The Shared Workplace – A Look Ahead
s the COVID-19 pandemic becomes more contained, companies are looking to understand what their future workplaces will look like. At CommonGrounds, we believe more flexible and hackable spaces are the future for the working world. What this means in the long term will be debated for the months to come, but the debate certainly begins with questioning the efficacy of the traditional model: fixed purpose-built office spaces.
Conventional workspaces are not adaptive to the fast-changing needs of a company’s culture or an organization’s growth. When alterations need to be made, it isn’t as simple as removing a wall; such changes require building permits, consultants, contractors, labor – in short, time and money. Now, in the wake of COVID-19, there is the growing concern for the health and wellness of occupants, bringing into question interior air quality, durability and cleanliness of frequently touched surfaces, among other things. While the pandemic has far-reaching consequences, it does offer an opportunity to take a step back and think critically about how we have been working. What is flawed about traditional practices? How we can implement change to make the experience of working healthier, more productive and more enjoyable?
First, we must examine what defines the fixed purpose-built office space; until now, the answer has been seemingly straightforward. One of the most defining traits of a traditional office is fixed walls with heavy internal infrastructure, conduit for power, data, lighting controls, audio/visual controls, framing, multiple layers of gypsum board, etc. Heavy underlying infrastructure renders traditional office walls immovable without substantial investment of time and money. As a leading Workplace-as-a-Service provider, CommonGrounds recognizes these pain points. We have implemented products and technologies at our locations that significantly reduce the financial burden of modifying our spaces.
Much like the rigidity of a traditional office building, the mentality that accompanied the fixed office space was equally inflexible among corporate real estate professionals.
As people are forced to work from home in quarantine due to COVID-19, companies are learning that their employees can be just as productive as they were in the office. As CommonGrounds CEO Jacob Bates touched on in a recent post, the pandemic may entirely change the way organizations utilize physical space. “When we look at the future workplace, it will be less of a place to perform work and more of a place where business is conducted. This will require various typologies of spaces to accomplish different business activities, as the heads down individual contributing work will be completed remotely.”
Just as the densified open office of the last two decades created the need for the phone booth to provide moments of privacy in a crowded environment, this new “heads down at home” approach could free up real estate for innovative spaces in which people will come together to conduct business. Companies will have a decreased need for local desking as most people will be desking remotely in isolation from co-workers, shining a new light on the importance of the time we come together to collaborate.
But what about social distancing? Though popular opinion is that over time, the need to social distance will decrease, the benefits from a health and wellness perspective will influence our built environments for years to come. These new spaces will need to foster collaboration while simultaneously providing comfortable space between users, creating a challenging design hurdle. There is a lot we can learn from our current situation that can help inform solutions.
The new shelter-in-place orders have brought to light more than ever that we are social beings who require collaboration on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. Nearly every aspect of the social experience has gone virtual and people are finding a range of technology to support that. We need to integrate these technologies into our physical spaces – not only in support of our health and wellness, but to improve our modes of working.
Touchless, voice-activated controls can help maintain clean surfaces free of contagion and simplify workflow. Virtual Reality has been gaining momentum over the last decade and could be incorporated into business in many ways going forward. At CommonGrounds, our design and project management teams have been using Matterport Scans to do virtual walk-throughs of our construction sites while we are quarantined.
Sophisticated technology is of course not the only way forward for our shared workplace. Solutions that are more grounded in physical space will become more apparent when stay-in-place orders are lifted and a return to the office is underway. As the post-pandemic workplace becomes the new norm, CommonGrounds looks forward to working closely with businesses and landlords to identify and create the best office environments for their employees.
