Navigating What’s Next: The Post-COVID Workplace offers strategies for retrofitting, reconfiguring and reinventing the workplace to create offices that are as safe as possible. We share design guidelines and thought starters as well as safety guidelines.
During the shutdown, every company was forced to hunker down and keep things going. Established teams learned to use video conferencing to have meetings and individuals could use email and enterprise resource planning systems to sustain existing processes. That was the easy part. Similar to the yellow caution light in auto racing, during
the shutdown competitors mostly stayed in their lanes and held their position. That’s all about to change.
As the economy reopens, the competition will be intense.
The crisis has created new challenges and new opportunities in almost every industry. Every competitor will try to respond. The winners will be those who most clearly understand their customer’s needs, collaborate to identify multiple solutions, prototype and iterate quickly, bring new ideas to market and make the risky decision to invest at scale. Digital transformation initiatives will need to accelerate to redefine every element in the value chain. Culture will never be more important as companies focus on innovation, speed, and risk-taking. The winners will be those who can reactivate, redeploy, and reengage talent most effectively. The losers will be those who stay hunkered down too long and miss the moment when the light turns green.
This experience has also impacted everyone's wellbeing at work – their physical, cognitive, and emotional wellbeing. Some people easily made the transition to working from home and will want to have the option of working remotely in the future. Others struggled because of inadequate space, furniture, worktools, and bandwidth. Some faced challenges balancing work demands and family expectations, while others were affected by loneliness. Everyone experienced health-related anxiety as we wore masks to go grocery shopping, crossed the street to avoid crossing paths with neighbors, and worried about those who were not following the rules. Everyone will return to a workplace changed in some way, though expectations will be different from person to person, and could create new tensions across generations at work. These new sensibilities will affect how leading companies attract, retain, and inspire talent for many years.