Early this year I was invited by First National Bank CEO Jacques Celliers to lunch at his office at the bank's headquarters at Bank City, in the Johannesburg CBD. I put on my best suit and high heels, expecting the usual bankers' boardroom lunch.
I arrived to find a denim-clad Celliers wafting around with his iPad. Turns out he doesn't have an office. Nor even his own desk. Nor does anyone else at Bank City, which has been renovated in recent years to become the office of the future. Staff are encouraged to move around and interact within the building but also to spend time with clients and work remotely outside it, enabled by FNB's much-vaunted tech platforms. Lunch with the ebullient Celliers was sushi takeaways from the Food Lover's Market. We sat in one of the coffee shop areas where staff (and outsiders) can eat, meet and work.
I was reminded of that pre-Covid lunch this week when FNB's parent, FirstRand, reported its full-year results. I asked Celliers if and when FNB staffers - the vast majority of whom have been working from home, as at other banks - were going back to the office. He doesn't see the office going back to more than 50% occupancy. But that's in line with a property strategy FNB has been pursuing over the past decade, cutting the size of its branches and consolidating office space. Covid has just vindicated and accelerated that - and where previously the bank might have a couple of thousand techies keeping Bank City awake of a Sunday night doing tech releases, now the techies have been set up to do it from the comfort of their living-room couches.
Celliers is at one end of the banking spectrum. Other bankers see the office going back to something closer to pre-Covid capacity over time. But the way the financial services sector and its regulators shifted to WFH is extraordinary. Most big groups have had 80% or more of their people working remotely and have invested big money in enabling them to do so. The JSE was run from home and the Reserve Bank on Microsoft Teams, including the now familiar press conferences with governor Lesetja Kganyago in his stylishly curated study.
Staff and their families have discovered the joys of flexible working - and the stresses of a working day that never quite ends. Perhaps to their surprise, executives discovered that employees' productivity from home was better than ever, especially in the early days of the lockdown. And, crucially, pulling people together to manage a crisis was much easier and quicker virtually than physically. But they found, too, how exhausting it is to sit on Zoom or Teams or Webex all day, every day, without the decompression of driving to work or time out with colleagues at the coffee machine. And they speak of how difficult it is to "read the room" in an online meeting - especially if folk turn their videos off.
There's little doubt that Covid has forever changed the life of the office, and forced a relook at the way organisations are managed. It has enormous implications for the future of sectors such as property as well as for the ecosystems of cities. For SA, with its skills shortage, remote working potentially opens a whole new avenue of hiring the necessary skills without the need for visas.
But the office is clearly not dead. Sustaining corporate culture is one concern; training and team building is another. And there are big question marks over how long organisations can continue to innovate without face-to-face interactions between their people.
SA may have its own particular anxieties and constraints - one senior bank executive says many staffers are desperate to return to work because they fear retrenchment if they're not seen to be working. Another points out that in a country that is still socially divided on racial lines, the office is a key place where diversity happens. The question will be how to capture the lessons of Covid to find a new balance in the world of the office.
• Joffe is contributing editor
