The Star writes that a surprising number of people want to get back to the office, even though office workers have largely been working from home and using online communication throughout the Covide-19 lockdown.
This was revealed in a nationwide survey conducted by workplace consultancy Giant Leap, which canvassed several hundred people. Giant Leap’s Linda Trim said the survey showed that 86% of people wanted to go back to working in an office. She said that while remote work was initially very popular, as time wore on people realised there was a lack of work life balance. “The survey showed 70% of people missed the general social interactions of the office, while 85% said they missed the ‘colleague interaction’ while working at home,” Trim reported. About 81% felt that working remotely made work communication harder and 70% reported they were more sedentary working at home. Trim opined that SA would slowly get back to work and offices would again be the epicentre of the working world, but well-being had become paramount in workplaces. However, Lesiba Mothata and Craig Bentley of Alexander Forbes said that with remote working likely to become a more permanent feature of the workplace environment in various industries, companies needed to work on providing better technology to enable flexible working, increasing flexible working hours to encourage effective time management and rethinking their talent value proposition strategies.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Edward West at The Star
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