Good morning from Geneva.
The war over remote vs. In-office work is over, and hybrid has won.
That’s the conclusion of a new McKinsey report, out today; CEO Daily got a sneak preview.
“Three and a half days in the office. That’s where we think the convergence will roughly happen,” Jan Mischke, one of the report’s authors, told me. “There will be a lot of movement still” before we settle on that number, he added, and it could be 3.9 or 3.2. “But it’s unlikely to be five days and unlikely to be two days.”
This surprised me, since corporate leaders—from Wall Street to Silicon Valley—have been so vocal in calling their workers back to the office full-time. But according to Mischke, that’s more a reflection of where these companies are coming from than a sign of where they are going. “[These firms] have the lowest attendance today,” he said. “They are the epitome of remote.”
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, for example, may go back to five days in the office, but the rest of us won’t. Credit the segment of the population that is “extremely adamant” about being hybrid, Mischke said. The biggest advocates of the model may not be who you’d expect. “It’s the senior executive that comes in three to four days a week. They think they are more productive at home one to two days a week.”
The consequences for superstar cities like New York, San Francisco, and London are profound. “We’re going into a world where city centers will become much more mixed-use,” Mischke said. For central business districts, building conversion won’t be easy, nor cheap, “but it has to happen for 10-20% of the properties.” Companies, for their part, “will need to upgrade the quality of the office space” and “make it much more adaptable.”
The primary function of an office, Mischke concluded, should be to meet other people. I would agree. And I’d even venture to say that’s true about shared spaces in general.
Separately, have a read of this opinion piece by Michael Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work, titled, “‘It’s time to acknowledge why diversity makes us uncomfortable.” “Facing issues related to race in this country is very hard, or perhaps, impossible,” he writes. But if companies want to build trust, they need to address it.
More news below.
Peter Vanham
[email protected]
@petervanham
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This edition was CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.
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