Ep4: Here's why office mandates could be a productivity killer - with Dr. Craig Knight, workplace psychologist, Nathan Sri, Kate Pilgrim and Tim O'Connor, JLL

Kent, Rebecca

Five years after Covid pandemic lockdowns, when office workers became widely accustomed to doing their jobs from home, there is still debate about whether giving office workers the right to choose where they work and on which days is good for business. 85% of companies globally expect employees to be present in the workplace at least three days a week, and that's according to JLL’s Future of Work survey.

But there have also been some highly publicised mandates from big companies actually, for all workers to be in the office five days a week with little tolerance for variations on that too.

We've kind of got to a point now where the ability to work remotely or flexibly is perceived as a right by many employees. It's kind of entrenched now, I suppose.

And many of them would sooner quit their jobs, than give it up, research has also found.

When there are critical business decisions, though, that hinge on return to office strategies such as investment in office spaces and how you invest in what you do within them to entice workers from their home desks, what are employers to do?

What are office developers doing? So many questions.

So my guests on this episode of the Perspective podcast to answer these questions are Craig Knight, doctor of workplace psychology at UK-based Identity Realization.

Hello, Craig.

Craig Knight

Good afternoon and good morning from here.

Rebecca Kent

And from JLL, Kate Pilgrim, head of tenant representation in Victoria and also managing director of JLL’s Victoria operations. Hi, Kate.

Kate Pilgrim

Hi, Bec

Rebecca Kent

And based in Perth at the moment, well, currently coming from Perth but typically based in Sydney, Tim O’Connor, head of office leasing in Australia from JLL. G’Day Tim.

O'Connor, Tim

Hi Bec. How are you?

Kent, Rebecca

Good. And Nathan Sri, executive director for workplace experience over in Singapore.

Is that where you are currently, Nathan?

Sri, Nathan

I am for a little bit, yeah. Now I am here.

Kent, Rebecca

I should have asked. You travel a little bit.

OK. And I'm Rebecca Kent, host of this Perspectives podcast.

So, Craig, over to you. It seems wild to me that the debate continues to rage on about what lockdowns have proven to us about remote working. Five years down the line, what are we learning about it?

Craig Knight

Hahaha. We’re learning that managers like to be in control still. That seems to be the driving force behind stuff.

There's quite an interesting shift, actually. As you said at the start, a lot of people are enjoying the flexibility of being able to work from home and work in the office and people are saying ‘well, this is new’. But it isn't new at all.

I think we should realise that. It's just that what’s happened is the right to work flexibly has gone down the hierarchy a little bit. So people have always worked from home and worked in coffee shops, third spaces and will still do. But the pandemic extended that privilege, and some companies are reacting to that positively.

But some people are saying, ‘well, now we want you back at work’ and there's a fear, if you like, of what people are doing when they're not being looked at.

And just to finish this little section up, what we noticed during the pandemic itself – we’ve done quite a long study – is that many managers change from saying ‘how are you?’ at the start, ‘we're definitely all in it together’ to, towards the end, saying ‘where are you and what are you doing?’.

Rebecca Kent

Interesting. So what have we learnt though about whether it's good for business, good for people, who it suits, who it doesn't suit? Apart from the fact that it's managers on a bit of a power trip, which seems like a very controversial statement.

Craig Knight

What people talk about, which is the crux of all this, of course, is that word ‘productivity’. And people talk about people being more productive at home or more productive in the office.

And it will be very useful if people want to measure productivity so that we can have a reasonably informed debate. Generally people don't know how to do that.

So for example, I'll ask in my questionnaire. So you're asking a performance question on the questionnaire. And so we have a lot of opinion that flies about.

More productive at home, some people say. More productive in the office. When you sit down and measure productivity there's actually very little difference.

Kent, Rebecca

And so what's the accepted measurement of productivity?

Craig Knight

There isn’t one. That's why I love asking people ‘how do you measure productivity?’

People don't really know. I mean, just for just for an example, if you look for example, at how hospitals measure things in the UK, they measure throughputs of people in beds: How many beds they use, how many people go through. And you ask nurses about that and they go bananas, especially the older nurses because people are leaving hospitals sooner than they should. That’s not awfully productive.

