The expansive wave of teleworking shakes the economy

El futuro no está escrito, pero la pandemia ha modificado muchos hábitos y obligado a abrazar otros sin discusión. Es el caso del teletrabajo. Un año después de que la covid pusiese todo patas arriba, se ha producido un brutal punto de inflexión: hoy queremos desempeñar nuestras labores en remoto por convicción al menos una parte de la semana y esto supondrá una revolución en los mercados; en los métodos de trabajo; en las oficinas; en la forma de vida de los ciudadanos y en la manera en que las empresas se aproximan a ellos.

McKinsey estimates that more than 20% of the workforce of developed countries can continue working from home between three and five days per week even when the virus is under control, almost the quadruple that before the pandemic.In Spain the percentage is 18%, although the Bank of Spain speaks of 31%.Because not everyone can exercise their work remote;Moreover, they are a minority of workers (just over three million in Spain in hard confinement, the peak), mainly in services and technology.

The impulse that Telework has received is of such magnitude that it has already generated new trends, all of them baptized in English: names such as Workation (combination of remote work and vacations) or Room Office (working in hotels) already swarm among us.Others are yet: when everyday life and hybrid work return - Immit in office, half anywhere - it has become strong, a day -to -day revolution will impact cascade on a thousand and one sectors.

Pablo Claver, a partner of Boston Consulting Group, is clear that face -to -face is past: “Our expectation is that remote work will be duplicated, of 17% we saw before the virus in the 15 main European countries at 30% or 40%".When that happens - and, in many cases, of course -, endless activities will be affected.To start, restaurants, because people who do not go to the office eat mostly at home.This will mean an annual savings of between 1.000 and 1.500 euros per employee, calculate.To continue, transportation: less displacements will benefit the environment and cut the teleworkor expenses from 500 to 1.500 euros.Finally, many people will move their place of residence outside the big cities, as is already happening in New York, San Francisco or London, where the Exodus has made a dent in the rentals, which have collapsed between 20% and 30%.

The world, in short, will change leaving behind - like every revolution - losers and winners:

The decay of the offices

The real estate will be one of the great victims, although, as Anu Madgavkar, a partner of McKinsey Global Institute, the scope of the impact is evolving and it is still difficult to predict all its effects.In 2020, offices unemployment increased significantly in the main cities of the world: 91% in San Francisco, 32% in London and 27% in Berlin.At the same time, it decreased in some smaller cities, such as Glasgow or Charlotte, which, he says, implies that companies can be moving from large cities to smaller ones.

According to a survey elaborated last August by the consultant, two thirds of the companies had plans to reconfigure their offices, moving away from the offices and focusing on more spaces for equipment and conference rooms, as well as reducing their surfaces by 30%.KPMG made a similar survey then and has repeated it now, and Spanish managers who plan to reduce their work areas have passed from 69% to 17%.However, some signatures have already done so.Nielsen has cut 33%: the three plants he occupied in Madrid have stayed in two, and in Barcelona he has left his office to move to a coworking, a trend that steps strongly.

Mikel Echavarren, CEO of Colliers International, acknowledges that teleworking will reduce the demand for offices between 10% and 15%.There will be companies, especially technological ones, which will leave their work centers, but others such as consultants, law firm or financial ones will keep their headquarters to continue close to their customers.At the moment, however, the owners demand more meters to be able to comply with the interpersonal distance protocols, he says.Echavarren also supports organizations that are going to leave thousands of square meters of offices, up to 90.000, of a tacada.Above all, at the outskirt.

“The offices surface will be drastically reduced in large cities.We are seeing it in London, where people leave the capital and move to bedroom cities and companies leave their headquarters to go to flexible spaces, ”says Philippe Jiménez, general director of IWG in Spain.Last year, in Madrid the hiring was almost in the middle: 654.000 meters in 2019 to 339.000, according to CBRE.And in the first quarter the fall continues, with 23% less.A trend that, according to Aberdeen Standard, will continue in the long term with a contraction between 15% and 25%.Alfonso Galabart, vice president of CBR.000 meters to increase by 60.000 in 2022.To the technological ones who hugged the teleworking, he explains, the productivity is failing and they begin to return to the offices.Google, Amazon or Telefónica are an example.But there are only some: Twitter or Salesforce are still faithful to remote work, also with a view to the future.

American consultant Cheryl Geoffrion has made him his way of life.At 58, five months ago he decided to leave Budapest's cold behind Gran Canaria."Before I had to travel a lot to see customers, but not anymore," he explains by phone from his apartment's kitchen, his current workplace.He searched the Internet what was the best place to perform remotely, Google replied that Canary Islands and she followed him together, says laughing.The experience has liked it and is already in process to stay indefinitely.It is not much less the only one that has opted for the archipelago: if in 2019 these profiles were minority, the repeate firm speaks of a monthly increase close to 10% in arrivals since September.Almost a third decides, as Geoffrion, to prolong your stay.

