The rapid growth of factories during the Industrial Revolution created a new way of organizing labor for the production of goods. During this time, factories were commonly considered the workplace for employees. The Industrial Revolution drove efficiency, which put an emphasis on process management and data analytics, and those, in turn, drove a professionalization of the workplace that eventually gave rise by the 1950s to the Information Age. As the country focused on technology advancements that facilitated the processing and transmission of information, jobs evolved, and work also began to take place in offices. For the U.S., the 1960s were the early beginnings of the office as a workplace.
Fast forward to March 2020, when the pandemic hit, businesses faced serious challenges that impacted their workforce, operations, and productivity, among other issues, threatening their very survival. The pandemic also changed the perceptions of a work-life balance for many professionals, ultimately changing how we work. The pandemic left no industry immune to its effects and created significant challenges for where and how work was performed, impacting service delivery models. To survive the pandemic, most industries found themselves having to rapidly change their workplace strategy, a new term meant to describe an organization’s office occupancy strategy, more specifically, whether employees work in a hybrid, remote, or in-office work structure, to optimize the work environment to support business goals. This instantaneous pivot has caused a conundrum for business leaders today about what the best (in terms of productivity, revenues, risk management, employee retention, regulatory compliant, etc.) office/workplace arrangements might be. Workplace strategy is not one-size-fits-all, and organizations struggle to determine which hybrid, remote, or in-office structure will produce the best business outcomes.
