The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that countless Americans now work from home rather than an office. But even as many of them have developed a taste for that flexibility—and corporations see the prospect for lower rent and a wider talent pool—some business leaders say in-person work will always have a big role to play in how companies operate.
In fact, after months of working in isolation from one another, there is likely to be some pent-up demand for working together when things open up, one of them said.
“There’s going to be such a reversion to trying to re-connect,” Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels Corp said at Fortune‘s Reimagine Work Summit on Wednesday.
And even though more tasks will be carried out remotely, in-person work isn’t going anywhere. “We need social capital from physical interactions,” said Ravi Kumar, president of Infosys. And, adds Hoplamazian, “There is question whether the mental health impact of remote working is actually allowing people to stay productive in a healthy way.”
That’s not to say companies won’t tap into the benefits of remote working to be able to recruit talent further afield or yield the benefits of lower costs like cheaper rent or lower salaries outside big cities. Kumar spoke of a client who said that its tens of thousands of call center workers might not come back to a single place after COVID ends.
Still, the pandemic and isolation some workers are feeling is making so called “soft skills” even more important, said Dr. Frida Polli, CEO of pymetrics, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help employers recruit. “The human elements of empathy and connection so critical to making this distributed workforce function properly,” she said.
The three executives agreed that office life post-pandemic is not going to go back to what it was in 2019. “I think the five-day work week, 9-to-5 in an office, is gone, probably forever,” said Hoplamazian.
A recent poll of over 9,000 knowledge workers conducted by Fortune and Future Forum by Slack found that 27% of workers would ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ work from an office in an ideal world. At the same time, it’s a mistake for anything to think white collar workers by and large want work to be all remote, all the time.
“We want balance,” Polli said.