[ad_1]
Among the many things I haven’t been able to do in my career, there’s one that I’m sorry about. I’ve never been on a corporate retreat. Nor have I been on any day off or on anything else that could be remotely described as “out of place”.
People who have been into these things, before Covid put an end to them, always said he should be thankful to have been spared.
“It’s a nightmare,” one told me. “You’re stuck with people you work with all day, desperately pretending to have fun.” Others insisted that outside the facilities was a waste of time and, in the case of team building exercises, mortification.
I never believed it for a second, not even after discovering the kind of places my friends passed by. The stately rural houses. Luxury hotels. The resorts on the beach. I’m sorry, but being paid to take a daiquiris by the pool after an intense kayaking morning doesn’t seem like a bad day at work.
So, with the pandemic that turned working life upside down, I was interested in meeting a company that has decided to leave its elegant downtown offices and see if it can find new jobs that capture the best of the day every day.
The Golin PR company dates back to the 1950s founder, Al Golin, called cold a man who was starting out in the burger business called Ray Kroc, the brain of McDonald’s.
McDonald’s is still a Golin customer, which has more than 1,000 employees worldwide, mostly in the United States and, most importantly, still works from home thanks to Covid, probably until at least September.
Like many other businesses, their staff is interested in hybrid work or a combination of days at home and in the office. Unlike others, he has been able to give up the leases of two of his California offices, one in San Francisco that housed about 35 people and another larger one in Los Angeles that had about 100. He has decided to experiment to see and I can. replace these offices with what their chief operating officer, Gary Rudnick, calls “inspiring” jobs that stimulate collaboration and the energy he believes will instill the best days.
“Out of place is a special day,” Rudnick told me from his home in Chicago last week. “Everyone does jazz. Everyone has their creative juices. “
No decision has been made yet, but Rudnick has had plenty of advice on what to try, from museums and sports venues to restaurants and stores. “We want them to be unique,” he says, adding that the group could end up with five or six rotating shared spaces, and is not motivated by cost reduction. “I’m perfectly happy to spend as much as we used to.”
It may be, but the appeal of leaving the expensive downtown offices to get cheaper space in the suburbs is obvious.
The much larger Standard Chartered bank plans to do so offer most of his 85,000 employees worldwide the opportunity to work in a shared office space near your home or home, as part of a “hub-and-speak” approach that combines a conventional main office with satellites elsewhere.
Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has also signed an agreement with the IWG office sharing group that will give theirs even bigger the workforce chooses more than 3,000 jobs.
Last month, after having a brief taste of the office’s shared life, when the dazzling home WiFi took me into the arms of a local Regus office, I’m sure the staff will survive. The WiFi was great. The coffee was good and the view was very different.
Still, it was nothing compared to the big visions presented by Marc Benioff, founder of the cloud computing group Salesforce. His thinking about new ways of working post-pandemic has taken him museum about buying some kind of ranch that could be used to train employees and foster corporate culture.
Either way, it’s clear that a new state of experiment is opening up. Like so many other things in the pandemic, it’s impossible to know how it will end.
But as Rudnick de Golin says of his trial in the office: “If it doesn’t work, I’m going to get a lease again. There are a million leases to hire.”
Twitter: @pilitaclark
[ad_2]
Source link