If you measure people in call centres, they tend to measure people on how quickly the call comes in, how quickly you handle the call and how quickly the admin associated with that call is. So you pick up phone calls, tell people to get lost and put the phone down. That's not really productive.

So people don't know.

What you need to do is to analyse the job in intense detail and argue about it. So it's not just HR saying it’s the amount of people we hire, it’s why is that important?

Surely you look at the quality of the hire.

Even things like sales, for example. The gold standard productivity is how much sales you do, but nobody's looking at the destructivity of those sales if you get the really high performing salespeople who create bedlam in their wake. How productive is that?

It's really important that we sit down and measure things precisely and see what's going on. And so few companies do.

Rebecca Kent

Nathan, you're nodding your head vociferously there.

Nathan Sri

Yeah, I mean, when we speak to business leaders – and there's often a disconnect between corporate real estate leaders versus leaders or department heads or team leaders – the narrative is productivity or the undertone is productivity. But because we can't measure it, there's this causality between more people in the office equals productivity. Again, that’s without the accurate measurement.

But often how that translates is they talk about team cohesion and culture because that's a much more palatable framing of how to respond to it, right? And I think there's obviously some truth to it, right?

We know as graduates there's a big topic of research to talk about how they're missing all the interactions, the undertones of how businesses actually function, because they're not in day-to-day.

I remember some of my best learning happened in the banks in Australia sitting in front of leaders and sitting behind and right beside leaders and learning how to behave, how to act, how to how to speak, what was accepted. Those things are now missing.

But I definitely think that the narrative now at a business level is more around team cohesion and culture as opposed to productivity and the way that people do come in. But in the same breath, there are a lot of leaders that want their staff to come in, but they themselves are absent. So there's contradiction in the level of, or complexity, rather in how we actually manage this, because we've got technology clients who have been asked to come back in. There's a big wave of tech clients coming back in and the number one feedback we get from staff is ‘I come in, but my leaders aren't there’. So then you’ve lost the value of actually that connection.

So it's interesting how the concept of productivity is kind of filtering down into more manageable language.

But then there are still some kind of structural deficiencies in how we are actually working in the office, which I think we need to get to the bottom of as well.

Rebecca Kent

The height of hypocrisy.

Tim O'Connor

Sorry, Bec. You touched on a point that I was about to ask Craig about as well. I get the measure of productivity and the challenge around that. But how do you measure development and the impact of a lack of development on an organisation? Presumably that's got to be done over a longer time. Because Nathan, to your point – and I and speak to different organisations and I get different insights around the more senior people not coming back, the more junior people not coming back. Where either of those groups is not coming back, you think there's a long-term cost to that business. If the younger people aren't there, they're not learning and so you're not bringing that next group through the business. If the younger people are coming back and the older ones are not, then the impact is the same by virtue of the fact they're not being near and hearing and listening and doing all the things you said, which is exactly how I learned.

So I get the productivity measure, but I think also the development measure is a bigger cost to businesses longer term. That's how I see it.

Craig Knight

Can I just make a comment on that because I think that’s absolutely right, Tim.

And Nathan, you hit on culture, and I wrote it down, and culture is another one of those things that businesses completely misunderstand.

People think you can tell somebody what a culture is. You cannot do that.

Culture is a bottom-up process and how that culture develops then depends on how the board treats people. You can say ‘we are a forward, progressive looking company’. But if we don't act like that the culture won't be that. The culture will come from the bottom to respond to that: So how the leaders behave, how the managers behave, the kind of space that you give people to come into so that, to your point, Tim, people can come in and learn and interact, which is a crucial part of our psychology.

It depends very much on how the company leadership starts to behave and bring people into the process.

Nathan Sri

It's interesting, Tim. Because there’s a generational impact to what you said, right, Tim? Maybe back a few years ago people were more likely to stay for longer than Gen. Z, as an example.

