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Re-emergence - a new future for the office environment

Alexandra Hatcher

If you are an office based organisation, have you started to re-think your office space for the future post-covid19? We think that our work life patterns and needs will be very different and with the proven ability to all work from home, what do we really need our office space to do for us? We will no longer need banks of desks and want to use our space for meaningful face to face interactions with our teams, customers and as a showcase for our employer brand.

Are any other companies looking to do a similar review and what ideas have you thought of initially? I would love to hear ideas on Facilities, People and Digitalisation.

Thanks for reading!

Alex

  • Hi Alex we ran a live twitter Q&A on this yesterday and you can look at the comments via this #AskTheCIPD link for interest! twitter.com/search

  • in reply to Keith
    We are London-based. The City currently still resembles a ghost town but this is London - I can't imagine it not bouncing back at some point. Urban spaces thrive on people interacting and all that entails. Human interaction being a driver for creative thought and innovation. Plus there is the more personal stuff that home workers will miss out on. London's demographic is younger than average, they often conduct their social lives at work, plus how many people have met their other halves when their eyes met across the copier?.

    More pragmatically, I know many people at my work would love to be in a proper office again, with a proper desk, and a printer and copier. People who live in London often don't have huge amounts of space to set themselves up.
  • I recently read a report from a company which makes most of its money through the development and leasing of commercial property (predominantly office space) and you'd think they'd be concerned by the prospect of companies downsizing, but interestingly they're not and it ties back to Alexandra's questions quite neatly.

    In the short-term, whilst offices will contain fewer people, they also have to accommodate social distancing, meaning that the same amount of space is needed for half the bodies.

    In the medium term, they expect offices to continue to be a visible sign of "success" (no one will want a smaller office, because it will look like they can't afford a bigger one!), but their use will shift away from, as Alexandra puts it, banks of desks to more imaginative spaces: a combination of private offices, hot desks, sharing spaces, break-out spaces and social areas.

    However, in the long term, they expect emerging companies to grow their office spaces more slowly and to make more use of shared space with other companies because they won't fear the risk of poor perception arising from a visible "down-sizing", but be able to spin it as part of their culture (environmentally and fiscally responsible). But the investors still expect to make money by simply charging more money per square metre.

    Ah. Capitalism.

  • Picking up again from Alexandra Hatcher's thread starter... another thought-provoking piece considering what coronavirus might do to our offices (and homes)...

    www.bbc.co.uk/.../idt-dc2d6e2d-3ab4-42de-8d03-bb7eda5fff8e

    7701.future.jpg