Stephanie Ping
This month we speak to three business owners on how their businesses have been affected due to the pandemic. We delve into how they have shifted their business and their recovery plan post-pandemic.
According to Stephanie Ping, people are demanding more flexible working hours. With the option of checking- into remote working areas closer to where they live or within their communities. Many companies are downsizing the size of their offices and refurbishing private offices into meeting rooms. Will traditional offices be obsolete? And can we possibly look forward to a 4-day work week?
The pandemic has most definitely changed our working culture. Some of us have been working from home for almost 2 years. As we gear up to head back to work, we can’t help but wonder if the traditional 9 am-6 pm workday has come to an end.
The Peak interviews Stephanie Ping, Co-founder and CEO of WORQ to find out more.
What changes did you have to make to adapt your business plan to the pandemic?
Basically, most people during the pandemic is working from home. And as the economy opens up, people are demanding a different way to work in an unprecedented way. People now want to work near to their communities near to their homes, as well as they want a lot of flexibility in how they work. They may, for example, go into the office and have a meeting or have a team-building exercise, and perhaps only go in a rotational style two days or three days a week. The other times they would like to work either from home or from a perhaps location of work near to their homes in order to be more productive, have some quiet time, or have a meeting near to their houses, or near to their communities or near to their customers and drop in and drop out from work. Therefore, post-pandemic, when people go back to work, they demand a different work style. And we are here to help them reach that flexible way of working by the services that we provide, which we call enterprise right now, where we customize the solution to each and every company in terms of how their workers work. And we give them the flexibility to give their teams where and when they want to work from and in any style, they want to. We do it end to end. That means with the customized solution we can build their HQ. As well as add to that all the outlets that we have, and anything above that, that they need to help their workers work in a much more flexible and productive way, as well as to add to the company’s resilience in terms of employee retention as well as hiring.
How have working trends changed due to the pandemic?
After the pandemic, a lot of people do not need such big office spaces. At least companies don’t need to maintain such big office space, whereas they may want to give a distributed number of locations for their workers to work from nearer to their homes or nearer to their communities. According to Microsoft’s work trends survey, 77% of Malaysian respondents said that they want flexible work options to remain even after the pandemic. Companies like Unilever have switched to a Flexi work plan and their employees are found to be 13% more productive. And companies like HSBC have removed their executive floor and converted all their senior manager’s personal offices to meeting rooms. Hence flexible work styles are being adopted widely. And this shift is important for real estate innovators like us because we will be able to fulfill this market demand with the kind of products that we have that supports the distributed work style that’s coming to us. As the work trends survey shows 75% of respondents in Malaysia, still want in-person collaboration, there is a desire for face-to-face meetings at work. And there’s a lot of team building that cannot be done over the internet. So even though workers want control over when and where they work, and we should give it to the collaboration, team building, training, and so forth is important, as well as extremely more crucial in terms of the new work style. In the U.S 39% of workers would rather quit their jobs and return to the office. So with this number rising to even 49% for Gen Z and millennials, I think the number is huge for players like WORQ in order to capture this market and to help workers everywhere work the way they want to work, as well as help companies take advantage of the efficiencies and the cost reduction that they can have from this new working style.
Find out more about WORQ here.