We had this very interesting initiative we ran in Asia where we got a whole bunch of Gen. Zs to focus on a number of different topics. I remember our CEO being in the session and just asking them, ‘so what is your longevity in a company?’ And many of them, without batting an eyelid, said ‘after two years, we're happy to look and we happy to move’.

So even when you look at measures like attrition, and you can see maybe attrition in those graduate levels coming down, that may be not necessarily a product of not being in the office very often, or your leadership, but it's a generational thing where just after two years they’re happy to look and happy to pivot and happy to move on.

Rebecca Kent

Studies have shown that haven't they? That Gen. Z are less loyal to employers than older cohorts. So you don't want to conflate different issues.

Nathan Sri

I wonder if that's also a symptom of we've had the largest group of people start in the middle of working virtually. So Tim, you talked about the camaraderie that we develop when we're in the office. I mean some of the best nights out were, you know, after work building social connections that at times, when you're contemplating whether you leave for another job, you're actually weighing up the friendships you've built and the social connections and the strength of that.

And I wonder how strong that is in a virtual environment? I would suggest not.

Kate Pilgrim

We have recently moved into our new office space in Melbourne and part of what we are delivering is an amazing space for employees to come into where they can collaborate. And we have ongoing activation around the office, that is Thursday and Friday afternoon social events for that reason exactly, to get people together to connect and mix again.

My vision was when I started at JLL, I was 24 and I want to be able to create that same environment that I had at that age.

And it's amazing the turn out that we have for those social events from the younger generation, but across the board people seem to be really craving that social interaction again.

Rebecca Kent

Do you see employees coming in on those days when those activations and events are held and then it’s maybe quieter on the other days? Or is it consistent?

Is that also just encouraging them to come because they enjoy the everyday interaction?

Kate Pilgrim

We are trying to be quite specific around when we have the activations to try and do it on the quieter days to try and get people back in. If there is an event or some sort of activation: drinks or food or a guest speaker then we do definitely see an uptick on those days. And yes, I've been trying to be really purposeful about when we host those. It’s quite strategic.

Craig Knight

Kate, can I ask you who organises these days, the Thursday and Friday?

Kate Pilgrim

We have a workplace team that organises that. So we have them set the activation for the month and there's a mixture of social club as well as those events put on through JLL.

Craig Knight

That sounds really good. And who's in the team?

Kate Pilgrim

Who's in the team? As in, who's in the workplace team? They've come from a hotel background, so we're really trying to provide that experience and that hospitality concierge service for our employees across the business.

Craig Knight

So the reason I ask you, there are two levels of looking after people in the workplace.

And the first one is to enrich the workplace. Which is clearly what you're doing, you're making the work experience better for people, which makes them feel loved and makes them feel wanted. And it does improve their performance.

You can take that a step further, which is why I was interested in the composition of the team, by handing the organising over to the people who will be going out. That makes it even more powerful.

Kate Pilgrim

Yeah. So we have a number of groups involved with the social committee across the organisation as well as leadership who are providing input around what the activation should be and tying it quite closely as well to charity and that diversity and inclusion purpose.

Nathan Sri

One of the things we're getting better at, I was going to say, Kate, Rebecca. The research suggests that seven in 10 of the clients we kind of surveyed want to increase their spending and commitment to workplace experience and building that social coalition. So it's great.

I think you're absolutely right that social sense of belonging plays an important part in how people feel engaged and therefore want to be productive. We do a great job at that.

One of the things we're trying to lead in within is definitely be purposeful, but then add to that and say ‘how do we create events that are sticky over a period of time?’

So we're exploring things like learning languages or learning how to how to play around with AI and creating courses that might take six to eight weeks, but you're coming in on a routine basis because the one-offs are great, but you're coming in for a specified event.

But we're trying to now … what we've learned is that not everything is for everyone.

So you end up getting very niche populations.

So we're yet to find those very interesting topics that are of mass appeal so that people want to come into routinely. But we've just, in Singapore, put in a health gym.

So it's a cognitive gym that's aimed at really trying to improve your level of cognition and there are routine classes. So now you're starting to see people come in because they want to join those classes. So it may be a good indicator of the type of things that create stickiness over a longer period and hopefully that creates habit, right?

