Zooming back to physical teams

Workers are returning to offices in greater numbers around the world – and Lightstone’s data suggests the same is happening in South Africa.

Research in other parts of the world suggests working at the office is more productive, but that in some cases workers are prepared to accept less pay to have the benefit of hybrid work lives, so quite where the patterns will go is too early to say.

In the Sandton CBD and the northern areas of Johannesburg, we see an increase in the number of visits lasting longer than two hours, but they are not yet back to pre-Covid levels.

Lightstone selected commercially active nodes in Sandton, Bryanston, Morningside, Woodmead and Sandown, to compare pre-Covid (August 2019) to current (August 2023) behaviour. We focused on trips arriving in the nodes between 6am and 12am where the duration was longer than two hours, which Lightstone considers a proxy for office visits.

Approximately 55% of trips in August 2023 stayed longer than two hours, higher than the 50% in 2022 but still down on the 60% in 2019. The numbers suggest people are returning to pre-Covid work patterns but are not quite there yet.

The patterns differed slightly depending on what day of the week it was, with most office visits taking place on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with the least office visits taking place on Fridays.

Two-hour plus dwell times

Overall average visit volumes were at 74% of pre-Covid levels, with Tuesday (78%), Wednesday and Thursday (76%) being closest to pre-Covid levels, followed by Mondays at 72%. Friday dropped to 65% of 2019 levels.

Two-hour dwell times: 2023 compared to 2019

Arrival times: August 2023

Most people arrive for work between 6am and 8am, with the hour from 7am to 8am being the busiest. Again, Fridays are different with arrivals significantly lower in the 6am-7am and 7am-8am peak.

And while Fridays were always marginally behind other days of the week the gap today is much bigger.

A lesser proportion of people arrive for work before 8am, with more arriving after 8am, probably because working hours are still flexible and workers have the luxury of not traveling during the peak hour.