As coronavirus impacts our regular working lives for the foreseeable future, might this be the point that companies are forced to examine not just the way we work in terms of offering more remote working, but also how our offices are designed to promote health and wellbeing?
Firstly, while the pandemic may not permanently put an end to working in traditional office buildings, the global ‘work-from-home’ trial may mean a re-think, at the very least, of a change in office typology.
Although employers cite fostering better team working as the main reason for open plan layouts (though inevitably, cost-cutting has a lot to do with it), open space plans have often been unpopular with staff.
But as their employees work from home over the next few weeks at least, many employers may find that, ironically, their teams develop strong team-working bonds. Already, anecdotal evidence shows more teams are videoconferencing – or simply picking up the phone and speaking to their colleagues – rather than resorting to electronic communication, as tends to often happen in open-plan environments.
Secondly, those businesses that do have staff working in their offices are having to make sure they are suitably distanced from each other to prevent contracting the virus. That’s not a problem at the moment with most employees at home, so it could focus minds on how easily diseases can spread in modern offices.
According to research, whereas 20 years ago each worker was allocated on average more than 9 square meters of workspace, this has declined to around 7.33 square meters. And with co-working environments becoming more popular, this space is often far smaller for many workers: WeWork, for example, allocates just over 5 square meters per person across its global portfolio. We know close contact with a confirmed case hugely increases the risk of infection, so that makes the modern open-plan office environment where workers are packed densely together the extremely fertile ground for viruses like COVID-19.
Because we spend more time in offices today than any previous generation it becomes more important to think how we can design buildings to stop the spread of disease. To date, modern business has not had to cope with a virus like the one we’re seeing today. But the likelihood is that such pandemics will become much more frequent in the future. According to David Finnoff, an economist at the University of Wyoming College of Business, an old rule of thumb was that such pandemics happened about three times every century.
Since the turn of 2000, the world has already confronted a raft of viral shocks, including SARS in 2002 and 2003, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 to 2016, Zika in 2015 and Dengue fever in 2016. So even when we turn the tide on COVID-19, the likelihood of another virus impacting is high.
So, with that in mind, here are five tips for what employers should consider:
1. Consider making working from home arrangements more permanent – at least some of the time
While most employees may not want to work from home full-time, evidence shows that where it is an option for at least some of their week it has a significant impact. Research carried out by Stanford University of employees that worked from home at least for part of their week found employee productivity rose by 13.5% and job satisfaction increased.
2. Think about modifications to ‘one size fits all’ open plan designs
From offering private rooms to allow employees space to think, concentrate better, for taking calls and for meditation, to providing fun, comfortable areas that foster collaboration, think about building office spaces with different environments to maximize employee wellbeing.