A three-part series of articles to help guide you on how to design offices in a post-COVID world
In the past few months, I’ve given a lot of thought to how the office space will change in the coming years due to the COVID outbreak and the lasting effects on the work community, even after the pandemic is contained. I want to share these thoughts and with you through a series of articles on workplace design to help incorporate what I’ve learned from experience into actionable steps to improve your own office.
The first part of my three-part series will explore work areas. Part two will look at reception spaces, conference rooms, common areas and gathering spaces, and will explore the importance of mechanical systems. The final piece will help illustrate SUM’s general take and deep knowledge on what makes for good building design.
Whether you’re a small business owner, CEO, or head of HR, in the long run, your offices will not be the same, but they might work even better than before.
Part 1: Redefining work areas and how they function
Hand sanitizer on desks, one-way hallways and staggered work schedules will be the short-term norm in the current workplace. That’s a given. As a designer who has created countless workspaces, I’ve always strived to make them work better for their inhabitants, and COVID has amplified how I do that. Here’s how work areas will be redefined.
Less ‘benching,’ hot desking and don’t even think of returning to the mile-high workstations
You’ve seen these popular tables in many offices, typically facing each other, almost like a dining room or a farmhouse table where employees crowd around. Benching is popular because it saves space and creates clusters of collaboration. But the closeness that saves space also allows for the easy transmission of pathogens. Even after a vaccine, staff will naturally shy away from any work area that puts people within a few feet of one another.
During the next 12 months, there will be little usage of hot desking or desk sharing, with a steep decline in offices using hot desks for the next 2-6 years. Following this pandemic, people will suffer from a “COVID / Office PTSD,” and will not want to work in the office the same way as they did pre-COVID, or may not be allowed to. Post-COVID, employees just won’t want to use hot desks for fear of contracting the next big virus.
Additionally, we won’t, or at least shouldn’t, go back to the seven-foot tall fabric covered workstations that were so popular in the seventies and eighties. Remember giant open office spaces where everybody sat at their workstation and didn’t talk to anybody? That’s a trend no one will miss.
That said, we’ll need a happy medium, somewhere between a benching solution and the old school 8x8x7-foot-tall cubicle solution. We’re going to see solid elements between 48 to 54 inches. Above that, glass or plastics that will either be clear or offer an opportunity for graphic elements, from 48 inches up to 65 inches.
Some of the benefits that came from station heights dropping are that employees can be deep inside an office space and still see outside, see office activity and see daylight— important components to productivity and health. Lower panel heights also lead to spontaneous conversations, idea sharing and collaboration. We don’t want to lose these benefits.
There’s going to be a paradigm shift in workstation design too, not just in heights, but in the layout of the workstation and the acoustics. Undoubtedly, furniture manufacturers will adjust their design with workstations that aren’t necessarily rectangular, either. We’re going to start seeing different shapes that take up the same amount of floor space, but set up to accommodate the safety of employees.
Aisles between workstation clusters will grow in width to accommodate two-way traffic with enough room to pass comfortably. Typically aisles between work stations have been 42 – 48”. Look for an increase to 60” and beyond to give breathing room to staff as they move about the office.
The rise of modular systems in tenant improvements
If you’re about to start an office tenant improvement, there’s nothing less expensive than getting a contractor to go in and build some steel stud gypsum board walls to create an office. But it makes reconfiguring difficult and expensive because it’s time consuming, dusty, and inconvenient.
Enter modular systems: not only do they add aesthetics to a workspace, they can be easily disassembled, moved to a new location and put back together, without dust or time delay by a specialized contractor or an in-house facilities team. This will be important during the post-COVID design of offices when flexibility and speed will be key.
Systems like DIRTT, SMED, and Hayworth let you reconfigure a space to bring employees back now, but when the health crisis has subsided, workspaces can be quickly changed again to accommodate a different workflow cycle with little disruption to the space.
Though initial costs of a modular system can exceed traditional construction costs, these expenses can quickly pay for themselves, in terms of timeframes, cleanliness and mobility. Modular wall systems are likely to gain market share, thanks to COVID.
More web conferencing and new designs to meet it
In-person meetings will decrease as online meetings become the norm. That means you and your employees will have to get more savvy being “on the air.” In my own office, I've had to make adjustments to lighting, furniture layout, and background to accommodate web conferencing.
To be set up for an online call, the typical workstations will be replaced with shapes that break out of the typical rectangle. These new shapes will provide a clear entry point into the station, private areas, acoustical separation, and specific location for a monitor and camera so that a web conference can take place without overhearing your neighbor. Workstations and offices will be designed so that backgrounds will be less crowded, personalized, branded and flexible too.
It’s easy to envision a system of lighting at the entry to employees’ workstations or offices that illuminates green for “available,” yellow for “working,” or red when on a web conference. This type of scenario could be incorporated into the workstation furniture for a built-in appearance.
Parting thoughts
New policies, rules, and regulations might also drive the design of wellness spaces in the workplace that let employees rest if they’re feeling ill and need to be quarantined until they can be picked up and taken home. That’s a topic I’ll explore in a later piece.
Rethink windows, too. Many older offices have had their windows painted shut for decades. When your employees come back into the office, even if it’s warm or cold out, they’re going to want fresh air.
In my next piece, I’ll look at reception spaces, conference rooms, common areas, and gathering spaces. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me here or leave a comment in the post.
Our own offices, before COVID.
A typical mid-sized office, pre-COVID.
Using some of the ideas discussed here, we are transforming our own workspace to respond to challenges presented by COVID.
Same office, illustrating how to adjust to a permanent post-COVID environment, not just as a temporary solution.