THE TRENDS SHAPING WORK IN 2022: WORKFORCE DISPERSION
Employees are moving away from big cities – and employers are reaping the benefits.
Employees are moving away from big cities – and employers are reaping the benefits.
Hybrid working is opening up – quite literally – a new world of opportunity. Now that employees are not tied to a central corporate HQ on a daily basis, companies are free to cast their net far wider for potential new hires, increasing the chances of finding the very best candidates for a job vacancy. As Mark Dixon, Founder and CEO of IWG, puts it: “Companies are benefiting from an increased ability to attract the best talent, no matter where they are located.”
For employees, this new trend of ‘workforce dispersion’ opens up even greater possibilities. Freed from the necessity to commute long distances or to move to the city to perform their role in a central office, employees have far greater choice in where they can live. That means they are able to move to rural or coastal areas, where they can enjoy a better work/life balance and an improved standard of living: house prices are often cheaper outside of big cities.
Naturally there will still be demand for company HQs as places for people to come together to collaborate, but the shackles are off. For example, a company in California can hire someone living in London to do a job that previously would have required them to relocate to San Francisco. In the hybrid world, they can simply check in via Zoom from a coworking site near their home and visit the head office two or three times a year.
The hub-and-spoke model is also key in this flight from the city. By having a network of suburban flexspace hubs that act as convenient ‘satellites’ of a city centre HQ, companies can offer employees access to workspace closer to where they live, driving down the need to commute.
The dispersion dividend
Workforce dispersion also helps to build diversity and inclusion in organisations. According to Tamas Varkonyi, People and Operations Manager at equity management platform Ledgy: “Current and future employees can come from and live in completely different situations every day. By not restricting the location of work to expensive cities, you open up to people from less privileged backgrounds.”
With hybrid enabling recruitment from a national (or even global) pool of talent in the years ahead, companies will be able to do more to build teams with deep cultural and experiential diversity in the months ahead. They will also offer opportunities to those suffering from physical or mental disabilities, for whom commuting poses a significant barrier.
Areas outside of big cities will also benefit from this newly dispersed workforce. According to a recent study by IWG and Arup, rural and suburban areas in the UK could receive an injection of £327m a year in spending thanks to the roll-out of flexible office and coworking spaces for hybrid workers. It also estimated that more than 4,000 new jobs could be created for people to run them.
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