Who Will Ultimately Decide Where Work is Done?

Coming out of the pandemic, there are still questions around who will have the power to determine where work is done. Namely, will it be the talent or the employer? Right now, many companies appear to be punting on the issue, with hybrid work strategies. But the long term is still very much to be determined.  

“What we’re seeing now is this tension between leadership and talent because talent really enjoyed this freedom, and leadership wants to move the ball down the field,” Lisa Picard, CEO and president of EQ Office said during a recent CBRE podcast. 

In the past, workforces traditionally followed the workplace, according to Dan Harvey, vice chair of Bay Area Occupier Services for CBRE.

But the current competitive labor market has thrown that model into question. It is up for debate whether the workplace is going to follow the workforce, “which gets back to the power in labor,” Harvey says, who also participated in the podcast.  

Harvey pointed out that things like AI and social media platforms have empowered the knowledge and innovation of the creative workforce. “So there is this tension between executive leadership teams and the workforce in terms of choice and enabling choice and how to deal with the return to the office,” he says.

For leadership teams, bringing workers back may depend on both their function and company strategy. 

“There is this notion of a piano player,” Picard says. “You can find piano players available in other markets outside of the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Boston—the core tech markets. But every now and then, I talk to some of the leaders who are starting up companies, and they say, ‘Look, we need to bring a product to market fast. I need a concert pianist. I can’t just have a piano player.’ That is also a bifurcation of talent of those people who can kind of produce the work and those people who can actually really generate the new value.”

The organizational strategy also plays a role in the decision of where to work. Picard says things an organization already knows are easy to achieve in a remote or isolated location. “But when you start to look at growth, unless your organization has been growing in that mode, it’s been really critical to have that huddle to drive the offensive moves for the organization,” Picard says.

Looking forward, Harvey thinks the density in cities will play a role in an organization’s decision-making process. For instance, he says density magnifies inequality in wealth. “I do think part of the workforce wanting to distribute in other cities, other amazing but smaller cities, is in part a way to get away from that sense of scarcity, which promotes some of the bad behavior that we’re seeing,” he says.