‘Near Home’ Offices: Better than WFH?
Homeworking isn’t for everyone. Standard Chartered PLC, the UK based emerging markets bank, is responding to the departure from inner office workplaces with an alternative – the Near Home Office. From early next year, the bank intends to offer 85,000 staff across nine countries the option to work from a ‘near home’ location. CEO Bill Winters calls the model a ‘hub-and-spoke’ alternative.
The hub and spoke alternative rejects the single large, central city office and replaces it with flexible workspaces and working styles. Originating in the transport sector, hub and spoke office working gives employees the choice of either working from a central city office, strategic regional workspace or their own home office.
CAPTION: Near Home Offices or Hub and Spoke solutions, whatever you call them they provide an opportunity for businesses to cut overheads and improve performance (Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash)
The advantages of hub and spoke offices
The advantages go beyond reduced office overheads. Employees who find working from home impossible are granted an alternative that suits them and the business. Local work and reduced commute times lead to an increase in productivity for organisational teams. The boost to local economies is yet another advantage.
Issues with a lack of tools or reliable internet connections – exactly the kind of problems that many financial institutions grappled with for operations located in India and Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic – are easily mitigated too.
While Standard Chartered are leading the departure to the ‘burbs for banking, Les Back, Professor of Sociology and Goldsmiths University in London, predicts this is just the beginning of the migration for businesses.
“It may be that some businesses won’t come back to the centre of cities, thinking it’s too risky – or other economic drivers may be prompting people to ask why they’re investing so much of their capital in large office spaces.”
Challenges of a distributed workforce
While working from home is clearly not the right answer for everyone, near home offices come with their own unique challenges too. Frontline staff may find the change to their work location far more challenging than colleagues involved in back office operations.
Managing distributed teams is less straightforward than teams who share a centralized space. Add to this compliance and regulatory monitoring, and satellite offices may well lose their attractiveness for businesses subject to heavy regulation. Issues of security on shared networks or the possibility of passers-by snooping on sensitive information may also make shared satellite offices impracticable.
The demise of the office
Challenges aside, it’s starting to become clear that the office we once thought of as integral to business operations is entering it’s sunset years. Standard Chartered’s CFO, Andy Halford believes it’s just a matter of time before offices become completely redundant.
“The word ‘office’ will become a thing of the past” he says.
Despite the levels of complexity involved in making satellite hub and spoke office arrangements work, it’s clearly not impossible. Central real estate is proving to be superfluous for many businesses who successfully took to WFH during the pandemic and then carried on after cities began to open up again. Deloitte LLP plan to shut four of their UK locations for this reason alone.
Transport and logistics giants have successfully run their businesses using the hub and spoke model for decades. A look at Federal Express, UPS or Amazon Web Services is proof enough of its efficacy. Businesses with fewer moving parts and more static practices may find the challenges of hub and spoke office arrangements less perplexing than first imagined.
If landlords can provide real solutions to worries about technological security and staff safety, suburban satellite offices will gain in popularity even faster. One thing’s for sure, the greater flexibility, reduced cost to business, and increase in productivity are already making hub and spoke office arrangements more attractive than ever before.