17 Gazing into the crystal ball… The future of office life is generally quite difficult to predict. What’s more, the complex and unstable state of global affairs further clouds our ability to see clearly in regard to working life and the future of the office. There is much to suggest that remote working will continue to a large extent, with the home remaining a solid competitor to the office. A better question to ask is perhaps how we should best approach this new age of office working life? Change has come thick and fast and we still do not know how remote working will affect things such as goal attainment, productivity, innovation and health in the long term. Its negative and positive consequences will not likely become clear for a few years yet. But we can also see that there is much for organisations to address already. At the same time, many organisations are somewhat hesitant and often too passive before these questions, despite their pervasiveness. There is also a large sense of powerlessness and frustration over how to get employees back to the office voluntarily, and there are many questions about what this means for the future. “I’m curbing my expectations for how we believe or hope this is going to go. Because we just don’t know. We have no clue what the situation will be in six months or in two years’ time. It is still so uncertain.”
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