It has been three months since the British government announced the end of all remaining pandemic-related restrictions in England as part of its “living with Covid” plan. Even the legal requirement to self-isolate after testing positive for the virus was scrapped. Yet, in a sign of the extent to which the shift to homeworking has proved more popular than expected, causing hybrid working practices to become firmly entrenched, average office occupancy rates in London last month were running at just a quarter of pre-pandemic levels, data from Remit Consulting shows. In the US, where most states and cities have dropped their indoor mask mandates as part of a strategy to treat the virus as endemic, average occupancy rates in 10 leading office markets tracked by Kastle Systems stood at 43 per cent on May 11, and were as low as 39 per cent in New York. The findings of a global survey carried out in February by WFH Research, a project run by a group of American universities that studies working arrangements and preferences, revealed that Britain had one of the highest numbers of paid working days from home. Several Asian countries, however, were among the nations that had the lowest. Since the pandemic erupted, one of the most notable trends in the commercial real estate industry has been the resilience and appeal of traditional offices in Asia. This is most apparent in China, which accounted for two-thirds of net take-up in Asia-Pacific office markets last year, data from Cushman & Wakefield shows. While the relatively strong performance of the region’s office markets is attributable to a host of factors, the limited disruption caused by the shift to homeworking – with the exception of Australia which has mirrored trends in Britain and America – partly explains why there has been a lot less uncertainty over the future of the sector in Asia. In Shanghai, whose grade A office stock is the third largest in the region after Bangalore and Tokyo, net take-up last year hit an all-time high of 1.5 million square metres, data from JLL shows. Leasing activity, moreover, was driven by solid demand for expansion from financial services, technology and professional services firms. However, since the start of this year, China, which won plaudits for being “first in, first out” of the pandemic, has endured its worst Covid-19 outbreak since the virus emerged in Wuhan. The protracted citywide lockdowns that served as the catalyst for mass homeworking in Britain and the US, and triggered the shift to a hybrid world of work, are now being implemented in China, with Shanghai facing the mother of all draconian shutdowns. The nearly two-month-long lockdown of the nation’s financial and commercial hub has given rise to a mass homeworking experiment that is forcing many companies, particularly private firms, to take flexible working more seriously . With its large number of multinational companies, flourishing tech sector, fast-growing decentralised districts and crucial role in helping the city achieve its ambition of becoming a global financial centre, Shanghai’s office market is fertile ground for the testing of new workplace strategies in China. Yet, while pandemic-induced lockdowns created a seismic shift in working and living patterns in the UK and the US, their impact in China is blunted by important cultural, technological and economic factors. First, like other Asian countries, notably Japan, most Chinese firms maintain traditional office settings with assigned desks for employees. Flexible workplace operators have made limited inroads in Shanghai and Beijing, unlike in Central London where they accounted for nearly 20 per cent of take-up just before the pandemic erupted. Chinese companies’ mindsets, moreover, are more conservative. An acute sensitivity to the drawbacks of homeworking makes changes to the workplace more problematic. “Corporate culture takes a long time to change,” said Tammy Tang, managing director of Colliers in Shanghai. What is more, employees themselves are more sceptical about hybrid working, mainly because they are more attached to the office environment and find it more difficult to work from home regularly – concerns that are shared by many office workers in Western countries. Second, high-quality offices in Shanghai and Beijing, which are often owned by occupiers, are technologically more advanced than their counterparts in London and New York, increasing their appeal. A survey of Chinese tech companies carried out by CBRE in early 2020 revealed that over half had already installed facial recognition technology at entrance points in their buildings, with some having even installed them at checkout points in their in-house cafeterias. Third, lockdown-induced disruption to Shanghai’s economy means further disruption to supply chains when the global economy and markets are in turmoil. Home to the world’s busiest container port, and responsible for 20 per cent of China’s international trade, “Shanghai is not just Shanghai”, said Tang. Work from home: a revolution in the making This raises the stakes for big companies with large workforces, reducing the incentive to make radical changes to working practices. Reports of thousands of workers in Shanghai’s financial sector bedding down in their offices to avoid restrictions have been a hallmark of the city’s brutal lockdown. Just as predictions of the death of the office in London and New York were way off the mark, the assertion that flexible working has no future in Shanghai is equally erroneous. What is clear, however, is that the traditional office environment is more secure in China, even with the risk of further citywide lockdowns. Nicholas Spiro is a partner at Lauressa Advisory