Then it creates the mechanism to say ‘I've been in the office for the last six weeks or most of the last six weeks, and it's actually not that bad. I want to, I can keep that habit going’ of sorts.

Kate Pilgrim

What happens in the cognitive classes, Nathan?

Nathan Sri

So you've got those games where, you know, those little poly thingies and they let go at different times. So you've got to like move your hand to get to them.

All sorts of crazy stuff that, I'll be honest, I haven't really entertained just yet.

I've been my lazy phase, but I will do shortly.

Kate Pilgrim

We have the benefit in our building of having a wellness space, so we have Pilates and yoga and HIIT classes that we can provide to our employees that we pay for throughout outgoings so we can offer them complimentary to all of our staff, which is a huge cost saving for employees across the course of the week.

It's like a spa retreat in the wellness space. It's amazing.

So this is what our clients are looking for as well – that wellness component. But also how do we attract staff into the office?

People are talking about the cost of getting to work. Well, we're providing this kind of service and we've got a cafe where we're providing coffees at no cost, then it really starts to add up for people to come into the office from a cost perspective.

Craig Knight

Again, if I may. These are all fabulous. And I love the idea of this health gym. I think that sounds outstanding. Just thinking about the research and how this applies. Again, to the point that was made that what we want is people to come in wholesale, not just come in for some little bits of appeal. Everything points to the more involved you can get the people on the ground, the people that work in the office, to develop these things, the better.

What comes up quite a lot in organisations to one centre or another is an unintentional infantilisation of the workforce. And the management will say, ‘we have provided you this’. You go to Google, it’s ‘we have provided you with scooters. We have provided you with sandpits to play in. We have provided you with free beer on a Friday afternoon’.

‘Well, that’s really kind, but it would be nice if we can make up our own minds’.

When those people develop the ideas themselves, then what we see is this fundamental piece of people wanting to come into that workspace and interact. And I think what you're doing is superb. If you can incorporate that into that too, then I think that is something really impressive.

Rebecca Kent

I just want to go back to that core issue of return-to-office mandates and how it's affecting decisions from organisations and investors. It's been used very much as a political football, not just in Australia but globally. But in the Australian context, one example is you've got the NSW and Victorian governments exchanging volleys about being pro-hybrid work and one being pro-get everyone back to the office for various reasons, which has been really interesting.

How does that affect the decision making of organisations across the board, both public sector and private, Kate?

Kate Pilgrim

Across the board, it's definitely a topic of conversation that we're having with our clients, both in the c-suite, but also CRE leads. And it's an important part of … for us kicking off a project for a client, around what is that space requirement. What is your workplace strategy and the future of work? What does that look like.

And it can vary from organisation to organisation often, depending on who or what the c-suite drivers are, and also across an organisation, different departments can have different requirements as well around their need to be in the office or perhaps ability to work a little more flexibly.

And sometimes we find it's more of the finance and the technology teams that might have more ability to work in a more flexible manner. But we really have to get down to the detail of each of those departments to determine what that future of work and space requirement is.

But definitely the conversation we see is more around is what Nathan was saying earlier around the culture and wanting to get people back into collaborate again.

Particularly Melbourne, we've had a really, I guess, a tougher … I’ll say the ‘C’ word: Covid time and lockdown period. So I think there are some ingrained habits across Melbourne that a lot of corporates are starting to break and we're starting to see a lot more mandating as well.

An example of that is Tabcorp, who recently mandated a return-to-work, as we ourselves did with our people. We've mandated a return to office five days for all of our people. So that's definitely a trend moving forward in that mandating.

Tim O'Connor

Can I just say, Bec, on this point, because mandating makes it sound as though …

Kent, Rebecca

It sounds a bit aggressive.

Tim O'Connor

Yeah. It almost says ‘you must be here and you sit at your desk and you work’.

That's not reality for us as an organisation.

We had flexible work policies well before Covid happened, and those policies continue now, right?

