The COVID-19 Design Effect…
The beginning of 2020 saw the world come to a standstill as COVID-19 found its way to all parts of the globe. Employees and Students were sent home and suddenly personal hygiene and contact between humans became a consideration of heightened proportions. Many cannot remember the joy found in the days of large group gatherings, Friday night after work drinks, close contact music concerts and even the simple weeknight hotpot. The once exciting activity of plane travel has come to represent a metal tube of potential diseases as the world waits thirsty for daily global updates and a vaccine.
The unexpected rise of a change we never knew we needed…
As a designer, I am forced to wonder what the effects of COVID-19 will be on the workplace environment. Perhaps this time of immense disruption will be the catalyst for innovation and positive global improvements in the way we work?
Companies in China very recently went back to work and we have already started to see reactions and requests for new measures to make the office space more hygienic. While the first wave of requests involve quite logical and easy adjustments/additions such as desk shielding and barriers, I believe this is just the beginning of a wide spectrum of requests to tackle the challenges of the post COVID-19 world.
As economies and organisations desperately want to find some sort of normality to avoid financial loss that will be very hard to recover from, I am curious to see how organisations will consider not only the physical design of a space but also the emotional impact that the office will now have on employees returning to the place that was only recently considered a potential petri dish.
The physical space
As organisations will have their workforce at least partially returning to office spaces, they will enter a world that was left in a pre-covid stage. These spaces will change from there and the desires such as shielding or distancing seem to mark just the beginning of change and adaptation to a new world in which we work. The spaces we work in will not change overnight to a dramatically redesigned environment. Instead, we are about to enter a longer phase of prototyping. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t. What are new best practices and what will simply continue functioning as before. Gradually and over time, we will reach a state that is often referred to as ‘the new normal’.
* Furniture and Floor-plans: Organisations will need to rethink their spaces. How will employees feel safe in an the open plan office? What adaptations will be required to have workers feel less ‘exposed’? Organisations will have to consider not only the physical surfaces but also the air quality. A new attention will go the air we breathe in spaces. I think in the near future, we will see an acceleration in material innovation for office spaces as well as the interior they hold. This is not too surprising when we look at the by now common reflex of asking for antibacterial surfaces. However as we are gradually working towards ‘the new normal’, the true potential of humanizing performance spaces will lay in an older recipe: Smart and integrated floorplan designs, allowing a full palette of nuanced solutions playing together.
* Digital Transformation: This global virus will no doubt be the catalyst for digital transformation for many organisations. COVID-19 left organisations and their employees no choice but to rapidly adopt technologies such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams on a global scale. This rapid adaptation will no doubt become in some ways part of ‘the new normal’ moving forward which will also allow for even greater flexibility around where we work from. Next to the obvious employee facing digital transformations such as communication and collaboration tools, it will be interesting to see if organisations take this opportunity to ‘keep the ball rolling’ and accelerate the implementation of other digital solutions while the winds of change are blowing. We can certainly already assume that a true ‘new normal’ world will be a much more digitized one.
* A new level of certification: Will COVID-19 be the catalyst for a new level of building certification that will include certain standards of air circulation/filtering and perhaps even temperature checks for every inhabitant? And with time, could these certifications become a differentiator and recruitment tool for top talent?
* Employee Innovation: In the interim, employees may also be the inspiration behind new designs as they return to work with varying levels of caution and begin to build makeshift solutions. The open plan may temporarily resemble a shanty town as employees bring their beliefs and theories about contagious diseases (and how to deal with them) back to work. Organizations creating close feedback and documented learning cycles with employees will be very well placed to learn quickly about what matters most to their staff and how to make space work again.
The emotional realm
The emotional side of COVID-19 is one many organisations have not yet considered but I believe it is certainly something that cannot be ignored. How will employers handle the potential new ‘contact anxiety’ staff will feel? Will organisations that have opted for the freedom/agility of the hot desk have to find a new way to sterilise with every temporary tenant or has COVID-19 killed the design solution all together?
Designers will be faced with the brief of how employees can work in safe, hygienic (and sometimes yes crowded) environments. Organisations will need to introduce new tools and protocols into the workplace for the emotional wellbeing of their staff. Hand sanitiser available at every turn, face masks made as readily available as coffee/tea/milk and stationery, temperature checks on arrival and crowd control in the office.
Next to the office space itself it is the commute to work that will now be considered as a risky endeavour by many employees. While over time office spaces can again become spaces of trust, the intricacies of the metropolitan commute are hard to control for each individual travelling in cramped in buses, trains and the final transcend in the elevator. As organisations start to think holistically of the post COVID-19 challenges to master, it would be wise to consider the commute as a piece of the ‘staff experience’ puzzle. Organised and considered staff transfers might become an extension of an organisations ‘space of trust’.
Respect behaviours. Adjust the landscape
The global work from home (WFH) experiment is one I believe will not be forgotten and as the world comes back towards some sort of normality, I believe that WFH will change and shift parts of the landscape of work more significantly than we anticipate at this point. Working from home for many organisations will become a part of the new blueprint. At the same time there will always be a need for office environments, even if they will start to look and feel different. At Steelcase, we spend millions of dollars annually in research and development to understand how people work effectively together. These insights cannot deny the importance of face to face collaboration — something that COVID-19 cannot take away.
I suspect designers will see an increase in the requests for designing office environments that focus more on collaboration and interaction. In fact, these functions may well become the primary consideration for an office space. Studies show that coming together and using analog tools is a much more effective way to maintain flow and problem solve compared to using digital tools (when remote working). So if collaboration and connection is a non-negotiable, then the challenge will be for companies to facilitate this need in the right environment while making sure their employees feel safe — a primal need that cannot be ignored. Employees may find themselves working from home for individual tasks and then commuting to the office when collaboration is required. Employees may be asked to come into the office on a shift basis to reduce the number of bodies in the office.
At some point COVID-19 will be perceived as ‘manageable’. Once the major impact on our lives feels less painful; either through acceptance or developed solutions, we might collectively declare this the arrival of ‘the new normal’. Until then, we are embarking on an intense learning curve on all fronts and scales as we ride the wave of various ‘new normals’ while prototyping our way out of this.
