Hybrid work here to stay, says Savills Hong Kong's Smith

Monday 06 May 2024

PETALING JAYA (Jan 21): The hybrid working model seems to work best for productivity, staff retention and staff morale, as well as the need to balance solo project work and collaboration, said Savills Hong Kong senior director of research and consultancy Simon Smith during his presentation of “Post Pandemic: The evolution of commercial office and workspace demand in Asia-Pacific” in the Rehda Institute’s CEO Series 2022 session on Thursday (Jan 20).

People have all been part of a huge global homework experiment over the last two years but vaccine programmes have progressed and many countries are now starting to open up. So what does this mean for the workplace and what type of working will evolve and carry us into the future?

According to Smith, there are two sides to a hybrid working model, which needs to be considered from the perspective of an employee and employer.

From an employee's perspective, dwelling sizes in Asia-Pacific are often smaller and occupied by many generations, which will tend to push the worker more towards the office and away from the home. “Arguably, it is more comfortable in areas with larger homes, where one can find space for a dedicated home office. Other factors include city mobility, home broadband speeds, the population composition and the lockdown length and severity. Overall, employees generally reported a much higher level of satisfaction with a hybrid model rather than working full time in the office,” said Smith.

Looking at that same equation from an employer’s perspective, he opined that employers will be thinking much more about office cost and how efficiently an office space can be used if the cost can be saved and if a percentage of the workforce is at home at any given time. It is also about how much flexibility an employer has, what is the workplace culture as well as the length and severity of lockdowns.

“Employers also want to retain talent and ultimately create more flexible work environments. They will then be aware that with home office, employees are demanding slightly different managerial skills. Employers will also be concerned about attracting people back to the office at this point where people have been at home for prolonged periods, and they may have to start appealing to employees with new offerings,” Smith added.

A lot of people have been talking about the Covid-19 pandemic but he opined that there are other influences and some of them are rather more deeply rooted than the recent pandemic. “If you look at the shifting demographics, for example, the new workforce is youthful and are usually in their 20s and 30s. This is the new generation of the office-based service sector and each worker has a different perspective of life, arguably from those in the 50s, who are more community focused, socially democratic and location-agnostic.”

Another influence is the traditional shift from the secondary to tertiary industry, Smith noted. “It is moving from manufacturing to services, and within the services sector, there is another revolution that is the fourth industrial revolution, which means a shift or focus on things like artificial intelligence, big data and robotics. We are also aware of the huge changes that have taken place in technology, whereby we have so much better access to technology at home and this allowed us to work remotely over the last few years.”

Meanwhile, in developing economies that are still urbanising at high rates, this has allowed governments to reimagine the city. “There is more talk of the new urbanism of sustainable and walkable communities, much more mixed use and much better adaptation to a hybrid environment of working partly from home and from the office. Consequently, the pandemic has very much acted as an accelerator of a lot of these trends while also increasing our understanding of a need for better resilience,” said Smith.

Edited ByWong King Wai

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