But where I thought we went to during Covid was the individual felt they had this absolute right irrespective of the organisation that was paying them each month to decide where they were going to work and how they were going to work every single day and curse whoever wanted to challenge them on that. To me it became quite a selfish attitude as opposed to saying, ‘right, I'm part of an organisation, part of a team and I'm going to have a conversation to say, ‘Hey, Kate, next Tuesday I've got this and that is it okay I’d like work from home and whatever?’.’ And Kate will say ‘no problem. That's fine.’ And therefore that better communication occurs beyond just the individual and has far more context to a team in an organisation.

It just feels like mandating is either you work completely flexibly or you’re chained to your desk and I just don't think that's reality.

Craig Knight

The best way forward, to your to your point you just raised with individuals is to agree things as a team.

So you come together as a team and you drive things forward. And the manager's role, the leader’s role in all of this is frankly not to mandate. When you mandate you destroy team spirit, you destroy productivity. It's never ever a good thing to do. So what we need to say is ‘what we need to do is we need people in the office this number of days a week and we need to achieve these goals. Team, how do we do it?’

And then managers facilitate that and the team decides how to reach those goals.

That works incredibly well.

And that then gets around the selfishness that you're alluding to, Tim. That selfishness certainly happens. If somebody sits on their on their backside all the time and works at the computer screen they can sometimes get to like it.

And again, to come to the point that Nathan raised earlier about virtual teams and so forth. When you research, you can actually get some really good team bonding from virtual teams.

But again, what's very important – we come back to JLL’s point at the nexus of this, is that every now and again, that's at least once a year, and preferably once every four months at least, you need to come in and break bread and shake hands with people.

That's also very, very important.

And so JLL’s role in this if you like, is to provide spaces that can handle that. Because while the office should change, whether it will or not, we'll probably discuss later, but while it should change, the real space where people need to come in and meet and do work and develop these team bonds – and Gen. Z is the loneliest generation of all of the moment, the research is telling – that space needs to be real and needs to be provided.

Nathan Sri

There were a lot of organisations that went highly collaborative, going to design for people to just constantly be in these social incubators and team environments. And to your point, we didn't get to the bottom of how much of your day is actually spent in a team environment versus coming back to your desk as an individual contributor and developing. So credit to many organisations who went one way or the other. They went highly collaborative and designed a whole bunch of spaces that then became very stale because we know that not everyone is collaborating 100% of their day.

Or there was the other side where they put in a whole bunch of focus rooms and focus pods and environments, but then people spent all their time in those on virtual calls. So they’d travel an hour and a half, two hours. Or you look at countries like India where they have three-hour commutes, to come in and sit in a pod for most of their time.

So there was a lot of this apprehension of ‘we need to do something so let's take a guess at it’.

But I like what you're saying, Tim in there's got to be a better understanding. And Kate, you alluded to this in the workplace strategy about when teams are coming in, what are the reasons that they're coming in? What are the predominant work types?

How do we actually create some environment around that? Because we know that these collaboration areas – look at agile as an example. We think they collaborate a lot, but they use the Kanban walls for maybe 5-10 minutes in the morning and at the end of the day, right?

And then those Kanban walls are used sparingly throughout the day to check in on your workload. For the rest of the time they're actually at their desks, shoulder-to-shoulder coding, testing, developing whatever it is. So really getting under the bonnet of how people are working can then help to design the types of spaces that they need. And that's going to be different to the type of space finance need when they're coming in for end of month and the quarter-end financial year, that type of stuff.

And then being very purposeful in not just the design of the space, but then from an FM perspective, how to actually deliver services. So it's not agnostic service delivery, it's more purposeful around ‘finance are coming in for these three weeks, we know exactly what they're going to be doing, so let's deliver some services around it.’

Rebecca Kent

So how aware are investors/developers of their role in supporting organisations in creating compelling environments for people to come back into the office?

Rebecca Kent

I’d be interested to hear from you about whether there any examples of buildings, besides JLL’s office, globally where you see buildings doing it really well?

Kate Pilgrim

You have just been on a global tour, Tim. So you can tell us the best in class assets.

