Schroders staff may never set foot in their office again

This morning, the wealth manager Schroders has announced that there will be ‘no mandated requirements to be in the office a certain number of days’ as long as staff are contactable during their contracted hours and days.

The announcement came as PwC also said the ‘majority’ of its 22,000 UK staff will continue to work from home. Also, Aviva Investors is considering a 2-2-1 system. This is where staff are in the office for two days, work from home for two days, and choose between the office and home on the remaining day.

Theta Financial Reporting, a chartered accountancy and consultancy firm specialising in freelance working options for the UK private sector, has released a nationally representative survey across over 2,000 UK adults looking into how the UK workforce and business leaders feel about returning to work post-lockdown, and what it is that they are returning to.

Key stats·

• Nearly three-quarters of Londoners – 70% – do not feel comfortable commuting to work via public transport anymore and think it will be one of the most stressful parts of their day
• 57% of people in London do not want to go back to the normal way of working in an office environment with normal office hours
• Over a third of Londoners – 36% – say their company will return to the office with a smaller team with people handling more varied responsibilities
• Nearly half of all business leaders in the Capital – 49% – say they see the working environment changing for the better due to the impact of COVID-19
• 44% of London’s business leaders say they have streamlined their team permanently because of the COVID-19 crisis as they discovered some roles were surplus to requirements vs only 29% in the rest of the country
• Over a quarter of London workers – 26% – say their company’s finance teams will not be returning to the office with other employees in July and will now work at home for the majority of the time
• Over a third – 35% – of people in London say going back to work in a traditional office environment will have a negative impact on their mental health, which in turn will negatively affect their productivity
• Nearly three in 10 Londoners – 28% – say their employer hasn’t explored any flexible working options to help them or their colleagues return to work
• Over a fifth – 21% – of London-based workers say their business will no longer be in a permanent office when they return to full-time work

The survey unveils sentiments from both the workforce and business leaders in the Capital about returning to the ‘normal’ way of working with over half of employees not wanting to return to work as they did before and 49% of business leaders seeing the benefits of the new environment brought on by the COVID lockdown period.

With Transport For London, commercial landlords and train companies seemingly desperate to not only have Brits returning to work but also travelling into London, 70% of London-based workers do not feel comfortable commuting to work via public transport anymore.