Apple CEO Tim Cook added his voice to the chorus of business leaders who now expect the future workplace to be a hybrid environment in which remote and onsite employees work together.
Welcome to the office as a service
He’s right, of course. IDC predicts that 60% of the US workforce will be remote by 2024. According to Slack’s Future Forum, only 12% of knowledge workers want to return to the office, while 72% want a hybrid remote office model in the future.
However, Cook is not quite a supporter of remote working. Speaking to People magazine, Cook said that while he thought Apple would accept remote working more, he also believed that bringing people together in the physical sense was important, at least for some of his business activities. (This includes, I guess, developing products in secrecy.)
“My gut says that for us it’s always very important to be in physical contact with each other because collaboration isn’t always a planned activity,” Cook said.
Remote innovation takes time
This reflects part of the experience I have read as teams try to innovate together. To be successful, working remotely takes a lot of planning and – as Cook notes – planning the next big idea isn’t always possible. Sometimes they emerge when people just bounce smaller ideas together against the wall.
“Innovation is not always a planned activity,” he said. “It’s meeting during the day and pushing forward an idea you just had. And you really need to be together to do that. “
[Also read: 14 items of office equipment replaced by iPhone]
Apple’s CEO isn’t the only one to believe this; JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, among others, also believes that in-person presence is important for fostering company culture and developing relevant skills.
It is possible that the two men are horsemen. “Hybrid remote work models are likely to persist in the aftermath of the pandemic, primarily for a highly skilled and well-paid minority of the workforce,” says the McKinsey Global Institute.
Most business leaders now accept that employees can perfectly perform many of their tasks while working remotely. Indeed, some HR departments are starting to explore the benefits of drawing talent from a global stable of potential hires, rather than being limited to just one area or geography.
Good people need good software
We are therefore witnessing the adoption of asynchronous working practices in many companies, with an increasing internationalization of teams and an increase in deployments of mobile technologies.
These movements are also driving the adoption of new software solutions to support remote working, from robot-based robotic process automation tools (to make interaction more efficient) to chatbots such as Apple Business Chat and powerful project management tools such as those of the Merlin project.
These software solutions are becoming as important as using Webex or Zoom for businesses trying to get things done. That’s why so many developers of video collaboration tools are now integrating with Trello, Slack, Dropbox, Otter, or Zendesk. The future workforce will be supported by a mix of complementary technologies, remote IT support, and contactless setup.
All the same, Cook said that while Apple is still figuring out how to get people back to offices, he now admits that remote working is suitable for many tasks and is full of praise for what its teams do. have accomplished in the past year. “I really give the team credit for really seizing the opportunity.”
Go when you want
Hybrid work should end up being more voluntary.
As Dean Hager, CEO of Jamf said, office presence will cease to be a job requirement but could become an advantage. I suspect that most workers will come to the office for the resources they lack at home, or – as Cook’s model envisions it – just to work closely with others to manage and solve the more difficult problems.
This will of course change the office space requirements. A recent study by the New York Partnership found that the city’s largest employers expect just 45% of employees to return to work in offices by September. This, of course, heralds great changes to come both in offices and in the service sector that exists around business districts around the world.
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