Editorial: Working at a distance

The office world is changing beneath employees’ feet. The question now is whether government and the business world manage to keep up.

Even before the pandemic, many of the trend-trackers projected that companies were scaling down office footprints, with more space-efficient layouts featuring shared spaces and few private offices.

The arrival of COVID-19 likely has accelerated that trend. Locally and nationally, employers have adjusted to the work-from-home model as an emergency coping strategy, and now, as many businesses resume routines, they are adopting some changes permanently.

The affinity for working remotely is playing out in another way as well: The first cohort of participants in the new “Movers and Shakas” program recently finished their monthlong stint of living in, and working from, Hawaii.

The nonprofit Hawaii Executive Collaborative runs the initiative with support from foundations and companies, and from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

The first 50 slots were awarded to applicants who received airfare to Hawaii, working here for their home employer. In return they would contribute volunteer hours for local nonprofits.

During the pandemic months of remote work, this model resonated with professionals who already were distance-workers. Second and third cohorts are in the works for midsummer and fall.

Hawaii benefits from this not only by the nonprofit service and the employees’ spending in the local economy but also because it promoted the islands as a workplace environment, a facet that would enhance the state’s visitor-destination image.

COVID-19 shut down many business activities, including a relatively new sector in commercial real estate: “co-working” spaces, office facilities rented by workers on a short-term basis. Assembling unrelated clients in a closed space was not an option through much of the pandemic.

But it should be recovering now, even expanding, as some businesses begin to shrink their permanent office footprints.

Some of the existing office space may be repurposed, as happened with Queen Emma Apartments, an office-turned-housing conversion.

Developers need a regulatory environment that supports such adaptations of existing space to fulfill current needs. There isn’t a need now more critical than housing.