Death of the workplace post Covid-19? No!

The workplace is often essential to the operation of a business and helps shape its internal culture, but some of the recent changes that we have seen are certainly here to stay (in some shape or form) and all businesses will need to adapt.

During these unprecedented times, many businesses have implemented short term changes to the workplace to allow for business continuity. Those changes may have been simply adjusting shift patterns to allow less interactions between employees or more drastic, like reconfiguring the workplace, or even implementing working from home.

In the longer term, the impact of COVID-19 is likely to significantly impact workplace design, from the possible death of large open plan offices and hot desking, increased use of working from home and video conferencing facilities, to the reduction in the number of worker ‘touchpoints’ by increased use of automated office design technology such as motion sensor doors and lifts and bathroom facilities, to the implementation of one way systems.

Here at AG we expect to see our clients and business partners:

Re-evaluate their property needs – Rolling out smaller brand hubs with lower overheads

Implement increased cleaning programmes - Particular attention being paid to high touch points including toilets and food preparation areas

Implement more flexibility – Working from home becoming more frequent

Introduce health screening – Visitors or even employees being asked to declare that they are fit and well before entering the workplace

Use more technology – High tech boardrooms being constructed to support video conferencing

Install more building services – Installation of air filtration systems etc.

Put more emphasis on employee hygiene – Provision of wall mounted hand sanitiser and warning signage

Provide collaboration space – The office being seen more as a place for teams to meet face to face and collaborate

Plan – Business continuity planning becoming the subject of annual testing (yes, the ‘what if’ scenario did happen and caught many companies off guard)

However, many businesses provide services which rely on teamwork or junior staff being supervised by more experienced staff, but most importantly they value the ‘culture’ which develops when people work together.

Post Covid-19 the challenge business leaders now face is make the workplace somewhere that employees want to be, but with any challenge there is also the possibility for great opportunity and the future of the workplace is certainly not dead!

So, if you ‘need your workplace to wow and work for you? Let’s Talk’. AG’s Workplace Consultancy team are on hand to meet all your workplace needs: