How many organisations have all of their employees working in the same physical location?
I’m sure some do, but my hunch is it’s the exception not the rule. Whilst one’s own experiences are nothing but circumstantial, as I look back at my career, I can’t think of a single place where it was the case. Let’s look back at 30 years of work…
1993 – 1995: KPMG
I was based in the Management Service Centre in Watford, a euphemism for “cheap place where the non-fee-earners sit”. We were providing technology support to offices dotted across the country, all part of the UK partnership. Many of the fee-earners would also be out on client sites.
I cannot begin to explain how complicated providing telephone support for remote email usage was in the mid-1990s on Toshiba Laptops, cc:Mail and dial-up modems.
1995 – 1996: London School of Economics
Split between a number of buildings orbiting around Houghton Street, just off the Aldwych, the academics would all have offices of their own (or at most shared with one or two others). But academics don’t come into the office every day, then or now. Especially during the summer when they’d be working from all sorts of locations.
1996 – 2004: BBC Worldwide
Based in buildings that crumbled in ways that would make a school teacher feel at home, the then commercial arm of the BBC was based on the other side of the M40 from the BBC Television Centre and White City buildings. But the business had global presence, split across a number of countries, and there were some business units that were in other locations entirely – BBC Bush House, Bath and the West End.
2005 – 2006: Techniques for Change
A small, family-run management training business, the core offices were “Landside” at Gatwick Airport. Admin staff would generally be in those offices, and we frequently ran training events their too. But trainers could be delivering to clients anywhere in the world, either at client sites or in third-party venues. Particular highlights in my time there of international jet-set travel included Nottingham, Bournemouth and Feltham. Never let it be said that there isn’t glamour in consulting.
2006 – 2008: Reuters
I joined the international information business just after it had mostly consolidated its London operations into brand new offices in Canary Wharf. However, there were teams still in offices in older spaces in the Fleet Street area and St Katherine’s Dock to the East of the City of London.
My own role, however, had a boss in New York, colleagues across the globe, and internal clients to support in China, Thailand, Paris, London, New York, St Louis and Nottingham amongst other places. Reuters was my first experience of being interviewed by video call (although I had to travel into their offices to do it). It was also the first place I experienced hotdesking.
2008 – 2011: Imagination
The marketing agency’s London Store Street offices were probably the coolest place I’ve worked. Many of the staff were based their, but we had offices that I had to service in Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Frankfurt, Coventry, New York and Detroit. The business of the business was running large-scale experiential events, so teams could find themselves in any part of the world at any given time.
2011 – 2013: Microsoft
My work for the global organisation in the UK was split between Reading, London and occasional customer sites. My first experience of really being left to our own devices as to where we should work, I found myself in the office most days because we took advantage of the subsidised on-site creche. Some days that meant driving to Reading from London, dropping the kids off, getting a bus to Reading train station, working in London, training and busing back, picking up the kids and heading back home.
The childcare costs made this madness economically the only thing to do.
2013 – 2019: Stamp
My own consulting business, I worked either from home or peripatetically at client sites across the country and (occasionally) the world.
2019 – 2022: Richmond Housing Partnership
Probably the most “local” business I’ve worked in, the social housing provider has offices about 20 minutes walk from my home where about half of the roughly 250 employees are based. Some of them had long commutes, so would work from home reasonably regularly. After the pandemic that increased.
However the other half of the workforce (caretakers, care home workers, surveyors and others) were always out and about, either at their sites, or going from place to place. The pandemic, forcing everyone out of the office, actually meant that those remote by design workers felt much more connected to the business.
2022 – : Equal Experts
We gather together as a business unit quarterly, as an entire business annually, and have co-working space in London which some people use regularly and others not so often. Client site working happens, but so does working from home as many of our clients are split across multiple locations.
The UK business, though, works increasingly with our colleagues across the US, South Africa, India, Europe and Australia. And many of our clients are similarly globally spread.
So over 30 years I’ve never been in a place where anything like everyone was all in the same place most of the time. This hybrid working malarkey really has been with us for quite some time, hasn’t it?
mmitII 