Hybrid working has so far resulted in peaks in office presence on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Conversely, office attendance is often very low on other days of the week.
We all see it on our commute and in our offices. This is also what occupancy analyzes carried out by AREMIS confirm in more than 90% of companies.
Beyond the organizational issues widely described elsewhere, this creates at least three problems:
- Offices remain sized for nearly 100% of the population of white-collar workers, whereas with 2.5 days of weekly teleworking (widely observed average) and a smoothing the occupancy on all days of the week, this surface area can be reduced by at least 40%. At €10,000 annual cost for each workstation, the waste is colossal.
- This waste is also environmental, since one m² of office space represents l'equivalent of 4 tonnes of CO2 throughout its life cycle, and that we count between 15 and 20m² gross per workstation.
- Beyond businesses, these alternations of dips and peaks in office presence have very serious consequences for restaurateurs and businesses in urban centers which lose up to 50% of their attendance.
Organise the smoothing of office attendance
We therefore see poorly allocated resources, an environmental opportunity not activated and an urban economy threatened.
The solution exists. It is already implemented by a minority of far-sighted companies and consists, simply, of smoothing attendance in the office.
The model can be described in a simplified way as follows for a company that authorizes 2 .5 days of teleworking:
- Each person or team belongs to category A or B
- Category A comes to the office on Mondays and Thursdays, category B comes to the office on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Presented here in a caricatured manner, this model is in reality refined and declined
by entity to take into account specific constraints or collaborative affinities between the different divisions, in particular.
This system implemented, the result:
- A discount significant real estate costsfor businesses and administrations
- An equally significant reduction in their environmental footprint : double space reduction practically the pendulum effect to jointly achieve a reduction of almost one tonne of CO2 per employee per year
- Much more favorable traffic for urban businesses.
- The release of former office spaces for the benefit of residential projects.
Hybrid does not mean unrestrained
This organisation of office presence deserves dialogue and governance informed by factual data.
It is necessarily much more virtuous than closing oversized offices on Friday.
This is not the only challenge posed by hybrid working, but the solution is relatively simple and tried and tested.
Source: Struggling cafes and restaurants are closing in series: “Teleworking has changed everything” (lemonde.fr)
