The developing Hybrid workspace - 4 years on from the lockdowns
Time marches on… and memories of the Covid 19 lockdowns - and the extraordinary impact they had on our personal and professional lives - seem somehow to fade and dim, as though the experience so many of us share is simply too traumatic to accommodate.
But there’s no escaping the long-term / permanent legacy of that experience - most especially in terms of workplace practices. I feel very strongly that this legacy is for the most part positive.
3B were late to embrace hybrid working; only after a year or so of repeated lockdowns - a year in which we calculated we’d only gathered at our Battersea office on no more than 12 occasions - that we collectively accepted that hybrid working was here to stay. Furthermore we discovered very quickly during the first lockdowns of 2020 that many staff - most especially the developers - actually worked far more efficiently when away from the office… flexible hours, varied and various meeting places, and a hybrid working week were here to stay!
Now, 4 years into this Brave New World and 3B is putting into practice a long-held notion that actually working physically alongside our clients can have immediate and quantifiable benefits; there is a palpable sense of “zoom fatigue” (other video conferencing tools are available) and we find we get so much done when clients know we’re “in the building”. Our work touches so many departments and stakeholders in our biggest clients and they find it hugely advantageous to know that once a week / fortnight they can just pop along unannounced to a meeting room to discuss an issue or iron out matters that might otherwise have sat and festered at the bottom of a shared meeting doc.
Moreover, we find opportunities to offer our services on more and more projects that might normally have bumped along at the bottom of a client’s priorities can very quickly turn into realised project opportunities because we’re right there to make immediate sense of ideas and ambitions.
Quite simply it’s a win-win!
