Switch to homeworking can boost productivity and recruitment for Yorkshire - Mark Casci

Even though it had only been 10 weeks, it felt as if I had been away for an eternity.

As well as marvelling at the incredible progress on many of the city’s construction projects – most notably the Majestic which is looking marvellous – I was pleasantly surprised to see so many people around.

Many were wearing masks and many were clearly on their way to work or taking a break from it.

As someone who has been working in his front room for nearly three months, it was a great reminder that life is going on.

However, as we prepare for next week’s reopening of non-essential retail, I wonder what that life is going to look like for the office market.

Lockdown has demonstrated conclusively that remote working not only works but in many cases, it can make your business better. During the last 10 weeks many office-based workers have shared a collective epiphany that travelling to work to essentially just sit in a different room is not only unnecessary but actually genuinely pointless.

The very concept of a 9-5 working day has been obliterated for many, many people – especially those with children.

You really have to ask why we have followed a path comparable to that used in Victorian factories for so long.

Certainly employers will now understand and be unable to dispute that flexible and remote working is viable.

Indeed, I would imagine for many sectors it will prove to be preferable.

With transport so poor across the region, the eradication of a miserable and slow moving commute by car, train or bus will be a welcome relief for thousands.

School runs and child care will be made easier and people will make important financial savings, particularly those who travel by train and contend with sky high season ticket costs.

This will, of course, lead to challenges for many commercial property businesses and indeed for the service firms that feed workers during lunch hours.

In recent weeks, I have been inundated with submissions and pitches from public relations professionals acting on behalf of office space managers, all desperate to channel Mark Twain and insist that reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.

They are right, of course, in the sense that a physical presence will always be required for any organisation.

You still need a space to welcome and meet with clients, partners and of course with each other. All meetings will not be conducted via Zoom in perpetuity. However, the switch to remote working will without question become a more prevalent method of operating for many of us and is most likely that employees will prefer to operate from home whenever possible.

This will come at cost to the demand for office space.

Hot desking will be more commonplace as the public health threat retreats and it seems inevitable there will be rationalising of how much space companies choose to rent.

However there will be opportunities as well.

Here in Yorkshire, and indeed across the North of England, we suffer from low levels of productivity among large sections of our workforce.

The painfully slow pace of travel is in large part responsible for this and home working can help level up the productivity gap in a quick and effective way.

Moreover, the access to talent can also improve for many parts of the region.

Take for example the fantastic city of Hull, which has made giant steps forward in recent years but often struggles when it comes to recruitment owing to its geographic location.

Both public and private organisations will find it easier to attract the best people if they only need to travel to the city once in a while. This also applies to many rural companies.

There is much rhetoric about how we as a planet need to treat the Covid crisis as a chance to change things for the better.

This is one arena that can make a difference for Yorkshire and deliver quick wins for this proud and glorious county.