How Can Companies Manage Virtual Space?

During a Zoom call with her company’s chairman, Meredith Heagney’s 10-month-old daughter Lillian screamed. Loudly.

Everyone on the line knew Heagney had a call later with a big client, so she tried to assure them that Lillian wouldn’t be screaming when that started. The chairman told her not to worry about it.

“He was acknowledging that we're people with lives,” said Heagney, 36. "I don't think that's always been okay in business."

Like many around the world, Heagney and her husband Mitch have spent much of the past five months in their 1,700-square foot, two-bedroom condo on Chicago’s North Side juggling their jobs and Lillian. It hasn’t always been easy, but Heagney is heartened to see that, for all its challenges, COVID-19 appears to have prompted a change in attitudes among corporate America’s leaders.

Heagney’s experience sheds light on how companies – faced with a pandemic that will be part of our reality for the foreseeable future – can best manage virtual space and how employees work remotely. That’s the theme of the fourth chapter of Work, Wellness & Space project, a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and communications firm Greentarget in collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam.

Dealing with Meeting Overload — and Different Personalities

A Gartner, Inc. survey of employers last spring found that 74 percent of employers will shift at least 5 percent of employees who worked on-site pre-COVID to permanently remote positions after the pandemic. For everyone else, working from home will continue on at least a limited basis for a while. Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 25 percent to 30 percent of the workforce will work from home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of this year. It’s the only way most offices – particularly those designed with close quarters in a pre-COVID era – can operate with social distancing.

But many employees would probably argue their performances in the COVID era merits expanded or loosened work-from-home privileges in any scenario. “People are learning, ‘Oh, I'm getting my work done in four hours where it used to take me six hours because I'd have Molly popping by and asking me how my weekend was,” said Dr. Eugénie Pabst, a biofeedback specialist.

That’s not to say the transition to remote work has been smooth or easy. A new study finds that the workday increased by 48.5 minutes since the pre-pandemic and that the number of meetings per person jumped 13 percent. Anyone who didn’t think there were too many meetings before the pandemic probably thinks so now, said Dr. Michael Horowitz, president of TCS Education System, a nonprofit system of colleges advancing student success and community impact. TCS has long embraced online platforms, which made the COVID transition easier. Horowitz’s organization is being intentional about the number and length of meetings to prevent employee burnout.

“Video meetings are tough and fatiguing,” he said. “For maximum impact and productivity, we are learning the right cadence and quantity for our remote environment. When is it important to have the whole leadership group together? What could be better addressed in a quick, one-on-one conversation? We need to be purposeful with our time and virtual interactions right now.”

Organizations also need to be mindful that work-from-home scenarios can affect workers differently. Introverted people might seem suited for remote work. But that’s only true to a point, said Monica Hakimi, the James V. Campbell professor of law and the associate dean for faculty research at the University of Michigan. As introverts are often drawn to academia, Hakimi has had the chance to see how many of them have reacted to working from home over the past few months.

“In some ways, introverts are well set up for it,” she said. “But the fact that this is their M.O. could lead to more isolation.”

To prevent that, the law school faculty two weeks after going remote began checking in with every law student to make sure they were taking care of themselves and getting the assistance they needed. The school also maintains community through weekly faculty workshops via Zoom.

Those kinds of check-ins are important for all employees amid growing feelings of isolation and uncertainty, said Nicholas White, managing director of Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam. In many ways, managers must relearn how to effectively manage workforces with an emphasis on the nuances of remote working.

“Without clear direction, coaching, or guidance, people are often left to navigate this difficult journey on their own,” White said. “Individuals can build stories that overwhelm – am I going to lose my job? Am I doing enough? Is my manager happy with me? This on top of managing everything else at home can be a recipe for disaster.”

The Future of the Home Office

But managing virtual space isn’t just about tolerance of screaming children, limiting video conferences or ensuring remote work doesn’t feed employees’ angst. Companies and employees are probably only beginning to understand what this all means. Some would argue that robust productivity over four months of working from home might justify broad changes – perhaps arguing that an office is no longer necessary. But there still are too many unknowns, said Ari Klein, vice chairman of Cushman and Wakefield, which specializes in representing corporate, legal, and institutional clients with their commercial real estate requirements.

“Right now is not the time for someone to make a possible irrational decision based on data that has not been tested,” he said. “The space needs of yesterday have clearly changed. The space needs of tomorrow have not been defined yet.”

Tim Swanson, chief design officer at Skender, an integrated design and manufacturing company in Chicago., agrees. “Part of the challenge is not knowing what this looks like and what it means. Whether people can be productive in their home space. Open offices were supposedly a failure, especially when your staff feels under supported. If you thought open offices didn’t work, how will you work from home?”

But others think those questions have been answered. Forge Craft, an Austin, Texas, architecture and design firm, recently released The COVID Companion©, a white paper predicting that employees will go to offices about once a week for team meetings and collaborative projects – and that the 9-to-5, 40-hour work week becoming obsolete for knowledge workers.

“We think we’ll see primary or secondary spaces in homes that have to function as offices,” said Rommel Sulit, Forge Craft’s founding principal. “Your home is your single-most important investment – and that’s especially clear now as COVID forces us to optimize the space for work. And the evolution of that space has staying power.”

He envisions a wave of new construction where one side of a house includes a master bedroom and offices, children’s bedrooms and a home school space on the other side and a family/public area in the middle. Of course, the vast majority of housing isn’t designed like that – but workers will probably seek that kind of space, especially after working on card tables or kitchen counters for the past few months.

“There will be more intentional third spaces in apartments for people working from home – like people renting a place with a third bedroom to use as an office,” Swanson said. “But as we go down that path, companies and employees are going to have a little bit of a reckoning asking who’s going to pay for those slightly larger apartments, especially if companies expect these spaces to replace commercial offices permanently.”

A Swiss court ruled in May that companies in that country must help offset the cost of working from home. Even if they’re subject to no such requirements, companies might wonder how much they should change, and how much they’re willing to pay for change. Even if remote work continues in some capacity for the foreseeable future – which is likely – some experts believe employees should provide some basic amenities to home offices.

“People are asking to take their chairs home and they were not allowed – it’s a chair, not a NASA secret,” said Tanarra Schneider, managing director, design at Accenture Interactive/Fjord. “Companies have shifted from saying we should never work from home to doing it because of COVID, but there has not been an effort to truly listen and ensure that employees are set up for success.”

The Conflicts Around Managing Virtual Space

As is our practice with Work, Wellness & Space, we identify social conflicts surrounding each chapter’s theme. The management of virtual space presents these conflicts:

·         Zoom Overload: Leaders struggling to manage far-flung employees might overcompensate and schedule too many virtual meetings. But experts said that video conferences can be more draining and cause employees to lose focus in already turbulent times. How can leaders strike a balance between online collaboration and overdosing on Zoom calls?

·         Managing Personalities: Can leaders ensure that they’re thinking about how different personalities adapt to remote work – and provide assistance and check-ins to match? While extroverts will likely struggle not being around people, introverts working at home for months might end up dealing with feelings of extreme isolation.

·         Amenities vs. Cost: Hopes for a vaccine could keep leaders – particularly in a bad economy – from paying for work-from-home amenities. Will they pay for office chairs, monitors or even subsidize rent when employees need more space to effectively work from home? If not, will employees who can pay for those things have a leg up?