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The story…

The future of the office

Learn language related to…

working from home

Need-to-know language…

struggling – finding something difficult

aberration – different to normal, often negative

splitting – dividing into two

hybrid – combination of two factors

through the roof – raise to a very high level

Answer this…

According to Tushar Agarwal, what are companies and people demanding more

of?

Watch the video online: https://bbc.in/3uoXzdM

Transcript

Remember this? This is what an office looks like. During the pandemic, millions

of people swapped their large open-plan offices for their living rooms. Now,

some companies say their employees need never come back in.

Brynn Harrington - Vice President of People Growth, Facebook

Facebook believes that remote working is the future. We think in the future we're

going to increasingly take work to people versus need to bring people to work.

We also want to be able to give our employees choice to live and build lives in

places that they love - and we want to increase our ability to hire from places

around the world, not just places where we currently have offices.

Lingohack ©British Broadcasting Corporation 2021

bbclearningenglish.com Page 2 of 3

Nina Nanji - BBC Reporter

But isn't everyone fed up of working from home by now? Some people must be

desperate to get back into the office.

Brynn Harrington - Vice President of People Growth, Facebook

It's really interesting! In our data we're seeing that some people are having an

amazing experience while they’re working from home, and some people are

really struggling. So, the big picture to takeaway is that this is a really, really

personalised thing for people.

Facebook estimates that more than half of its staff could work remotely in the

coming years, but it insists the move is not about saving costs. And it says it’s

committed to keeping its offices - like this one - open.

Other tech giants such as Microsoft and Twitter have also indicated staff could

stay remote - even after lockdowns ease. On Wall Street, they seem less

enthusiastic about the idea. The boss of Goldman Sachs rejected working from

home as a new normal - labelling it an 'aberration' instead. There are also fears it

could create more inequality.

Professor Nick Bloom - Economist, Stanford University

The problem is, if you're working from home five days a week and most of the

rest of the team is in the office, you're likely to lose out in terms of promotions

and, you know, pay increases. And looking at the data, it's clear that we see a

much higher share of particularly women with young kids, disabled people,

people living very far from the office that look like they're going to choose to

work from home for five days a week.

For many companies, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle - with

workers splitting their time between office and home.

Tushar Agarwal - Co-founder and CEO, Hubble

The office does have a future, we believe the future is hybrid. We believe the

future is flexible. The demand for flexible workspace has just gone through the

roof. Just in the month of March, we're back to about sixty to seventy percent of

pre-Covid levels, and actually huge amounts of companies that are demanding

flexible space used to be in traditional need space, so now people want more and

more flexibility than ever before.

One thing's clear - the world of work will look very different to how it did before

this crisis.

Lingohack ©British Broadcasting Corporation 2021

bbclearningenglish.com Page 3 of 3

Did you get it?

According to Tushar Agarwal, what are companies and people demanding more

of?

Flexibility. Companies want more flexible space and people want more flexibility

than ever before.