An architecture CEO says there’s too much focus on return-to-office rates. The real conversation is the future of hybrid work

On the latest episode of Fortune podcast Leadership Next, Hoskins and her co-CEO Andy Cohen shared with Fortune CEO Alan Murray and editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram their insights into how people are working right now.

Office vacancy rates in the U.S. are around 15%. But if you take a closer look at which offices are vacant, Hoskins says, it’s out-of-date buildings. There’s been a “flight to quality,” in which businesses are choosing buildings constructed after 2015. Vacancy rates in those buildings are in the single digits, as employers seek out better-quality offices and amenities, perhaps to soften the blow of RTO. “Buildings that cannot play in that amenity game are going to have to find other uses,” Hoskins says.

That might seem like a convenient data point for an architecture firm behind some of those new offices. Or it may signal which kinds of businesses are succeeding at RTO and which are struggling to visualize a future in which RTO sticks.“We have our finger on the pulse of where companies see themselves going,” Hoskins says. And that’s what vacancy rates speak to—how companies are planning for the future, not how many people are showing up to work today. People are “over-focusing” on the latter issue, Hoskins says.

This isn’t the first time Hoskins has seen business standards shift amid rapid societal change. She and Cohen have led Gensler for 18 years. And, rather than a unique response to pandemic-era work-from-home culture, today’s way of working is a natural part of an economic cycle, she argues.

The 1980s savings-and-loan crisis in the U.S., she says, led to a focus on workplace “flexibility.” The dot-com era inspired organizational flattening; in physical offices, that meant tearing down cubicle and office walls and creating more visibility on office floors. The 2008 crisis was up next. “Collaboration was really born out of the global financial crisis,” Hoskins argues. In fact, she says that co-working came out of the recession era.

What COVID has altered, seemingly permanently, is the concept of hybrid work. “It has become a way to decrease expenses, which is a normal response during an economic downturn,” Hoskins says. “So the question is: to what extent will hybrid continue through an upturn?”

Hoskins and Cohen are the authors of a forthcoming book Design for a Radically Changing World. You can listen to their full Leadership Next interview on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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