this is the new direction that, like a lot of things we tried during the pandemic, all these countries are in sort of different places, and things sort of bit seem to be reverting back into this, I wouldn't say normal, but like they're saying to revert back into maybe what is the new normal, to use an overused term. - The modern workplace, perhaps. - Yeah. - Let's stop using COVID references.
One of the things I'm really interested in hearing from you too, Daniel, is about what we are seeing in terms of maybe how we measure attendance and workplace. You know, we're seeing as you say, you know, a steady rise in presence. Do you think there's any clues as to how we might start to measure workplaces? I mean, the old measure is how many head count per square metre, and you've got a density ratio.
When people aren't always there, and I think we can safely say the office isn't dead, but maybe 9:00 to 5:00 is dead, do we start measuring by amount of people present? Often we talk about the language of, you know, workplace metrics is going to have to change and continue to evolve, because of what we're all living through here. Any clues as to where we're headed with that?
- Yeah, I think certainly you're seeing, like during the pandemic there was an acceleration and adoption of technology around measuring things like presence.
But I think also this question of like how you measure the utility of the workplace goes back to maybe that earlier point about like it's not just about people sitting at desks, like just knocking out work, that workplace has this other purpose, and maybe before the pandemic that purpose was almost implied or it wasn't explicitly stated, and we just took it for granted that people in an office were doing the thing that they needed to be doing to make the company operate.
And I think coming out of the pandemic, the real kind of question that a lot of organisations are grappling with is like, what is the purpose of a workplace in this organisation? And I think really like to go back to the sort of fundamental principles, like by what you define the purpose of the workplace as, like that should be the thing that leads to the metrics.
So if it is about people coming together and having these shared experiences, like maybe that should be the metric, not the number of people are there, but like the quality of the connections. Or if it's about creativity and making sure that ideas are spread across the organisation, like that should be the metric and maybe not so much the square footage.
- It's fascinating, isn't it, because the CFOs of the world still looking for ways of, you know, getting, as you say more agency and utility from their biggest, aside from their salary expense, the biggest cost that an organisation typically has is its real estate costs, and you know, how to get more value out of that is certainly the question of the time. I'm fascinated by the idea of moving on from Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00.
I think that the survey shows some fairly regular patterns of attendance, doesn't it, Daniel? I think that's kind of become, as you say, the new norm. - Yeah, and I think everyone's aware of this, but attendance on Mondays and Fridays is really just down in a lot of organisations, and people, when they're choosing to come into the office, they're tending to choose to come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
And one thing that might have surprise, well, it did surprise me from the data, was just who wanted to work where. So we asked both like individual employees and managers what days they wanted to come into the office and sort of how much time they ideally want to spend in the office on those days. What you saw there was that individual employees were actually quite polarised in what they wanted.
They either wanted one or the other, they wanted to come into the office or they wanted to work at home. When you look at managers, they're actually the ones that were most open to spending part of their time in the office and part of their time at home in a single day. And I thought that was just really fascinating, 'cause we think of managers as wanting everyone to be back in the office with them and to be there full-time.
And actually when you go and talk to the managers themselves, what they want is something a little bit different, at least for themselves, maybe not for their employees. - It's always been the way, hasn't it, the white collars versus the blue collars, the workers versus the bosses. (laughs) Always a slightly different approach.
As we start to wrap this up, Daniel, I am really fascinated by what you think we're gonna see in 2023 survey, have you got any brave, bold predictions for us on what we're gonna see? - I wasn't prepared for that one, Domino. (laughing together) Careful at the end. So I think the interesting part of doing the surveying work is that we have done it now for three years in a row.
So we're starting to get a database of insights on how people across the world are feeling and behaving as it relates to the workplace.
So for sure when we run the survey next year, we're gonna be able to benchmark, like what was happening this year against what was happening next year, and I think those are gonna be really interesting to see, because a lot's gonna happen in the next year in terms of, I think companies gonna have to start making decisions in the next year, they've been holding things off for so long that they're really gonna settle down. So we'll see a lot of that coming through in the data next year.
I think also, hopefully we'll be able to expand the survey out a little bit and there's some other regions that we've always been curious about but we haven't surveyed yet. So it'd be fun to do that too. - I like that, we're workplace curious in various regions of the world. I'm really looking forward to seeing, you know, free food and great coffee again on the top of the list. My prediction for next year is that's not going anywhere.
But I'm really looking forward to sharing the data from this year's survey as we go through the next 12 months with organisations to really reinforce this amazing statistic that we've got, that more presence in the workplace leads to greater engagement, greater levels of trust, and a much higher feeling of belonging, if you don't force people to do that and give them choice and autonomy.
I think of all of the information we've been able to glean out of the last three years worth of data, that to me is absolute workplace gold, and is the clue in my way of thinking, or the holy grail, of how we're gonna get through this is choice, autonomy, and creating magnetic workplace experiences that people are really, really going to love. Thank you so much, Daniel, it's been so nice to talk to you. - Thanks, Domino, it's great talking with you.
- So if you guys wanna know more, please feel free to email us at insight@hassellstudio, one word, .com. There's more great episodes coming your way, so keep an ear out for those. I'm Domino Rich, Hassel's commercial and workplace sector leader, and I've been talking to Daniel Davis today, our senior researcher. Thanks heaps and keep an ear out for the next episode, bye. (gentle instrumental music)