Back to school and back to work is coinciding for many families, but the workplace has changed for many people. Some are now turning to creative, new solutions to gain flexibility and productivity.
“We are now back to about 90 percent occupancy,” said Jeannie Fowle, the owner of Venture X in Palm Beach Gardens, a flexible, communal office space of sorts.
“There is a tremendous influx of people coming from the Northeast, and a lot of them are in the financial sector,” she said.
Fowle said she’s noticing more people, who are looking for new, different types of workspace.
Keith Diego, a father of several children, works in information technology consulting.
“I think when the kids were going back to school, it kind of made me think ,well it’s time for me to get back out of the house and back to the office as well,” he said. “It was kinda like a first day back for a lot of folks being in the work place.”
Diego said the big corporate footprint has shifted. He initially was drawn to a more flexible work environment for personal and professional reasons.
“I personally do it, so I am here Monday through Thursday,” he said. “I work from home on Friday, so I like a little bit of the variety….As a business owner, there is a lot less overhead associated with working in this type of environment.”
Some companies have now paused return-to-work with the surge of the delta variant.
“We have a number of clients that are paying for this out of pocket, their manager says you can work from home,” she said. “They choose not to.”
Other companies got rid of office space altogether during the pandemic.
“We’ve got a company that is still working from home, but they meet here periodically to use conference rooms, so that they can still get together as a team, collaborate, build relationships, and then go back to their home offices and back to work,” said Fowle.
Others moved to Florida as remote workers.
“Now there may be a load of laundry or a dog walk in between, but they feel like they are no longer working from home but they are living from work,” she said. “Not everyone thrives in the spare bedroom, ya know, or the makeshift office outside of the kitchen.”
One thing is for certain, the pandemic changed many perspective, including how people work.