People aren't avoiding city offices because they are scared of losing their life. It's because they are in fear of getting their old life back.

Lockdown confirmed something we've all suspected for a long time. We simply don't need to be commuting every day into cities during a two hour window at the start of each day and then out again in another at the end of it, just to spend that day sat at a computer or having a smattering of internal meetings.

Even if the supporting infrastructure worked as it should, travelling to and from an office every day to sit at the same laptop you can use from home, connecting to the same network you access from home would be mad enough but throw into the equation a travel network that is so far off the level it needs to be - especially when we are ALL using it during the same four hour slot each day - and you are touching on total insanity. Trains and roads have long been off a standard that is even acceptable for travel and most rush hour journeys into and out of U.K. cities are miserable and totally unpredictable, which not only impacts your own life but also your ability to support your children and other loved ones and for many means even a basic social life during the week is totally off the cards.

But with the majority of employers still either officially or unofficially (via a culture of presenteeism) expecting many workers to spend most of the week in the office, pre-lockdown city commuting looked to be here for good, along with the miserable realities that came with it.

Then Covid hit us. And with it we and our employers were forced to make home-working, work. The laptops we'd all been carrying in bags on our backs for years were suddenly critical and video meetings went from rare or occasional to daily...or hourly. And over-night it was proven that most of us could indeed do our jobs to the same standard from home and save that precious commuting time with little or no immediate downside.

That's why most people are fighting returning to work in cities. Not because they are scared of Covid, but because they are scared of it going back to the old way. They are used to seeing more of their partner, children, pets, family and friends. They are enjoying a hobby again and keeping themselves fit and healthy. These are things that are not going to be given up easily.

So is that, that then? The commercial sectors of our cities are dead for good and the businesses that rely on the associated trade may as well give up? No! Why? Because how it is now is not going to work for long either. Most homes are not set-up or big enough for working at home for five days a week, especially where more than one of the household works. Most people enjoy or crave the social interactions of a workplace and most businesses benefit from the creativity and productivity of people working together in person, not just over video. The best working relationships are created when people are together, at least for some of the time and that avoids the damaging misunderstandings and miscommunications that are inevitable in a 'virtual only' world. Then there's the potential damage to home-life; sometimes we need the differentiation that the working week brings to weekends and holiday periods to bring balance to our family lives.

Rather than try and fix the current problem by seeking ways of 'getting things back to how they were', why not use this as an opportunity to make things as they should be. Here are my thoughts on how to do this:

1) Encourage everyone to work a blended week, where they spend part of it in the office and part at home, depending on where they are most effective. This cannot just be something that is said once a quarter in a news letter or instigated and owned by HR, it has to be a top-down promise from leaders that this is the way we are expected to work and it has the full backing of leadership who will also be working this way.

2) Make it absolutely clear that travelling to the office outside of rush hour is fine. If you have a meeting at 1pm, you can work from home in the morning and arrive for the meeting. You can leave straight after it and work from home again in the afternoon if that is best too. The concept of doing what you need to do, from where you need to do it trumps the policy of always being in the office.

3) Set up office spaces to specifically meet the needs of a blended working week. Do away with traditional seating and meeting rooms and install shared working environments, hot-desks, quiet pods (for confidential conversations and client phone calls) and meeting areas with good facilities for video conferencing (so people at home can easily connect to office meetings too). This has the added benefit of being much easier to make 'Covid secure' too.

4) Give the power to managers to figure-out who needs to be where and when. Do not try and enforce blanket policies or rules across an entire organisation. Empower your managers to get the balance right; one that drives collaboration and fosters relationships whilst maximising productivity but that doesn't see people commuting or travelling for the sake of it.

5) Really work on your performance management processes. If you have a process that you can trust to drive measurable performance across all levels of the organisation and that focuses on outputs rather than clock-watching, there is no reason to be worried about where people are working from.

Once people really believe that things have changed for the better and returning to city offices doesn't mean returning to life as it was before, I believe we will see cities getting busier again pretty quickly. But keep trying to get people back to how it was and I'm not sure we will ever get there.

I recognise this doesn't apply to everyone and understandably some folks are worried about catching the virus and that is why they choose to remain working at home. Likewise some jobs have to be done from the office all of the time and for these people and their employers they have to find other ways of striking a balance.

About the author: Jon Bennett has worked in HR, resourcing and workforce technology consulting for over 20 years. Living and working in cities across the U.K. as well as in the Middle East and US.