Facial recognition in supermarkets hailed a success, tensions rise amid the ongoing conflict in Lebanon and can your boss really force you back to the office?
The Government’s demand for more civil servants to get back to the office misses the point about improving productivity, four-day week pioneer Andrew Barnes says.
And a top real estate executive says many Auckland offices are already under pressure on the days people do choose to work inthe office.
Perpetual Guardian founder and four-day week pioneer Barnes said people wasting time during long-winded meetings, living far from offices, and a lack of focus on outputs were impacting productivity more than working from home was.
Public Service Minister Nicola Willis has asked government departments to call staff back to the office and enforce stricter rules around working from home (WFH).
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he wanted a “highly productive and collaborative” public service.
“Yet again we have exactly the debate about the wrong thing,” Barnes told the Herald shortly after he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and philanthropy.
“The four-day week used to be beaten up ... people would argue you couldn’t possibly do your job in four days instead of five.”
But he said more employers were adopting the four-day week, which focused on how to make people as productive in four days as they were in five.
“There are 1500 school districts in the US that now have a four-day week.”
Barnes said in some contexts, WFH was productive but in others it was more akin to “sleeping in the office”.
Barnes said WFH also created some major problems for people around work-life balance, and boundaries.
“The working day gets longer and longer because there are no defined breaks between work as home life and work as work life.”
Philanthropists Charlotte Lockhart and Andrew Barnes. Barnes says a narrow discussion about working from home entitlements misses other ways to boost productivity.
Barnes said open-plan offices were prone to interruptions and after each interruption it took people more time to get back to being productive.
He said modern Zoom and Teams meetings were often scheduled for too long, with 30-minute or one-hour blocks when not as much time was needed, and people frequently went off-topic with unproductive discussions.
The home-office debate was not always the most important one when productivity and collaboration were discussed, Barnes said.
“What is healthy is we have a debate about how work should be structured.”
Barnes said discussions about the proximity of home and workplace locations were useful.
A real estate chief said many big companies in Auckland were already moving to more transport-friendly locations.
“There’s been a huge demand on quality office premises, quality amenities,” Bayleys Auckland chief executive Lloyd Budd told the Herald.
Wynyard Quarter and nearby office spots are in huge demand, a real estate chief executive says, regardless of whether anybody makes WFH edicts. Photo / Alex Burton
“They need to be close to transport, they need to be green buildings.”
He said the WFH phenomenon was already putting some offices under big strain on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays - as many worked from home on Fridays and Mondays.
“All the infrastructure is getting absolutely stretched.”
Budd said Auckland had a two-tier office market at the moment.
“The high-quality offices, these new ones around Wynyard Quarter, Commerical Bay, Britomart, vacancies are at all-time lows.”
Budd said several big companies had moved to the city recently: SkyTV from Mt Wellington, 2degrees from Newmarket, One NZ from the North Shore.
“On the flipside, you look at Midtown, you look at Newmarket, the vacancy rates are the highest I’ve seen them.”
Budd said he’d been monitoring those rates since 2001.
He said more people working in the office would most likely boost retail and hospitality but that should be balanced with ways of ensuring offices already under strain mid-week did not face serious pressure on Mondays and Fridays.
Budd said smart employers knew utilising existing space better was often wiser than just clamouring for more space when people started returning to the office.
He said making broad WFH mandates sometimes missed the nuances of work.
“I’m a salesman. I need to be in front of people as much as I can.”
Budd said the people at Apple’s Wynyard Quarter innovation labs probably had to be there, whereas a Datacom coder might easily be able to work from home.
