8 Ways CoVid-19 Could Change Office Design

COVID-19 has upended working life, changing how and where people do their jobs.

With the lifting of Enhanced Community Quarantine to Modified & General Community Quarantine, organizations should plan how to adapt offices to comply with social distancing rules.

1. Office workstations

 Transforming existing offices into places where the six-feet distance rule can be observed. Since people must not sit together, size of office desks are expected to enlarge.

2. Simple Solutions

How to keep desks clean? As well as obvious additions such as more hand sanitizers, some deceptively simple changes could help.

 For example, employees can grab a paper placemat for their desk – like the ones fast food chains put on their trays. At the end of the day, the paper is thrown away, which could help mitigate COVID-19 spreading on surfaces.

3. Closed Plan

Office fashion for decades included open-plan working - with more common rooms for employees to work and chill together. But COVID-19 reverse this mega-trend, leading to a closed-plan setup with cubicles. 

4. More signs

Think road markings, but for offices. From putting duct taped lines in lobbies to standing spots in elevators, and from circles around desks to lanes in corridors, the floors and walls of our offices are likely to be covered in visual instructions.

Another possible approach is to encourage employees to walk clockwise, creating one-way flow to minimize transmission, as adopted by many hospitals during the current outbreak.

5. Technology

Companies may also need to invest in a new suite of contactless technologies to reduce disease transmission such as office doors that open automatically using motion sensors or facial recognition time-in/out clocks.

6. Fresh Air

With good ventilation being key to preventing the spread of COVID-19, a big trend could be simply opening a window - if windows can be opened, that is, since many offices in key business districts are now sealed, controlled units.

7. Co-Working

2019 recorded a boom in co-working spaces where startups share rooms – or in some cases, desks. But could this change post-virus?

8. Greetings

Handshakes are out, and look likely to remain so for some time to come. But new greetings have emerged.

But will home-workers want to return to their original workplaces? Would companies want to return when remote working could save them money? Even though some problems arise like low productivity and poor communication, these can be addressed with strong oversight and right messaging tools for the job.