Coworking outbreak

"We will return to maximum flexibility.The workplace will be adapted to the life of its employees and not vice versa: companies will keep their headquarters and hire satellite spaces to approach their workers ”, Vaticina Galabart, who has seen how the demand for flexible spaces (coworkings,business centers, hotels, etc.) fired 300% in the first quarter after falling 26% in 2020.

The rise of the new office formats, shared buildings in which companies, self -employed and individual workers can only be done with the space they need and for the time they consider, it came from behind.In a decade they have doubled, according to the director of IWG, that “every day opens a new center in the world;And in Spain it will be 10 this year ".But his final explosion has arrived with Teleworking."He has brought flexible spaces to clients who did not see a solution in us," says Mireia Pérez, from Aticco, which has seven locations in Barcelona and Madrid.“If today there are 20 workers, tomorrow 80 and last 40, they just have to change their plan.Many companies are no longer interested in an entire office so that only half of the workforce goes ”.

Impact Hub, with five centers in Madrid, says they are receiving an avalanche of consultations.“Until now the most interested were autonomous or freelancers.But that has changed: with teleworking more and more employees are looking for an alternative to their home as an office, ”says his head of development, María Calvo."Companies also come that want to leave their headquarters to remove a fixed cost".The same happens in Lexington, with more than a dozen centers in Madrid and Barcelona, although its director, David Vega, points out that contracts do not grow as much as applications.

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The menu of the day freezes

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the worst year for hospitality as far as memory reaches, but far from the main tourist foci this bleeding has left a dantesque scar on coffee shops and restaurants.The daily food is (ERA), according to Edurne Uranga, of NPD Group, "the most important occasion of consumption" for the sector and provided more than a quarter of the billing.A figure that increased in the offices areas, long the most beaten by teleworking.According to its calculations, work lunch has lost “more than 50%” of the business it generated in 2019, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.Menu restaurants have been more than delayed.If historically 90% of its sales were produced in situ, now the food to take and at home has doubled its importance, although with lower average consumption.Breakfasts have also fallen "substantially", but with a slightly higher average ticket.

At the end of the daily menu in large areas of the big cities - in Madrid there is nothing more to take a walk through AZCA to see how much the panorama has changed - the Afterwork has joined, a fashion that in the prepondondemic years had rooted in theRitual of not a few managers and office workers: drinking a drink after work with colleagues.All that has disappeared, if compensated with a beer on the terrace under home.

The lack of diners is even more bleeding in company canteens.The restoration of communities has 17% of its business in these establishments, according to the Food Service Association, and its president, Antonio Llorens, says they lost 70% of their sales in 2020 and continue in the same line.“We have closed restaurants and others at 20% or 40% activity.The loss has been brutal, ”admits Carina Cabezas, president of Sodexo Iberia, who knows that some of these spaces will not open again: one in five could disappear.A "devastating" number, in the words of Llorens, for a sector that moved 3.600 million euros in 2019.

The collapse is not the same between the restaurants of the factories (which are still operational) and the offices, many of them closed."There is a change of social paradigm and we have to adapt," says heads, which has created a new business line: produces the daily menus in their central kitchens and sends them home to individuals and companies.

The food at home shoots

Menu setback and boom of prepared food are communicating vessels: if you can't eat outside, you eat at home.This is how delivery has doubled its weight, according to NPD, until reaching 8% of the total food and restoration.And carrying food (Take Away) has climbed to 23%.Thanks to the explosion of platform distributors such as Glovo, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats and at the birth of the so -called Dark Kitchen, from where dishes of several restaurants are cooked to carry, the delivery has become one more channel, Carlos appreciates CarlosCotos, from Kantar.Orders doubled in confinement and Christmas, and in the last year they have grown 47%.A trend that, he says, will remain because the user has become accustomed.

The supermarkets have been the captors of much of the expense lost by restaurants and bars.Last year the Spaniards allocated 12.7% of their budget to them - until 105.000 million—, something that is expected to continue with the extension of the teleworking, although with much less intensity, according to Patricia Daimiel, general director of Nielsen: the borrowed consumption of the hospitality will tend to return.In part it is already doing it, because so far this year, food sales fall 7% per year, although 8% on 2019 rise.

The feeling, however, is that not all the expenditure will fly.It may remain about 5% at home because it will tend to save, indicates preserve.By 2021 a 2.5% decrease in 2020 is expected, which in any case would involve a 10% increase compared to 2019.Growth, then.And what will change, according to Daimiel, is the type of supermarkets to go to: those close to business centers have already lost 20% of their sales in 2020.

A handful of gourmet bakeries have also come out with it, which have gone around the traditional model and grow to rebuild the change of habits."In part because many people who are now working at Casa Baj.

