Office visits spike in last week of January

Office visits spiked in the last week of January as restrictions were lifted, new data from one of the country’s biggest office providers show.

IWG said that it had seen a 50% spike in office visits between the first and final weeks of the month.

The business said that the number of staff who visited its 300 locations across the UK has been steadily increasing in recent months.

Compared to January last year when the country was in lockdown, there has been a nine-fold increase in office visits.

The company’s research shows that staff are four times more likely to choose and office close to home than in a city centre.

More than four in five of them listed not needing to commute to work as a benefit of hybrid working.

Boss Mark Dixon said that there is “a lot of debate” about the future of working, adding there is a clamour for more decentralised offices

“This is an issue about commuting, and about affordability of housing and convenience. It’s not people working from an office or not working from an office,” he said.

“It was the cities where you had an imbalance which forces people to live a long way away from where they work, which were affected and still are affected by people voting with their feet, saying I don’t want to spend two hours a day commuting for no reason.”

“We’re at the epicentre of the change,” Mr Dixon said. Large and small businesses are saying there is a different way to work, he added.