What will the workplace of the future look like for big banks?
Since I earned my undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in 2014, I have experienced various work settings: from sharing a cubicle in Charlotte, NC to sharing a conference room in Boston, MA to sitting next to my entire division in New York, NY to finally working from my bedroom in 2020 right before I started business school. All systems had its pros and cons, but the widespread adoption of work-from-home (WFH) in 2020 has changed employee preferences, and therefore, employer responsibilities.
Cubicles (portrayed below) offer time for independent thinking but their rigidity puts a damper on creative combustion.
A large open plan (displayed below) proved, in my experience, to enable the collaboration inherent in many functions. This concept made Adam Neumann famous, in addition to his antics, of course. However, if you look at the photo below, do you think that it will be easy to convince a hundred people to be in the same room sitting within a couple of feet of each other?
The answer should be “yes, people will come back once everybody is vaccinated”. However, it’s not as simple as that given that employee preferences have changed during the pandemic. Below, you see somebody working from home, taking care of his child, not commuting, enjoying the comfort of his own home, etc. He likes this. He won’t want to go back to “the way things were”.
Furthermore, companies like Twitter have given their employees the option to work remotely indefinitely. Now, the value proposition changes for those that enjoy remote work: do you succumb to the mild subtle micro pressures of your employer to return to the office or do you maybe look at the myriad of companies that can offer similar career advancement opportunities and comparable compensation instead? If, before the pandemic, remote opportunities were limited, now they are a true option and that spells bad news for big banks that want to bring their employees back in the office.
Then, what should Jamie Dimon, David Solomon, and others do to retain top talent that wants to work remotely, yet create an environment that allows for creative combustion and collaboration across teams and geographies? Virtual Reality.
Yes, Virtual Reality.
With travel budgets likely to be cut in half (an EY survey showed that 74% of employers expected drastic changes to business travel), employers can use those expense savings and redesign the workspace to allow an employee working remotely to still feel part of the office and see/hear the gossip, chatter, weekend talk, and most importantly, participate in impromptu meetings around somebody’s desk. In-office employees can simply walk up to the desk of another employee and communicate with that person whether they are there physically or virtually. At-home employees can keep their headset on at all times (akin to sitting at their desk) or turn it off (akin to going on a coffee break). The ad-hoc meetings (that happen around a desk where new people are brought in by simply calling them over) are the key to driving innovation and solving problems quickly, and this is what employers want to conserve.
All in all, the workplace of the future will change and it will likely be an open space where everybody will sit next to each other, whether that is physically or virtually, it won’t matter, but it must be an option to enable talent retention, and therefore a company’s competitive advantage.
