It’s High Noon. A tense standoff has emerged between employer and employee over the right to hybrid working. Will one side win? Or might there be an opportunity to think beyond the binary choice between working from home or a return to the office?   

Positions are becoming increasingly entrenched. Employees have become used to the post-pandemic flexibility of remote working. Almost half (49%) of recent graduates surveyed said they would not apply for a job that didn’t offer hybrid working. Yet, while nearly half of recent graduates demand hybrid work, CEOs overwhelmingly expect a full return to the office. The disconnect is growing. According to the KPMG 2024 CEO Outlook survey, 83% of global CEOs surveyed expect to see a full return to work within the next three years. We’re seeing a growing number of corporates like Amazon, Barclays and JP Morgan mandating either a full return or a three to four-day-a-week compromise. 

When we zoom in on where the work happens, the fundamental questions of what drives business forward might be overlooked. If the answer lies in meeting an unmet societal need through innovation, creativity, and impact, then shouldn’t we be asking how the workplace, wherever that may be, can best support this?

Beyond the binary: a new way to work

Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, businesses must recognise the strengths of different models.

The power of knowledge transfer, team building and mentoring may be lost if employees work entirely from home. On the other hand, the necessary flow for deep work and headspace for breakthrough innovation is unlikely to occur at a noisy office desk 67 hours into the working week. 

Indeed, we saw a surge of entrepreneurship and innovation in the first few months of lockdown, when business life’s relentless pace and commercial pressure eased off temporarily. Twice as many startups were created in June 2020 as during the same period in 2019. Many were providing innovative solutions to address the challenges of getting services to people who couldn’t leave their homes. This trend wasn’t limited to just small business start-ups.

Corporate ‘intrapreneurs’, freed from office constraints, found space to think differently. Tesla engineers repurposed car parts to develop emergency ventilators. AirBnb launched virtual experiences, enabling hosts to earn remotely. Unilever introduced ‘touch-free’ retail shelves using AI. Perhaps working outside the box made it easier to think outside of one.

For some organisations, the concept of workplace innovation is evolving beyond traditional hybrid models. Craigberoch, for instance, is exploring remote co-working – or a more balanced “co-being,” as they call it – on the Isle of Bute, on the west coast of Scotland. Employees work from an Eco-Pod in nature, swapping the daily commute for a yoga, meditation, or tai chi class. Instead of stressful and distracted 10- to 12-hour days, the focus is on roughly half that time spent on deep, creative, and productive work. This is augmented by an a-la-carte menu of activities such as art, music, or walks in nature – all designed to stimulate the default brain network, fostering creativity, inspiration, and well-being. For knowledge workers, surely productivity should not be measured by hours at the desk but by the quality and depth of output and insight? Business partners engaging in such models are not only going beyond the binary choice of home or office; they are also contributing to the economic regeneration of rural communities like Bute.

Rewriting the rules of productivity

The workplace must evolve. In the early 1990s, my two-hour daily commute into central London made sense – there was no internet, no mobile phones, no Slack or Zoom. Today, the idea that a single city-centre office is still the best solution seems outdated.

In the way that Covid-19 forced us to find business solutions to address the broader challenges the world faces, there is more opportunity to find added value. According to the UN Business Commission, there’s a US$12 trillion market opportunity in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for business leaders who are successful in reframing today’s social and environmental challenges as business opportunities in disguise. The most successful companies will be those that use this moment to rethink not just where work happens, but how it happens.

A better approach could be ‘hub and spoke’ models – smaller satellite hubs closer to where employees live, reducing commutes and widening access to talent. Barclays, for example, chose Whippany, New Jersey, over New York for a new campus, while Verisure established its Centre of Excellence in North Tyneside rather than London. What if more businesses were encouraged to set up regional hubs, revitalising areas suffering from brain drain?