Stop on business trips

The trips are the largest losers of the crisis, and the work could not be an exception.Suddenly it has been discovered that technology facilitates many of these encounters and that, above all, they are lowered.And that will lead to a structural change in the business, fairs and conventions segment.McKinsey estimates that 20%will be reduced, with the consequent repercussions on airlines, hotels and leisure.

“The holiday trip will be back when the pandemic passes;The business, no, ”Javier García outline, of the Iberian Business Travel Association.The collapse of the sector, which in Spain moved 22.000 million in 2019, it will continue above 50% even in the medium term, he says."Companies are aware of the savings that suppose.Especially the consultants, for which - after wages - they were their second largest cost ”.For travel agencies, which have reduced their activity to 90%, it will be - according to Carlos Garrido, president of the Spanish Confederation of Travel Agencies (CEAV) - an earthquake.They are concerned that virtual meetings are also imposed on work trips, which represented half of their turnover: 12.500 million.Many city hotels live in much of business trips and are also against the ropes."The urban segment will suffer," says José Luis Zoreda, Vice President of Exceltur.

For now many hoteliers try to adapt plants to coworking and workation.Something that Meliá has already done in Cuba and Orlando, although with limited impact, according to its operations director, André Gerondeau."Teleworking will avoid part of business trips, but another will continue to be necessary".The Executive awaits its recovery and, in fact, says that they are already receiving "a significant reactivation of demand in congresses, meetings, events and, above all, in incentive trips in reduced groups".Despite this, he admits that changes in business trips, which generate more than 20% of their sales, will be structural.

Endless technological apogee

Zoom, Teams, Meet or Webex, names that the common of Europeans had barely heard before the virus, have become a year later into currency.Its use has shot at a time when many bosses and employees have barely seen faces without a screen and an internet connection in between.And it has been felt, and how, in the price of its drivers (Zoom, Microsoft, Google, Cisco).

But the software is not the only winner: hardware sales, with laptops in front, have shot up to unprecedented levels.According to the Fintonic Financial Application, household technology spending has increased by 80% in the last year, partly as an emergency solution to leisure during confinements and also to be able to perform from home.The English Court has raised its sales by 33% in this chapter, with the peripherals in the lead: webcams, keyboards, monitors, mice ... Carrefour has also detected a substantial rise.

The stock market translation of this sudden increase in demand is patent.Although some analysts warn of a certain market saturation, PC manufacturers, chips and components (Intel, Dell, Apple, to name three) fly high in the parquet, near historical maximums.Investors also discount that teleworking has arrived to stay.

Less transport

Fuel consumption in large cities runs through a parallel lane."The average decrease in the first quarter is between 30% and 40%, but in the offices areas it is much higher," explains Ignacio Rabadán, general director of the Confederation of Service Station Entrepreneurs.Part has to do with mobility restrictions.But, above all, with teleworking, which defines as "a constant pounding" and the fraction "which will be the most difficult to recover"."A significant part of the fall has to do with remote employment," says the general secretary of the employer Aevecar, Víctor García, because "the customer who consumed most was the one who moved the car daily to go to the office".According to Fintonic, the budget for transport - collection and individual - has dropped 60% in one year.

Visits to the workshop follow the same tonic.With data from the Solera firm, repairs have dropped 22%: the displacements per city, which occupy (occupied) a large part of the comings and goings to the office, are also the ones that most wear out the car, support Jesus Carbajo, mechanicalthat I had never seen his Madrid workshop - open in 1985 - so empty.Half of the fall in his turnover directly links it to teleworking.According to Deloitte, one in five consumers is delaying the maintenance of your car and six out of ten the purchase of a new one.

Public transport in large cities is also passing those of Cain.While rolled traffic fell between 15% and 20% in 2020, collective transport did it by 50%.

Training and leisure, in streaming

Less displacement time, more time in the home and reduced expenses for the lowest departures have made many have been thrown into the arms of technology for their learning and leisure.“Streaming is the pretty child of the COVID: in Spain it has gone from an average of just over a home television platform at 2.8.A jump that has taken Disney+ to be present at 120 million homes in the world since its premiere, in November 2019, or Netflix to exceed 200 million, ”analyzes José Luis Nueno, professor at the IESE Business School.And also to hit a great ball in the stock market, where their actions have not stopped uploading.After Christmas, according to Deloitte, payment televisions are the only categories of discretion.Although Nueno believes that when people make normal life again, they will tend to cut the number of platforms or jump from one to another according to premieres and promotions.

The same will not happen with online training, which registered an increase in registrations of 280% following the COVID, according to a 2020 Udemy study, when internet consultations related to this type of education grew more than 500%, with Semrush data.A bombing that in 2021 attests Ángel Paris, director of the Master of Aeronautical Systems Management of the UPM: “This year we have had students in provinces such as Ciudad Real or in countries like Colombia who could not have attended in a normal year.The volume of students has grown 50% with the online format, ”.As in so many other sectors, he is "rethinking" the face -to -face formats.Virtuality and remote work are much more than a passenger fashion.