Offices make up three-quarters of the real estate in downtowns like Kansas City, and the transition to hybrid work has some downtowns around the country struggling. Across the U.S., the pandemic has left city centers cratered and abandoned.
Now as we try to return to normalcy the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. Despite being credited to the pandemic, Tracy Hadden Loh, fellow at the Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institute believes we were already heading in that direction.
According to Loh, "Hybrid work and fully remote work were both trends that were growing even prior to the pandemic and what COVID-19 did was really just kind of supercharged that trend and also spread it beyond early adopters."
Loh also says whether people want to come back to work or not varies depending on different factors like who you are, where you live, where you are in your life and to what kind of office your looking to return. With COVID-19 hurting so many people and places, downtowns must think both boldly and inclusively.
To help, employers can provide for workers some of the homelike features that have preserved productivity and supported resilience over the past two years like comfort, furniture, dress code, care, food and personalization.
The bottom line is that workers want to get out of their homes, but they absolutely do not want to return to the old office.
Tracy Hadden Loh notes, "There has been things that home has provided for us the past two years that has helped us get through this and if those things are valuable and useful and support productivity then we should think about how to incorporate them in the workplace."
- Tracy Hadden Loh, fellow at the Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institute
