Where Will We do Strata Work in the Future?
Or, is work from home better, worse or even possible for strata workers …
The persistence of Covid 19 means that the ‘work from home’ phenomenon is becoming more normal and is here to stay. So, what does that mean for the many and varied strata workers who do things at and for strata buildings? And, is their strata work future, the same, better or worse …
[11:00 minutes estimated reading time, 2262 words]
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Introduction
I’ve written briefly about strata buildings becoming workplaces of the future in ‘Strata Buildings as Future Workplaces’ as a result of the acceleration of existing flexible working trends caused by the impacts of and government responses to Covid 19.
But, whilst that phenomenon may be obvious for residents in strata buildings and the impacts of more people at home more often and for longer on strata buildings being reasonably predictable for strata committee and other stakeholders, what about the impacts of wider ‘work from home’ trends.
How do those trends affect strata workers: those people who do things for strata buildings as their managers, service providers, consultants, and, otherwise?
I recently read this interesting and slightly challenging thought piece from the Washington Post ‘You may get more work done at home. But you’d have better ideas at the office’ which got me wondering about how I will work in the future and, since I’m a strata junkie, how those things will affect strata workers.
So, here are my thoughts and ideas.
And, whilst I summarise the key points made in the Washington Post piece in this article, I also recommend reading it in full to better understand what its authors suggest [and why] and to form your own views.
The Washington Post’s take on Work From Home
The main proposition of the authors of the Washington Post piece, Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, is that despite the productivity increases that American businesses are reporting during 2021, they are likely to be short-only term gains, are not occurring in knowledge or experience-based service sectors, and, are causing unintended divisions between workers.
Some of the key points they make are as follows.
Major US corporations, like Apple, Amazon and Google, have delayed plans for workplace re-openings to 2022 whilst Covid 19 infections are continuing at medium to high rates.
US labour productivity [the inflation-corrected value of goods and services produced per hour of work] increased by 1.8% from Q2 - 2020 to Q2 - 2021 which is 0.04% more than average US productivity increases since 2005.
Over the same period, there have been significant drops in employment numbers, so it is unsurprising that a skeleton staff of the most able workers is going to be more productive, per person.
When job losses disproportionately occur in low-productivity sectors, such as service work, that also boosts overall productivity figures.
There may be a permanent increase in productivity from remote work, perhaps because of reduced commuting and fewer of the distractions that occur in office life.
Over the medium to long term, remote work can’t deliver the same key benefits [including learning, experience transfer, and, new work collaborations] that come from face-to-face contact.
In-person work fosters more and greater innovation, which affects productivity more than any gains achieved from working harder at home.
An even a slightly higher growth rate in productivity once people return to offices will quickly outpace the one-time gain from saved commuting time.
The pandemic will hasten moves toward a hybrid work model that involves some days at home and some in the office, giving white-collar workers welcome new flexibility.
The remote work world may seem heavenly for middle-aged professionals with extensive networks of colleagues and comfortable home offices. But, it is far less appealing for 20 and 30 somethings who are trying to find their way in a new organisation, learn new work, or, get work done in dark, cramped, and, noisy apartments.
Promotion opportunities for remote workers are significantly lower than for people who work in person at the office or elsewhere.
Microsoft researchers concluded that ‘firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts’.
Microsoft also found a shift from synchronous communication (like meetings, phone calls and video sessions) to asynchronous communication (emails and text messages, etc); further reducing knowledge and experience-based development.
Research shows that the online classroom experiences have been disastrous for learning: One study in the Netherlands found that even under ideal conditions, including high rates of broadband access and ample funding, ‘students made little or no progress while learning from home’ and that ‘learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes.”
Some amount of teleworking will continue forever; it is just too convenient to go away entirely.
They conclude with the statement that:
‘21st-century companies compete by deploying knowledge and creativity, and these things are sparked more readily when people are in the same room. Video can help us muddle through for a while, but to soar again, we’ll need to get back into the office.’
How might ‘work from home’ apply [or not] to strata workers
Assuming and accepting the propositions in the Washington Post piece as correct, then what does that mean for strata workers [the people who do things for strata buildings] as a result of the ‘work from home’ phenomenon?
Well, that depends on the kind of strata worker they happen to be.
So, let me try to categorise strata workers in a range of ways and consider the position and future for each of those categories.
I’ve broken them down into 4 groups as follows based on how they interact with the strata building [as it is the fixed and unifying feature to all this strata stuff].
Group 1 – Full time [on-site] strata workers
Firstly, there are strata workers that must be at the strata building to do all, if not most, of their work since their work involves doing things to the strata building, to equipment in the strata building, for strata residents, or, in/at parts of the strata building and cannot be done remotely.
Some examples include:
Tradespeople like plumbers, electricians, gardeners, cleaners, lift maintenance staff, etc who actually work on the strata building itself,
Concierge and hospitality staff for strata building facilities who need to be on-site at the strata building to do their work, and
Security staff who [by definition] secure the strata building.
These people are [in the modern Covid parlance] essential or frontline workers and have largely continued to do their work in the same ways unless and until Public Health Orders have prevented them from doing so [like cleaners].
For them, the future is not about remote work and potentially increased or decreased productivity from that model, but rather, dealing with the requirements imposed on them by governments via Public Health Orders, employers via new and stricter work protocols [including vaccine mandates], and, by strata buildings imposing work practice controls that they variously consider important and/or desirable in their buildings.
