Never before has it been possible to commit to full time study and work in tandem with such flexibility and ease.
This is largely due to technology enabling greater efficiency. University lectures can be accessed online, while work meetings, projects, emails, and document collaboration can now all happen remotely.
This raises an important question: do the efficiencies of technology enhance collaboration amongst students and co-workers; or does it suppress it?
The types of collaboration
In my view, collaboration takes on two forms; structured, and unstructured, and technology is uniquely placed to influence both.
Structured collaboration is largely output orientated work produced together. In our world, this looks like co-authoring reports, reviewing financial modelling, or coordinating submissions across our industry partners. Previously meeting rooms, commuting, document access (which only allowed sole editors), were barries to entry, technology has since unlocked improved structured collaboration. My own circumstances are evidence of the point; the ability to pursue postgraduate research alongside full-time advisory work depends almost entirely on this efficiency, and a decade ago the combination would not have been practical.
Unstructured collaboration is unique. It occurs organically and can be brought on through many forms, such as overhearing a co-worker in the kitchen or asking a question prompted by the physical proximity to another team member. These conversations are often enabled by in-person connection, and by removing that environment, we reduce the opportunities for them to happen altogether.
Technology has limited organic connection between co-workers, other students, and peers by altering the environment collaboration occurs in. How comfortable people feel sharing ideas in scheduled meetings, speaking up in tutorials, or expressing new ideas could be determined by the relationships that were built organically, around the office, in the library, or in a classroom.
The university campus
Following COVID, universities very quickly became the centre of technological changes, which impacted the culture on campus. Lectures are not a collaborative format, and evidently enough, students (and I) continue to choose not to travel for lecture content, which can be obtained remotely at the same quality with greater depth of accessibility. Inversely, and although not always the case, university tutorials that were discussion / contribution focused, as well as shared libraries maintain, or even see boosted attendance.
Physical attendance was and continues to be prioritised by people where value is communicated through presence, or experiencing human connection. Understanding what the space is for, when the activity it was designed around no longer requires the same demand for physical space, is worth considering for increasing space utilisation.
The office parallel
During the pandemic, focused individual work shifted to the home and has largely remained there. What continues to draw people back to the office is the same category of activity found in tutorial rooms and shared libraries at university: onboarding and mentoring, complex team-based problem-solving, immediate information exchange, and client interactions.
Office floors alternate between being congested and empty, and fit outs that were designed for five-day occupancy now primarily service three days (at a maximum!). Tenants have revisited footprints; re-weighting them, reducing allocated desking in favour of collaboration settings and direct leasing demand toward buildings whose quality and amenity justify the commute.
What brings people in, and how to bring in more
Considering both environments, a few factors appear to reliably generate attendance (spoiler, it’s not an “in person” mandate). The first is the presence of other people: the value of coming in depends on who else is, which is why unstructured flexibility tends to produce the least satisfactory outcome for everyone.
We have found that organisations that anchor attendance around common days, or around specific teams and activities, are finding much more buy-in to structured collaboration than those who don’t.
In-office events to look forward to, such as a morning tea or a boss-shouted coffee run (thanks Micah!) create an environment that encourages people to step out of their front door and into the office for organic, team building collaboration.
Personally, I don’t find it worthwhile commuting to the office when I could do the same job effectively at home, and many others feel the exact same way. This is why the quality of the office experience also matters: location, amenity, and fit-out all justify the effort and cost of commuting into the office.
Technology has removed the ability of any space, office or campus, to justify itself by default. More thought and reasoning need to be articulated on what space is for more than ever. That is a more demanding brief than the set and forget methodology based on an estimated headcount, however, it does open the opportunity to lease less space, at better quality, and to greater effect.