The post COVID-19 office design: Open space but not so much.
New buildings with a hybrid organization will be necessary.
The so-called new normal has introduced a different frequency of attendance to the office. One extended approach among corporations is to concentrate their employees once or twice per week on a team-based approach in order to reduce the risk of contagion. Many other alternatives exist, but as a guiding principle offices must not exceed a certain capacity to ensure social distance.
As a result of these changes the next question everyone is starting to ask is: how the post COVID-19 workplace will look like?
This question arrives after a period where both the private and public sector were precisely debating whether or not to move towards an open space design. To provide an answer updated to the new times I have gathered the comments and feelings from my colleagues after the lockdown period. Therefore, let us start with those needs employers should bear in mind when setting up the physical working environment for the next years.
Considerations for the future office design
- Ease to organize and attend meetings: One positive aspect of teleworking is the possibility to attend multiple meetings in an easy way. For that, IT office equipment, personal offices and meeting rooms will need to be fully functional. Forget about labyrinthine buildings with long corridors and different elevators to reach a meeting room without a videoconferencing system.
- People first, design second: In the past, architects and interior designers have made many awful mistakes due to their obsession with extravagant shapes and strange conceptions. New office set up must prioritise people with environments that make staff happier, better motivated and more productive. Employees aim to be close to nature with wood furniture and a better use of sunlight.
- Contribution to reduce CO2 emissions: If everyone agrees on something, it is on avoiding long commuting times to and from work. The idea of locating the company headquarters in the neuralgic center of the city or in the outskirts may not be convenient any more. Smart cities will have to integrate residential and office buildings with green areas, providing and array of services including shopping, education and leisure, all accessible under the umbrella of a sustainable mobility.
- Homeschooling cannot be a problem: Employers and new office buildings will have to support parents. With children exposed more an more to online classes at a younger age, the future workplace should provide the required physical and digital tools to do so. Parents should not feel they must leave their jobs for the care of their children.
- Canteen and cafeteria services: Canteens have been targeted because employees admit to eat better at home and at a lower price. Plastic trays with convenience food are not the future. The increasing of teleworking will irretrievably boost the reduction of canteen services, but this change must be accompanied by an improvement of food quality. On the other hand, cafeteria services will become practically irrelevant as soon as open spaces are adequately equipped with coffee pots, kettles and toaster ovens.
What is coming next?
There is still a lot of conjecture about how the post COVID-19 will look like in the long term, but we can bet that the global pandemic will change the workplace forever. Based on the above-mentioned considerations it is clear that new buildings with a new organization are necessary to satisfy the future workforce needs.
The future office design will not have to follow necessarily an open space design, but a new hybrid concept that ensures social distance and meets new personal and collective needs will arise.
For that, employers will have to find a balance. The changes to reconfigure the workplace will be likely to imply practicing physical distancing even when a vaccine is administrated. As a result, the main refurbishment works can be expected to be focused on moving desks apart, adding touch-free doors, enhancing ventilation and safety systems, as well as introducing meeting rooms with variable seating capacity and modern IT equipment that enable the communication between those who are working from office and from home.
Particularly on interior design, the trend goes beyond beautiful furniture and potted plants. Employees want a good understanding of the time of day, seasons and weather. This conception should be coupled with a clear appetite for a digital workplace.
New office equipment must be an enabler to a more agile way of working.
This includes, for example, electric standing desks and collaborative tools. Employers should also seize the window of opportunity to reinforce the nature of their business. The future workplace must be on the opposite side of the casino model.
Creating a sustainable workplace based on a green culture will require to reduce the overall ecological footprint during construction and over the life of the building. In consequence, corporative culture will need to be transformed accordingly. To incorporate recycled and responsibly produced materials, install sensors to control lights in low use areas and going paperless can be considered as a fundamental first step. However, the real impact will come from the workforce, when — and only when — the green corporative message has percolated in every employee. By that time, saving practices will be effectively reflected.
Risks and opportunities
The 2020s is going to be a fascinating decade for everyone. With regard to office working, we should address this period as an inflection point in the transition towards more balanced and dynamic workplaces where work-life balance is the norm and not a ‘Friday possibility’.
Employers will have to adapt real state to the people and their employees needs. This can be seen for companies, especially big corporations, as an opportunity to reduce operating costs. However, the workforce must be vigilant to keep essential services such as canteens or child care, ensuring these are adapted to the new demand with an improve in the quality.
IT services have demonstrated their crucial role during the pandemic. They will make real the workplace digitalization which hitherto has served to minimize the spread of the virus and maintain critical services.
In the future, its importance will be systemic, where artificial intelligence will have a direct impact on enterprise productivity and profitability. Here big corporations and public entities have a competitive advantage towards small and medium-sized enterprises, typically with more limited resources and less capacity to a quick response.
The opportunity ahead of us is to make the office even better than it was before the crisis.
As employer or employee you can steer this change.