It’s likely that will make work harder and costlier for Group 1 workers, but it’s unclear whether they will be able to charge and/or receive more for that work from strata buildings. It seems unlikely to me, so there’ll be a classic squeeze between price and cost; inevitably impacting on quality.
Group 2 - Part time [on-site] strata workers
Secondly, there are strata workers that have to do some of their work at the strata building but can do most of it from other locations [remote from the strata building]. In some cases, they have always done that work remotely from the strata building and in other cases, they have traditionally done it from the strata building even though they didn’t need to.
Some examples include:
Building managers [including serviced apartment managers] who need to inspect things at the strata buildings and do things there from time to time,
Certifiers for essential services or WHS who must inspect parts of the strata building,
Consultants like engineers and project managers who must assess, report and/or advise about parts of the strata building, and
Insurance assessors who need to decide about liability for damage and other claims by strata buildings.
For them, the future is largely the same in relation to their connection with the strata building.
They will continue to attend the strata building when necessary for inspections but probably do so less frequently than before as they will not want to attend if it’s not essential and/or the strata building may want to limit unnecessary visitors. Plus, their organisations have probably already cut down on ‘non-essential’ travel and site visits and those work practices are likely to continue.
So, Group 2 workers may be able to provide equivalent or, even better, service to strata buildings due to the rationalisation of and better structure imposed on the on-site parts of their work and the flexibility and convenience benefits of remote work changes in the off-site parts of their work.
Group 3 - Occasional or optional [on-site] strata workers
Thirdly, there are strata workers that mostly don’t do their work at the strata building but, occasionally attend those buildings. Mostly they do their work from other locations [remote from the strata building] like offices or home [these days].
In fact, I think that it’s only really strata managers who fit on Group 3/
Pre-Covid, they mostly worked from their office and only visited the strata building for face-to-face formal and informal meetings [remember those?] or for occasional building inspections even though they mostly stopped those inspections a long time ago for risk management reasons.
For the Group 3 strata manager workers, the future is the most challenging as they will be forced out of this category because:
they [and their employers] will become increasingly unwilling to attend the building even for strata meetings now they’re used to not doing so,
it’s not strictly necessary for them to be at the strata building to do their work,
strata management organisations are seeing productivity increases [for the reasons the Washington Times piece explains] and, probably, profitability increases due to ‘work from home’ which they’ll want to continue,
strata buildings won’t want to pay for building attendances by strata managers unless they see value in them, and
strata manager worker homes [where they are already working remotely] are likely to be farther from the strata buildings than the offices were.
That almost certainly means that strata managers will progressively move from Group 3 [occasional or optional on-site workers] to completely off-site strata workers [in Group 4] and they will increasingly do that work from home or an office/home hybrid environment.
But, that trend could become a problem for strata manager workers and organisations over time as it will:
negatively impact on their ‘relationship’ with the strata building as they are seen less often and in more abstract ways,
decrease their knowledge, awareness and connection to the strata building as the asset they are managing,
reduce the innovation, knowledge sharing and learning in their work,
tend to commoditise and devalue the work strata managers do, even more, and
give the on-site building managers even more ‘power’ in relationships with strata buildings.
In my view, strata manager workers should instead be using the ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to change traditional work patterns to try to move into Group 2 [occasional on-site workers] by ensuring their routine presence in and at strata buildings to preserve and enhance their knowledge of and value as strata managers to strata buildings.
Group 4 – Off-site or third party strata workers
Fourthly, there are strata workers who do all their work away from the strata building and often without direct contact with the strata building, strata committee and/or the strata owners.
Some examples include:
Accountants and auditors checking the finances of strata buildings,
Insurers providing risk coverage and indemnity to strata buildings
Bankers and other financial service providers who mind and manage their money,
Lawyers who advise and represent strata buildings and other stakeholders, and
Strata managers [in the future] when they move out of Group 3.
For Group 4 strata workers, the future is not likely to be very different [except for strata managers as explained earlier] and their strata work patterns will largely depend on the size and nature of the organisation they work for and its business strategies.
Larger organisations will move increasingly to online and remote working models to provide their services whilst smaller organisations will also do so but less quickly, formally and consistently.
What’s more interesting for those Group 4 strata worker organisations is that their ‘referral’ relationships with strata managers and building managers may be adversely affected by the increasingly remote working patterns in their businesses as they will similarly commoditise and depersonalise those relationships; making them less secure, shorter-lived, more easily monetised, and, increasingly reviewed or reviewable.
Plus, when they are joined by the strata managers as they migrate from Group 3 into Group 4 strata workers, they’ll all become increasingly more remote from the strata buildings and strata owners they work for.
Conclusions
The acceleration of remote and work from home trends around all business sectors will impact strata workers [and their organisations] differently depending on the kind of work they already do, their organisation size and strategy, how they choose to adapt, government actions and intervention, and, ultimately the preferences of strata buildings, strata committees and strata owners and residents.
Some will see little change and others will see big differences. And, for some [especially strata managers] there’s threats and opportunities in equal parts in the future of strata work.
The winners [if that’s the right way to put it] will be those strata workers in Group 2.
October 05, 2021
Francesco ...