Business info - issue 144

businessinfomag.uk magazine 14 OFFICE DESIGN As businesses prepare to welcome workers back into the office or, more likely, delay their return, many will be conducting health and safety assessments and working with stakeholders to create a COVID- secure workplace. The prospect of enforcing social distancing in offices might be daunting and against the grain for spaces that are designed to bring people together and which in recent years have been engineered to encourage movement, circulation, collaboration and spontaneous encounters. Yet, this very flexibility – combined with the inevitability of phased returns due to concerns about the safety and capacity of public transport, uncertainty over childcare/schooling and a more relaxed attitude to home working and flexi-time – will help businesses adapt to the new requirements and could produce long-lasting change. Businesses will have to implement stricter cleaning regimes and will probably want to provide face masks, gloves and hand sanitisers. They may want to put up perspex sneeze-screens or implement a one-way system around the office. In some cases, it may be necessary to widen corridors or reconfigure furniture to maintain social distancing and stop people sitting face to face. But, as bdg architecture + design CEO Gill Parker explains, these short- The COVID-secure office term measures will only work if they are combined with home working to reduce the number of people in offices. “The solution isn’t to significantly redesign office space – the solution is to recognise that home working and office working both have a place in the workplace mix.We are working with our clients to develop their Return toWork plans in the short term (home working), mid-term (offices reopen with reduced occupancy) and long-term (post-Covid, when homeworking will be a greater part of the mix than it was pre-Covid). If organisations focus only on getting everyone back into the office then we are facing a bleak future of a return to fixed desking and shift working, which is not suited to a positive and collaborative culture that we have all spent so much time cultivating.” Evidence suggests businesses are open to this argument, especially in the London, where half of workers rely on public transport to get to jobs that could be done just as well from home. In a survey of 1,550 lockdown workers by cybersecurity software company SentryBay, 63% said they wanted to spend at least some of their working week at home in the future; 23% said they wanted to work full time at home once the pandemic was over. For Parker, the ease with which people and organisations have adapted to mass home working is one of the big gains of the last two months. “The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the untapped potential of 'remote working' and in a single moment accelerated its large-scale adoption.With mass recognition that infrastructure, technology platforms and people can all be trusted to work effectively and remain productive in isolation, organisations are now free to empower their staff to choose to work in the setting that best suits them, including the home. In a sector that continually feels the need to debate along polar lines (e.g. open plan vs. cellular) organisations should not feel the need to choose between home or office; this is not the ‘death of the office’ as many are predicting.” She adds that this is just something that employers and employees will have to get used to and accept. “We have to approach the change to our workplace experience in the same way we approach an upgrade to our smartphones. Millions of people will do it, at the same time, all over the world. Most people will not be entirely sure why they need it or 100% sure of what it involves, but they will do it anyway, with the expectation that at the very least they gain an upgraded end product with added features and improved performance.” Long-term changes Dr Greg Lavery, Director of Rype Office, a manufacturer and supplier of remanufactured office furniture, is another who predicts long-term changes to the way offices are organised, beyond short-term social distancing tactics such as staggered starts and morning and afternoon shifts. “When COVID came along a couple of months ago, the world was well positioned to adopt agile working and home working, because all the IT and communications technologies needed were in place. COVID has shown that people can work at home and, what’s more, that they like working at home. The question for employers is how many people are going to want to come back to the office and how many people do they want to have in the office, if they can be perfectly productive at home. “Imagine if you can say to staff ‘We are happy for you to work 2 or 3 days a week at home’. If you happen to live in Reading or Swindon that is a good option, and that will attract new In Part 1 of our series on office design, we ask suppliers how they think COVID-19 will affect the workplace.Will it mean the end of open plan? Will it mean the end of the office? Or will the changes be more subtle? Continued... Gill Parker, CEO, bdg architecture + design Rype Office

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