Personal question… Where are you as you read this blog? And no, I don’t mean in which room and I especially don’t want to know if it’s the smallest room – even if that’s the place that many confess to completing their daily Wordle! 

In this blog, I will be looking at where we work from and how that can affect our productivity alongside our wellbeing. 

Place names

There are many words to describe a place of work – here are just a few to get you thinking about what each one means to you:

• Office-based
• Field-based
• Remote
• Customer facing
• Client-based
• Shop/factory floor
• On-site

Location, location, location

The question of location for work has become a hot topic since the start of the global pandemic and I see many of my friends working in communications trying to find suitable terminology for employees and where they are based. Remote working used to mean you may not be contactable, or have limited access to online capabilities. Today, remote working can mean you are working from home with your full complement of online tools to hand. 

Just because you are on-site does not mean you are available, you may be in meetings, carrying out your customer facing duties or even having an informal catch-up with colleagues. 

There are ongoing debates about where employees can, could, or should work from and these need to be looked at based on the needs of a specific organisation or department. There have been some headline grabbing stories about the need for people to return to the office – but why? This is something that organisations need to decide on their own. They need to look at all the factors, not least the wellbeing of their employees. Do the benefits of having employees in the office for their full contract hours each week actually make a positive difference to their productivity, mental and physical wellbeing, or even to the organisation’s bottom line?

There are undoubtedly pros and cons to being in a certain location for work and everyone will see these differently. For example, some people enjoy their daily commute as they feel it helps them to decompress after a busy day. Whereas others find commuting stressful and time that could be better spent with their children. This example shows that there really is a no one size fits all when it comes to locations for working  and individual choice will make for a happier work-life balance. 

It’s true that the majority of people don’t have the choice of where they work from. Employees are needed on the shop floor in roles that cannot be carried out anywhere other than at a specific location. 

If you are giving some of your employees a choice about where they work from, then maybe there are some additional benefits that you can look into for employees that have to work from a given location. This could be things such as free/subsidised travel to the place of work or maybe complimentary fruit/snack/drinks in their place of work. 

Your online access

Perhaps more important than where you are working from is the topic of online access. I have worked in places where my online access has been better from my home than it has been in my workplace. Also, my desk at home is set up and tailored for my needs. Going into the office and having to set on a hot desk can be frustrating! 

People expect online access in this age of ever advancing technology. There is growing expectation for work places to provide some form of online access for all employees. This was accelerated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when messages needed to get out to employees quickly to keep then up-to-date with the latest safety news. 

Some companies did this remarkably well, I heard a story about a fast food chain setting their employees up with a mobile app within 24 hours to make sure that they were all in the loop on company information and were also able to quickly communicate with their organisation and line managers.  

This brings me nicely on to the sense of community that employees can feel when they have online access with their organisation. The ability to easily contact the right person in the company when you have a question or some feedback can increase employee engagement and lead to higher levels of productivity. 

Community at the heart of it all 

There is no denying that being in the same room as your colleagues and customers can help forge better and stronger relationships. We know this with line management too and the most powerful communications are face to face. But online communities can also be a powerful thing and are another way of being inclusive to a wider audience.   

So, Fans of Plans, the most important thing we can learn is that it doesn’t actually matter where people work from, as long as they are able to be effective at what they need to be doing. Let the employees in your organisation help to form the way you work. Ask them what works best for them as well as what works best for the organisation as a whole.