Over the last few months I have been closely following what the press has been reporting on the extreme lengths people in various major cities of North America go to in order to get to work, and to maintain residences in the general vicinity of their workplaces. There is a persistent mismatch between the population growth and job availability in many cities in North America in areas where it is very expensive to live and the comparative lack of population growth and job availability in places where the cost of living is much lower.
Major cities have generally attracted the Headquarters of large global and national companies which generate a high number of jobs while the suburbs have a spattering of small to medium size industries that generate few jobs. At the same time this polarization of large companies has led to concentration of jobs where there is less housing and the few industries in the suburb and small cities.
In urban theorist Jane Jacob’s 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the author Jane Jacobs wrote about what makes cities dynamic, safe, and humane. They needed to have:
- mixed use neighborhoods, with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings;
- small blocks that promote walking
- a mix of old and new buildings that cater to high- and low-rent tenants, and
- sufficient density to create a critical vital mass.
Any city that miss any one of these elements is destined to have neighborhood that could fail. At the time she wrote this book, there was no proof she was right. However, a study indicates that she was right. As the article indicates: “Mixed use neighborhoods with dense streets create the "sidewalk ballet" that the famous urban theorist envisioned 100 years ago”.
Per square Mile asked the question: How far should you live from work? Ask anyone this question and the obvious answer is 20-30 minutes. This 2012 blog indicates that: Regardless of mode, people seem to settle on an ideal commute time. And once they have settled, they don’t seem to stray from it. The thinking is that if a person gets a new job that’s farther away, they are more likely to move.
This is 2016 and things have changed - the cities are becoming expensive for people to relocate with each job change especially as job security has become mirage. People are not moving with ever job change they are instead taking the long road to work and back home as it is expensive to move and when the family has settled into a neighborhood they are reluctant to move anymore.
The distance that the employee goes to get to work has found a label: The 100-Mile Commute. The 100 Mile commute is a common to all the Great (North) American cites. It was earlier known as the “London Effect” and was reported on January 3, 1988 by The Sunday Times as mentioned in the 1990 scholarly study: Global Cities by Anthony D King.
One of the obvious solutions is to have highly functioning, affordable, and pervasive transit infrastructure which can go along way toward making it easier for people to get from where they can afford to live to where they can work. However, in transportation planning cities use a basic financing mechanism for the added infrastructure around the transit hub: Build a rapid transit station, and land values are supposed to jump up. Cities factor the benefits such as reduced cost, time, and stress for commuters; cleaner air; more walkable neighborhoods and translate it into dollars and factored into property values.
Meanwhile organisations are realizing that to retain and recruit they need to have a positive employee experience they have to design the employee journey from onboarding right through to departure. A positive Employee experience is even more important now as “The Workplace is Broken” and Our jobs have become prisons from which we don’t want to escape and the Full-Time Job Is Dead. There is enough stress at work with working longer and harder hours than ever before; struggle to maintain work-life balance; the challenge of constant connectivity; fear of technology replacing the jobs - the list goes on.
Robots, Virtual Reality and wearable tech is set to enter the workplace and will change the workplace dramatically in the near future. These developments in virtual and especially augmented reality (AR) will result in an entirely new dimension of efficiency and convenience in the office of tomorrow. Work-life blur will get even more grainier in the near future. Carlo Ratti & Matthew Claudel in their HBR article If Work Is Digital, Why Do We Still Go to the Office? says: The ominous “death of distance” may be reversed with the “birth of a new proximity.”
A report from Gartner indicates:
“The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work.”
There are some short term and long term strategies that organisations can take to ensure “Employee Experience” by creating:
RE Strategy that will resolve the global tension between cost and talent in corporate real estate by aligning long-term real estate initiatives with increasingly short-term corporate agendas; focus on expanding a corporation’s capabilities without spikes in capital investment or operational expense and allowing corporate real estate executives to balance employee desires with cost management disciplines.
Workplace Experience Strategy – that defines customer; talent, mobile, digital, Coworking, smart working, global workflow, workplace settings and service experience reflecting the rethink performance management to ensure that thousands of people know what to do, cooperate to get it done, and experience it as personally fulfilling.
Workplace Strategy which implement the business objectives that is driving the business; identify business process improvements and implement workplace experience criteria; as a basis for the development of new workplace guidelines and standards and planning to create workplace services and settings that are extensions and components of the work itself.
Flexible Work Strategy - identifying policies like unlimited vacation, remote work & distributed teams, Time-Agnostic Work, Job sharing which assists employees manage life's demands and the same time make it work for companies bottom line.
Organisations and Corporations can create the ideal Employee Experience by creating and initiating the above mentioned strategies.. A positive employee experience goes a long way in creating a Positive “Employee Experience” leads to positive Customer Experience”.
What has been your experience on the effects of the 100 Mile commute on the work-life balance? Is there an awareness in your organisation on the employee experience? I would like to hear from you
Philip Thomas - Optimizing Project Delivery Services; Workplace Experience Strategist; Design & Circular Thinking; Evangelist for disrupting the AEC Industry.
I do write on Enhancing Client Experience; Project Management; Design Thinking and Circular Thanking; The Untethered Workplace – The Future of Work & the Workplace of the Future and on Disrupting the AEC industry.
To read more on these subject go to our Blog page on our website: www.optumplus.com