Tim O'Connor

The ground plane for me is where a lot of it … and this this is not my theory, it's well proven and demonstrated. To get that really active ground plane where people want to be. You look locally at places like Barangaroo on a large scale from where that started to where it is: a really activated, engaging precinct.

You go to New York and a Hudson Yards. In some ways it’s not dissimilar to Barangaroo in that it was on the edge of the city and wasn't an area or location that people thought would perform well. While it's connected now through transport, it's not as well connected as other locations, but it's been incredibly popular.

It's really high quality real estate, but also very well amenitised and activated.

So yeah, those examples to me are really positive.

But then you look at buildings that don't necessarily have that footprint, the size and scale of those precincts, you look at things in London like 22 Bishopsgate and the recently completed 40 Leadenhall that have really invested in that amenity within a tower. So it's not just all at the base of the tower, it's much more spread through it and it's really providing a lot of the amenity that organisations would probably traditionally build into their office wellness facilities or auditorium or those sorts of things.

So it's allowing those organisations to go in and leverage what's within the building, or in some of those examples, within the precinct, without paying for it when they're not using it.

And Craig, you're probably a good person to come up with a better phrase than the ‘hotelisation’ of offices.

Maybe I'm giving you too much credit, Craig, but it is that idea that we're starting to really build out office buildings the way that you would have a five-star hotel where there's all of those different facets that you can use.

Or you can just use your room, but you're not going to have to pay for any more than obviously the food and beverage components and those sorts of things.

Craig Knight

What you face at the moment is a dichotomy. You have the world of realism:

You provide what your clients want. If your clients say ‘we want this space, we want this building’, you provide that, but you also have the opportunity to help them develop. Things like hoteling often give you that opportunity because you can take a client, you as a business can take a client and help them to develop what they're doing.

I'll give a quick example: Largely the space they use. We can beat Google, Microsoft easily. There's the Met Office in the UK whereby they had a little room downstairs where all the scientists used to gather. It was underneath the basement.

They had HVAC running through the ceiling, plastic palm chairs, deckchairs.

It was a bloody horrible space to go in, but they loved it. And they would much rather sit in that space than they would sit upstairs with the coffee machines and everything else.

They loved it. If you can incorporate your talent to develop that space and make that better, then you're really on to something powerful and you have the skills to do that. It's just a case of taking the size, applying it to what you do and you get the realism in that somebody wants this. It’s what’s you can provide for them and it’s what’s paying your money, but you have the capacity then also to take people many stages further beyond. The opportunity for JLL is fantastic.

Tim O'Connor

Agreed

Rebecca Kent

What do you think is the role of governments in the debate? The NSW government, I understand, is mandating, for want of a better term, its staff back into the office.

Kate Pilgrim

It's not a five-day mandated return to office. That's my understanding. Is that correct?

Tim O'Connor

Yeah. And I think the other interesting challenge is that NSW government had gone through a number of years of becoming more efficient with their space, that is, reducing their footprint. So the reality is, as I understand on good authority, is that if every employee in NSW government wanted to come into the office on the same day

there’s not enough space for them. So the risk with that is that ‘We all work for NSW government, we all go into the office, we can't get a seat, ready-made excuse. I'll just go home and work from home’.

Nathan Sri

Can we talk about from an infrastructure point of view?

If I look at it as an Aussie living in Singapore and how the government has been very tempered in how they influence return-to-office from a corporate landscape. They have internal policies they don't make very known. But what they've been big proponents of is making public infrastructure much easier and much more affordable so people can commute. You can argue we're a compact city and the notion that everyone thinks we can get to work in 20 minutes. It's not the case.

There are still people that travel an hour and over to get to the office. But you're looking at a dollar-plus to get into the office from your furthest distance in Singapore.

You're talking about trains that run every two minutes that make it accessible to come into these city centres.

JLL is in Singapore in a place that's nearly built up, called Paya Lebar. It's not the city centre. There's been a lot of investment in infrastructure, such as buses.

And then the communication back to the public they say, ‘hey, we're noticing that with the frequency of trains, it's jam packed at these times so we're putting on more trains or putting on more buses’.

