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There’s more of a structured plan for returning to the Canary Wharf bank office I work(ed) at, but the plan for the foreseeable future seems to be ‘most people in for some of the time’. It’s at managers’ discretion, though, with a pledge of no monitoring, so it’ll be interesting to see who returns – many seem to want to (I don’t and nor do I need to for my job).
‘Collaboration’ has also been bandied about as a sizeable plus for being in the office, which is odd given the anonymous hot-desk misery with no meeting rooms of the before times.
Adlopa
@chez_jay
Read this thread with interest - especially 'Collaboration'.
Well before the pandemic, 'Collaboration' and also 'New Ways of Working' were the buzzwords used to encourage large parts of the organisation I work for (big UK bank) towards partial home working (saving office costs) and away from face-to-face to meetings (saving travel costs).
This has allowed and encouraged teams to be increasingly split across different cities/countries/continents, and works reasonably well.
It is odd that the exact same buzzwords are now being used to try to encourage people back into offices some of the time. But it's been made clear we shouldn't expect to ever go in again for a day's work that can be done at a desk, and the buildings have been redesigned around that; and that the budgets for travel just to meet colleagues will not come back.
So there seems to be a lot of expensive communication about a notion of 'coming together occasionally' from tomorrow, which just happens to be exactly 18 months since the 'WFH if you can' order, but no actual plan to do so, apart from senior management meetings.
I just don't see 'critical masses' of people going back at all. Interested if other City/Wharf workers in big companies find themselves in the same position?