Office culture has undergone a seismic shift in the wake of the pandemic, fundamentally changing how and where we work. Many global employers are questioning whether they’ll return to the office at all; fifty of the UK’s largest employers said they have no plans to return staff to the office full-time in the near future, BBC reports. Google and Facebook have both announced that employees will continue working remotely at least until July 2021, with Facebook planning to permanently shift thousands of jobs to remote work over the next five to ten years. “The tech companies are leading the way on this…I think big offices are finished,” host Kara Swisher predicted on New York Magazine’s Pivot podcast.
While this may spell the end of the big, open, communal office, flexible solutions propose a new model for the future workspace: hotels and restaurants, in the absence of their traditional clientele, are repurposing their spaces as rentable offices.
