The end of activity based working and other surprises

The office we left in March will be vastly different when we return to it after lock down.

It's time to grieve (or celebrate, depending on your viewpoint) the shift away from the shared workplace. The modern office environment as we knew it, in which face-to-face collaboration and mobility was a basic tenant, is no longer safe. Our workplaces were deliberately designed to increase the likelihood of bumping into colleagues. It was an environment in which we moved around regularly and shared resources and spaces in order to maximise efficiencies and help break down organisational silos. This was activity based working at its finest.

These basic tenants of workplace design will now be a thing of the past, or at least until a vaccine for COVID-19 is found. The resulting demise of aspects we considered to be mainstays of the effective modern workplace makes a long list:

• Our understanding ownership will need to change. People will be assigned their own workpoint for either a day or a week, and work from home on other days.

• The notion of sharing space will also change; sharing will occur, but between smaller groups. Rather than having the entire organisation accessing a central hub, smaller neighbourhoods may be created in which the amenities and support spaces are shared amongst less people, thus minimising the chance of the virus spreading through the entire organisation.

• Encouraging people to move around the office and work from a variety of different positions, aka activity based working, will need to be curtailed. No one wants an asymptomatic person spreading the virus from their desk, to a quiet room, to a meeting room.

• The purposely designed 'bump' spaces in order meet colleagues from other departments are now potentially dangerous. Having large central gathering spaces where we would make coffee, read the shared newspaper and grab an Arnotts biscuit from the shared cookie tin will no longer be possible.

• Our pragmatically sized 1.5m wide corridors suddenly are too narrow. If corridors can't be widened by removing adjacent workstations, new circulation routes that denote one-way only traffic will become the norm.

Other changes to our workplaces will involve the following:

• Low or non existent partitions at workstations may be replaced by higher perspex partitions.

• Hygiene stations will be commonplace, allowing people to clean their hands upon entering the workplace, and periodically throughout the day.

• No-touch design solution encompassing automation and voice activation for lifts, meeting rooms and doors for instance will become the norm, to limit the amount of surfaces we touch.

• The maximum occupancy of meeting rooms will be dialled down, while the technology capability will be dialled up; a 20 person board room could morph into a 10 person meeting room with great capacity for virtual meetings. All of a sudden organisations will find themselves with a multitude of meeting rooms with smaller occupancy capacity, as well as small meeting rooms that will need to be converted into offices due a new maximum occupancy of one person.

Fitting less people in

What is an acceptable density will also have a seismic shift. We had been seeing more dense workplaces due to decreases in the number and size of offices, smaller work points overall, and a greater take-up of 'alternative' work points. What was a typical density of 8-10 sqm density on the workfloor will cease to be appropriate in a COVID-19 world. Many organisations have responded by physically removing chairs, or marking as 'off-limits' every second task chair and workstation. The latest study on transmission rates in a call-centre in Korea, in which the density was typically tight, showed"alarmingly that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can be exceptionally contagious in crowded office settings such as a call centre.”

The blue patches indicate the workstations of infected call centre staff.

Image: KCDC/CDC

Having conducted observational studies for organisations across Australia for almost two decades, there is no disputing that workplaces are historically under-utilised, with an average 40% occupancy at the work point over the course of the day. 40% occupancy in theory is great in a COVID-19 world, however the reality is very different. A 40% occupancy does not guarantee that people are physically distant from each other, nor does it address the peaks and troughs of occupancy, or staff moving freely around the office and working in different positions, and potentially spreading the virus.

A rethink of how our workspace is used is more critical that ever before. Though it is relatively straightforward to mark with an 'X' every other workstation and make other changes to the physical environment, the behavioural and cultural shifts required from staff will be more difficult and require more effort to address successfully.

Julia Simmons is the founder of Space Matters, a strategic workplace consultancy. She has over 20 years experience helping organisations around the globe develop workplace strategies.

Email Julia for more information

Julia.simmons@spacematters.com.au