Business info - issue 144

businessinfomag.uk magazine 16 OFFICE DESIGN employees. Home working will become part of the employment package,” he said. Lavery added: “One client told me they can imagine offices becoming like private clubs where you come in to meet and to mingle, to collaborate, to train, to learn, but if you have a day to write a paper you do that at home. “You can imagine a world where organisations adopt a hub and spoke model – a private members club-type office in central London and a series of satellite offices on the perimeter that staff who live outside London can pop into for 15 minutes to do their photocopying, collect their mail and engage and interact with colleagues. The satellite office might only have 20 desks and a really good coffee machine and some sofas and a pool table, but it might save people from having to trek into central London every day. “Imagine how that changes the whole fabric of working in London. It means fewer people in the middle; real estate prices go down; you may get rejuvenation of the High Street where those offices are set up; little villages re-emerging.” Such trends have been talked about for 20 or 30 years, and while there have been developments, both in the design of offices and the variety of workspaces available (e.g. shared office space), people still spend huge amounts of time and money commuting into offices in the centre of town.Will things really be different this time? Desire for change For IanWeddell, UK CEO of Swiss manufacturer USM, it all depends on how long the crisis lasts. “COVID-19 can only be eradicated through herd immunity or immunisation, and it will take 18 months to get proper immunisation internationally. Until then, the only way to keep the virus down is to drastically change the nature of social interactions, so there could be a massive change in our business lives for the next two years. If that is the case, there will be a sea-change in the way things develop. If it soon blows over and we all go back to work and back to watching rugby and football and drinking in bars, it will be forgotten. But I don’t think that will be the case,” he said. “Personally, I think there will be a big change in office requirements going forward. Just today Barclays was saying they might need to make a long-term adjustment to their whole location strategy. Do they need 7,000 people in CanaryWharf? Or would it be better to get their teams out into branches operating as local business hubs? The bigger companies will certainly be looking to change,” he said. Weddell believes that this will have consequences for the type of furniture organisations select, putting a premium on modularity, flexibility and durability – all hallmarks of the Haller table system that USM has been making since 1965. “We don’t know what each business needs, but given that the product is flexible and adaptable, there’s a variety of things we can do. For example, we supply a lot of reception desks and we have created a metal attachment that lets you mount a perspex screen. Or, where tables are configured in a bench, instead of placing a bag saying ‘Do Not Sit Here’ over every other desk, we could reconfigure the product and put storage between side-by-side desks to give people their 2 metres distance. “People will need flexible, adaptable solutions for their office requirements, because no one is quite sure what will be required in the next few years. Our product, because of its durability and modularity, is well placed to support people in that way,” he said. Common sense approach Jonathan Hindle, Group Managing Director - EMEA, KI, is more sanguine than most about the challenges involved in making a workplace COVID-secure, questioning the need for wholesale changes to office environments, especially those that have been ...continued... ...continued... Dr Greg Lavery, Director, Rype Office Rype Office IanWeddell, UK CEO, USM