RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – When considering the future of work, a new study finds that three-quarters of employees participating in a study say they value the flexibility to work from a location of their choosing, more than other company benefits. In fact, one in four who reported they’d be willing to give up healthcare coverage and cash bonuses for the flexibility to work where they prefer.

WeWork, a provider of coworking space and other services which has a big presence in the Triangle and Charlotte, conducted the study along with Workplace Intelligence, and Savanta.

In the wake of the pandemic and a year of work-from-home, social distancing mandates, what will the future of work look like, exactly.

WeWork postulates that the future of work is, in fact, hybrid, where employees will work from multiple locations in any given week.  Those locations might include working from a home office, a company headquarters or satellite location, local coworking spaces or co-working spaces available during business travel, or public spaces like coffee shops and public libraries, the company shared in a statement summarizing their research.

“The future of work is hybrid,” report authored by WeWork, released April 13, 2021.

“Covid-19 has fundamentally altered the way we think about the office,” said Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of WeWork.  “Moving forward, employees and companies will need to adopt flexible solutions that support hybrid working styles in order to keep employees engaged and satisfied.”

In aggregate, the study found that employees wish to spend roughly one-third of their time at home, one-third at a company headquarters, and one-third of their time at a satellite office, coworking space, or public space.

The study involved answering a set of questions regarding the hybrid work model, and included data gathered from 2,000 participants, half of which were company leaders and half of which were employees in non-leadership roles, all of whom received monetary compensation for participating.

Fndings align with prior research findings from Morgan Stanley, whose research in the summer of 2020 indicated that about 40 percent of American office workers anticipate to work, at least occassionally, from home or in other remote locations indefinitely, and from McKinsey, which found that 80 percent of survey respondents reported enjoying working from home with half reporting increased productivity.

“The more permanent shift in working habits that is underway will also influence when and how office work returns,” wrote Greg Brown, the executive director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, and Arzu Ozoguz, clinical associate professor of finance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, in a recent blog post.  “The grand experiment thrust upon the workplace by the pandemic means that, for some businesses, working remotely will be here to stay.”

In an interesting finding, the WeWork study showed that demographics impact workstyle preferences.

Overall, the study found, 65 percent of employees wish to opt into a hybrid work model, but 71 percent of those who are less than 25 years old prefer this model compared to 46 percent of respondents who are above the age of 55.

Employees who earn a salary of more than $150,000 are more likely to seek hybrid work environments, with three-quarters of respondents who earn at or above that income level seeking a hybrid environment, compared to 58 percent of employees earning less than $60,000 in annual income.

And, those with advanced degrees were more likely than employees whose highest academic credential is graduating from high school.

Three-quarters of those with advanced degrees reported preference for hybrid work, compared to half of high school graduates expressing this preference.

“People inherently want more freedom in their lives, including control over when, where and how they work,” said Dan Schawbel, Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence.  “We found that even if companies don’t provide access to offices, many employees are willing to use their own income to have a hybrid arrangement.”

64 percent of respondents expressed a willingness to pay, personally, for access to an office space in a location of their preference, including nearly half (48 percent) that said they would pay more than $300 from their own pocket, for the freedom to work in a location of their choosing.

Will employers accommodate hybrid work?

According to the research, nearly 8 in 10 executives plan to allow their employees to split their time between corporate offices and remote-based work, if their job allows for it, and 76 percent say they’re likely to provide some form of stipend to enable their employees to do so.

That’s why the study’s authors say that hybrid work will be a new normal, where employees might split the week, or even their day, between multiple locations.

It’s also consistent with what one Durham-based coworking community has observed in recent months, according to its founders.

“We are seeing an increase in demand for short-term rentals of office spaces for folks who may be out-of-market but need access to a professional work environment in short stints,” said Carl Webb and Peter Cvelich, the cofounders of Provident 1898.  “We are also seeing an increase in demand for flexible memberships that don’t assume you will be able to use the workspace on a typical Monday–Friday, 9–5 schedule.”

Employers might be willing to make these workplace accommodations because they anticipate higher levels of employee engagement, and thus productivity, as well as increased retention and word-of-mouth recruiting as firms compete to attract talent.  According to the researchers, “highly satisfied and engaged employees want to spend much more time at locations outside of their company HQ (37%), and much less time at home (27%) than their less-engaged peers.”

The result, the authors conclude, is that even though many of the employees who report high levels of positive work-related sentiments have had access to hybrid arrangements for some time, the result of a sudden and dramatic shift in work environments due to and during the coronavirus pandemic, the desire for hybrid work will increase.

Coworking isn’t yet a service that everyone needs, said Cvelich.  “However, it is a service that I think more people can benefit from than the number who have access to it at the moment.”  Coworking is still fundamentally inequitable, because access to coworking is largely limited by profession, industry, or demographics, and, added Cvelich, “the inequitable distribution of employment and work opportunities where the worker has choice in the matter of where they go to the office.”

Companies and organizations can play a role in reimagining their processes and procedures to enable more employees to have more flexibility and autonomy in their work schedules and their work locations, and there may in fact be economic benefit and competitive advantage for companies to do so, the study authors found.

“Employers who don’t offer hybrid options will be missing out on an opportunity to improve key business outcomes,” conclude the authors of the research study, noting that a different study from Gallup found that companies with higher levels of employee engagement are more profitable by 22 percent, more productive by 21 percent, and experience 65 percent less employee turnover.