Do property professionals work best in the office, or is a café or library just as conducive to effective business activity? Nadia Elghamry reports
Remote working has changed a lot over the past few years. Gone are the days of being either tethered to your desk or wired into a internet connection at home. Today, wander into your local coffee shop and it’s jammed full of suits working on laptops and whole departments that have decamped for a meeting. But is this the solution and does it work for everyone?
We asked a handful of property people to tell us about their secret hideaways.
The café worker
“Sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the office,” says Nick Symons, partner at agency MMX Retail. He is a big advocate of working outside the office, grabbing a lungful of fresh air and generally shaking things up to get the ideas flowing again. He tends to use the coffee shop when the boardroom is full. “But we wouldn’t go out if there were more than three of us,’ he says.
Symons dismisses the usual haunts of Starbucks and Costa, favouring the local independents. His favourite is Taylor St Baristas, a tiny gem of a coffee shop tucked away on the back streets of Mayfair, away from the usual crowds of property folk. “It’s a little bit quirky,” he says. “The coffee and the staff are superb and it’s not very corporate. It’s perfect for catching up on emails or doing the odd informal meeting.
“It’s a hideaway destination and it’s rare for property people to be in here,” he says but quickly adds: “It’s not for sensitive meetings, but there are few places in the West End where you’d risk that, say for a job interview. It would be pretty obvious whom you were poaching.”
Symons thinks the industry has changed as a whole. The days of meeting in bars are gone and, although you would still take a client for lunch at Wild Honey on Saint George Street, you are more likely to have a breakfast with anyone else. “If you do lunch, you lose three hours,” he says. “If you do dinners, then you’re really choosy and have to make a decision on whether it is worth giving up your family time.
“Breakfasts mean you can meet at 8am, plough through everything and get on with your day.”
The ‘old school’ office worker
“Business is bloody hard work and you do it at your desk. You go to a coffee bar if you’re selling widgets, not if you’re letting offices.” So says Simon Knights, partner at Strutt & Parker, who is not a fan of remote working.
“I’d love to think we could do this job in a bar or a club, but new business does not get created there. It might get consummated there,” he says.
Knights gives home working even shorter shrift. “It’s a joke,” he says. “It’s not going to happen. Clients expect you to be working your nuts off to secure lettings. They don’t want you dozed out on the sofa. It just doesn’t work for agency.”
Knights’ words might sound harsh, old school, even slightly old-fashioned to some, but his reasoning is sound. “I want to be sitting right in the middle of the bear pit [the nickname for Strutt & Parker’s agency floor],” he says. “I’ll be talking about agency one minute then to the acquisition team. The investment team will want advice and you can’t do that at home. You can’t inspire people if you’re on the end of a telephone.”
Of course, there are times when you don’t want everyone knowing your business and, although Fino’s is still great for a gossip, says Knights, going to a discreet little hideaway is useful. For him, that hideaway is the Stafford London hotel in St James. The hotel is 110 years old, and among its draws for Knights are the fact that it has an amazing cellar, a courtyard where you can smoke and, though lunch is at proper tables that aren’t packed together, they give you your supper on a tray with a cushion.
“A proper TV tray,” boasts Knights. “I would go there if there was a deal to do. I was always told not to do business there, but to take friends. Well, over the years, I’ve found a lot of the people I do business with are friends.”
The Stafford is an old-fashioned establishment and nobody bothers you, says Knights. “I was there at Christmas and Prince Harry was at the bar having a chat with David Beckham.”
The library worker
Want to get away from it all and support your local community at the same time? Kevin Lane, senior consultant at Capita Symonds’ strategic property and workplace projects team, thinks he has the answer. “How to save your local library? Work from it,” he says.
Lane, who spends his day advising big corporates on working more efficiently, says the library offers a “third workplace” because it is quiet (great for concentration, reading, report writing and that all-important thinking); it has comfortable furniture and you can spread out on the big tables; nobody disturbs you and, Lane adds, the BlackBerry definitely goes on silent.
“The library is clean, warm, well-lit, has toilets and there is even a coffee shop sometimes. It has wi-fi, PCs and their location is generally central, so you can have 3G for the phone and the laptop. Best of all for corporates looking to shave expenses, you don’t have to buy endless cups of coffee – they are free.”
But there is a downside, he says: “If I want to make or take a telephone call, I have to leave my stuff – but then that’s what good time management is about.”
He adds: “The coffee shops are fine, but they are a bit noisy. If you want peace and quiet, the library is the better option.”
Lane is sympathetic to the concern that, when staff are not visible in the office, people think they are slacking.
“Some people do lack trust,” he says. “Is Kevin working at home today or does he have his feet up watching TV? You see that attitude a lot in organisations that don’t have a robust performance management system.”
It’s all about managing the “fear factor”, as Lane calls it. He adds: “If it’s the end of the week and that person has hit their targets, do you care? Too many people still manage their performance and think that turning up at work is enough.”