I think there's definitely a role to play for government to support how easy it is for people to be able to come back into their place of work because we are very aware of environments where in the UK people are paying £50, £60 a day to come into the office. So you're talking about massive detractors. I think that needs to be part of the broader conversation of how infrastructure actually makes it accessible. Because it's not just a corporate real estate entity or an organisation client who is responsible.

It's a broader network of things that need to come together.

Rebecca Kent

Brilliant. All right, I would like you all to suggest a term other than ‘mandates’ which you think are much more palatable and explain better what it is we're trying to say with return to office.

Nathan Sri

I'll go. It's definitely not mandates. It's definitely for me leadership and that's what's missing. And I wish it should just be tarted on leaders leading the way in terms of what they want their staff and departments or teams to do.

I will say there has to be a greater reconciliation between what businesses want and what CRE functions are driving towards because there is a level of disconnect.

We're seeing companies who want to bring people back in, but Tim, you alluded to the fact that they're coming in on the same days. We've got clients in Sydney coming in on a Friday and it's packed and it's creating negative behaviours.

But one thing I will say is there is this undertone of conversation of people coming in for half days. Craig, I'll leave you to comment on its efficacy, but I think any means that people are coming in, even for two to three hours and connecting, is better than not connecting. So that whole notion that you come into the office, you need to be there nine to five. That's going to be the next challenge that we're going to have to get through. You might come in five days, but there's three days where you leave at 12pm and that should be okay. And I would say that's the emerging conversation that we're starting to have now. It's not just full days, is it okay to come part days?

I leave it at that.

Rebecca Kent

Or coming in for coffee. What's the term now?

Nathan Sri

I agree.

Rebecca Kent

People are literally coming in for a coffee and then and then leaving again.

Kent, Rebecca

Craig?

Craig Knight

Well, I’ve just been scribbling a few notes down here and I've got three headings that I think are really important. Four if you include the fact that you need realism in all of this.

But the first one of those three is, you need to understand what's going on in an organisation and the best way to understand what's going on in an organisation is to ask the people below the top level, the people that work in the spaces that you're going to be providing. That's really important.

And underneath that, use science. If you use what's called ‘the modesty of science’ so that it's Rebecca's idea, Kate's idea, Tim's idea, Nathan's idea … try those and see which one works best, no-one can really argue with that. If you say it’s three days, five days, part-time work, coming in for a coffee, test it. Use science to see how things work, how that compares to different scenarios and put yourself where you really should be, where you really can be, which is right at the forefront of all this.

So you can do the realism stuff, but you can also be groundbreaking world leaders and probably show quite a significant return on your investment for all that. Use the science, understand, include.

Kent, Rebecca

Thank you very much

Tim, what would you like to add to that?

Tim O'Connor

Nothing of much use. Other than … I'm reluctant to use it, but if you're creating a culture right within an organisation where it's not an either-or decision, there is that common goal, a little bit as Craig said before, where people understand the purpose of what they're doing, they understand the goal and therefore there is great communication across that team or organisation as such that there is that flexibility.

Because whether it's coming in for half a day or not coming in for half a day because there's something around that and there's effective communication around it, I just think that speaks volumes for the whole purpose of it, as opposed to this idea of telling people where they should be. So if you're creating it, then it's not even a thought it's just how you do business.

Rebecca Kent

Thanks very much. And Kate, over to you for the last word.

Kate Pilgrim

I had communication written down. It's vital to be able to communicate the vision and the goals for the organisation, but to be able to provide that experience to attract your people in and to engage and connect, and the importance of belonging in an organisation and feeling part of a community.

Rebecca Kent

Thank you. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much. It's a topic that seems evolving. Stubborn and evolving. But a really interesting one to debate. It has been great to hear your perspective, so I really appreciate it.

Nathan, Craig, Tim and Kate, thanks for having a chat to us on the perspectives podcast.

Kate Pilgrim

Thanks, Bec.

Nathan Sri

Thank you.

Craig Knight

Thank you.

Tim O'Connor

Thanks everyone.