Proactive employers will have already begun planning their workplace of the future. The office that people return to will be different than the one they left in March 2020. Hundreds of anecdotes and studies recorded over the past year suggest that most organizations will adopt a blended (or “hybrid”) work model that retains some element of home working on a permanent basis.

This shift requires a deep understanding of employees’ experience at home, what they have missed about the office, and how their expectations have changed in recent months. Organizations which choose to make workplace decisions in the dark risk alienating staff and dismantling trust in a stressful and uncertain time. For some, mismanaging this moment could even turn into a talent retention disaster, as employees look for new job opportunities in a world where the traditional bulwarks have come down.

Leesman’s research into the homeworking experience — having collected more than 160,000 individual survey responses to date* — revealed that 83 percent of employees feel productive in their home environment. In contrast, just 64 percent of the more than 800,000 respondents to Leesman’s office-based survey reported their offi ce environment enables them to work productively. The data suggests that home workers’ have a more positive view of their work environment because the home provides better support than the office across core work activities, including individual focused work (desk-based), planned meetings, telephone conversations and even collaborating on focused work.

These findings back a general feeling among businesses that most employees have worked effectively from home over the past year, but a closer inspection of the data reveals factors that could have some long-term ramifications for both organizations and their employees. A third of employees have reported that the home does not support their ability to learn from others, while 44 percent do not agree that their home environment supports informal social interaction. Meanwhile, three in 10 dispersed employees have admitted to feeling disconnected from their organization.

The data gets even more interesting across a subset of more than 22,000 respondents who reported on both their office and home working experience at the same time. The data from this group uncovered four key variables that have the greatest impact on the critical outcomes discussed above. Organizations that are planning their future workplace strategies must consider these variables if they want to provide employees with the infrastructure, tools and experiences they need to be their best.

Home working settings: Know what the home offers (and doesn’t)

Leesman asked employees what type of setting they have available to use when working from home. Respondents chose from one of three options: a dedicated work room or office, a dedicated work area (which is not enclosed), or a non-work specific home location (such as a dining table). The settings are likely to offer different degrees of acoustic privacy and ergonomic quality.

The findings revealed that the work settings available to employees at home are a key predictor of their home working experience. Employees who use dedicated offices reported the best home working experience. In contrast, those working in areas not intended for work reported the worst experience.

This underlines how crucial it is for organizations to understand what employees have available to them should they continue to need to work from home in the future. It is worth noting that the experience gap between employees working in dedicated work rooms and dedicated work areas respectively is smaller compared to non-work specific settings. This shows that having a dedicated work area — even if it is not enclosed — is still likely to provide a better home working experience than a kitchen table or a couch.

However, looking only at employees’ experience based on their home work settings paints an incomplete picture of their working life. To make decisions for the future, organizations must understand how all of this compares to their office experience. For those who work from a dedicated offi ce at home, the home provides a better experience than the office. In contrast, those who worked in non-work specific areas at home had a better experience in the office overall.

Activity complexity: How an employee’s role dictates their workplace needs

What employees do — specifically, the variety of work activities that make up their roles — is a key predictor of their workplace experience, whether at home or in the office. Role complexity is measured as the number of work activities employees select as important out of the 21 listed in the survey. These range from individual focused work at a desk and informal meetings to creative thinking and telephone and video conversations. The results revealed that employees in low-complexity roles — respondents who deemed only one-to-five different types of activities important — had the best home working experience, while those working in high-complexity roles (16-21 activities) reported the worst experience.

This pattern is not specific to home working, however. When exploring the office experience, employees in low-complexity roles reported a higher average experience score than those in high-complexity roles. In fact, as the activity complexity increases, the gaps between home and office become smaller, which demonstrates that supporting employees with high complexity profiles can be just as challenging across both locations. The more variety in an employee’s activity profile, the more challenging it is for their work environment to support those different needs.

However, averages do not tell the full story. While employees with complex roles tend to have a poorer experience than those with less complex roles, it is possible for one, or several, work environments to deliver an outstanding experience for all or most employees. To achieve an optimum experience, it is crucial to understand employees’ activity patterns, which activities are important, and how well they are supported.

Activity profile: How individual and collaborative work may demand different settings

The work activities an employee does as part of their role, both individual and collaborative, and how well supported they are to do these, impact on important organizational outcomes such as productivity and social cohesion, but remote working has dramatically changed how environments support these different types of activities. To explore these dynamics in more detail, Leesman calculated a ratio based on what proportion of the activities each employee selected as important were individual or collaborative.

Based on this ratio, employees were clustered in five activity profiles on a grading scale: highly individual, individual, balanced, collaborative and highly collaborative. The team then compared employees’ experience in the workplace and at home to understand which score was higher. The distribution revealed that the office provided a better experience in 55 percent of cases for employees who have a highly collaborative profile. In contrast, the home provided a better experience for employees with highly individual profi les in 61 percent of cases.

However, deciding where to work is more complex than a home-vs-office tug of war. Among those with highly collaborative profiles, 45 percent had a better experience at home, while 38 percent of the employees with highly individual profiles had their needs met better in the office, highlighting that what works best for most does not necessarily work for all.

Assets and liabilities: Know what your office offers (and doesn’t)

To fully understand the dynamics of a blended work environment, organizations must examine how the office and home compare. Each location comes with specific assets and liabilities, but these can vary greatly between different offices and even on a department level within the same office.

Nonetheless, the quality of the workplace could be the magnet that pulls employees into the office more regularly. Some of the surveyed organizations included questions on how many days per week employees would prefer to work from home once COVID-19 restrictions are removed.

In a case study of three different workplaces belonging to the same organization, the study revealed that employees’ answers varied according to how good their overall experience was in their workplaces. In outstanding workplaces, more than 90 percent of employees wanted to work at home for just one day per week or less. In the suboptimal workplace, the opposite was true, with 72 percent of employees declaring they want to work from home for most of the working week.

What next?

The pandemic has fast-forwarded the remote working evolution from years into a matter of months, shifting the mindset of many who declared pre-pandemic that their roles, as well as those of their team members, could not be done remotely. But with the success of the vaccination program in the U.S., organizations must turn the attention to rethinking the post-pandemic employee experience. Leaders and their facility management teams must figure out how their colleagues’ experiences, expectations and attitudes have changed since March of last year. The starting point is to ask employees the right questions and collect the data required to make these decisions.

*The statistics included in this article were captured from 145,000 Leesman Home survey responses.