It’s the first day back to work in the US after a long holiday weekend… so appropriate to talk about everything we see in the landscape.
The Washington Post examined over the weekend design changes happening in the suburbs. Developers are now designing new spaces for work-from-home employees, with examples like outdoor setups with tables, power, and wifi. The core idea – is alternative workspaces closer to those at home. Axios, too, with the redesign of the workplace. Will it look like a Starbucks? Twilio and PagerDuty are profiled as they redesign office space.
Insider looked at the flood of remote workers into small cities and downs in the US… and the struggle to keep up. These “Zoomtowns” might respond to short-term struggles in housing… which are solved by building new houses. That may not be as easy as you might think, and the piece digs into the why.
With some reporting here, Axios noted a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Remote work drove the home price surge and may be responsible for more than half of the surge in pricing. Remote work led to about 15 percentage points of the 24% average increase in house prices between December 2019 and November 2021.
Not just remote work… but possibly age-related too. In the annual Axios Harris 100 poll, 77% of those whose job can be done remotely value their employer allowing that when they want to. And it skews by age. 84% of millennials say it’s important, 66% of Gen Z, 75% of Gen X, and 68% of Boomers. The current situation matters too – 93% of those remote and 89% of hybrid workers say it’s important, versus 57% of those back in the office.
So, disruption in housing, city planning, where workers are, and in what they want… sounds about right.
These broad pieces highlight the issues, and where I think this is practical and useful is your local interpretation. For you and your customers – if you’re rural versus serving a suburb or a city center … or all three. That’s also true of your interpretation of the data around age. What is your staff make-up? What are the demands of each?
I intentionally presented the data to be broken down and applied to your specific circumstance. That’s where I believe the value is.
Notable to me –millennials are often thought of as young. All perspective. Many are in the early kid years, so the interest in working from home makes some sense to offset childcare. Remember that detail. As employers, consider that most of the factors to consider are likely below your visibility line.