The Journey to Your Future of Work

Each day I talk with organizations who are trying to navigate the journey of their future of work. Uniformly they ask, what are other organizations doing? What best practices are emerging? The challenge is that there are no best practices … yet. We simply aren't at the stage in which they emerge. Everyone is in the same boat, trying to figure out how to row confidently in the right direction. But we do have data and the data tells us that we will not "return to normal", aka the pre-pandemic office, for a variety of reasons.

Of course, the most common reason trotted out is that employees don't want to return to losing hours of their life to commutes, not to mention the cost of transit, parking, and fuel.

But, more importantly, it's simply not a good use of financial resources anymore. Real estate costs are in the top 3 expenditures for most organizations. Organizations are hyper-fixated on the productivity of employees while (accounting for a 3×2 hybrid model) allowing their offices to be vacant 40-60% of the time! Ask yourself, where would it be acceptable to plan for 40% waste in any other expenditure?

Instead of continuing to operate with a sunk-cost fallacy, organizations must pivot to a value-based methodology by accepting that navigating the journey to their future of work will require investment in:

Related:With Quiet Quitting Trend Picking Up Steam, IT Pros Stand at a Crossroads

Gartner-journey-to-future-of-work

And only then… Transforming

Clients can learn more with Using the Enterprise Value Equation to Make Return to Workplace Decisions. This presentation provides executive leaders with a framework for return to office decisions and their impact.

— Tori Paulman 

This article originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.