Changing trend in the post-covid-19 workplace

It is the heart of many corporate and social organizations where employees can come together face-to-face, share information, brainstorm ideas, and socialize around the canteen/eating area. It is also an ideal vehicle for imparting corporate culture and values, and enable teams to bond through shared activities and experiences.

This can sometimes lead to new insights, connections, innovations and opportunities. The natural instinct of humans is to find places where they can gather to socialize and crave interaction with others. However, the prolonged lockdown has made many people to feel cut off from others and missing the camaraderie of being in the office.

In today’s current circumstances, facility managers are working to ensure the workplace of tomorrow is definitely not going to look like the office of yesterday. Many employees, previously working traditional hours in the office will permanently change their approach when we emerge from COVID-19 as a result of a new way of working.

Read also: Businesses fret as second wave of COVID-19 encircles Nigeria

The new trend for the future workplace is “work from anywhere.” Forward-thinking organizations have been embracing telecommuting for some time, because the old 1:1 employee/desk ratio no longer makes sense when people spend less time at the office. Instead, it will be more efficient to have employees sign up for the workspace they need when required, – reflecting both changing the employee’s needs and the pressure to reduce overhead costs.

The lessons learned during the Covid-19 lockdown has led to the need for a rethink. While many organizations previously resisted telecommuting, they have learned during lockdown that many people can work productively from home. Organizations that were not keen to accommodate remote work have made adjustments to ensure employees change their day-to-day practices by communicating through and with online tools

Three trends that will gain momentum in the post-COVID-19 era:

•Agile working. The pandemic has greatly accelerated the shift towards agile working that was already underway. Agile working encompasses more than just working from home, it increases productivity, motivation and collaboration because of the flexibility it creates and the loss of manhours due to traffic.

• Activity- based working. Activity-based working (ABW), a result of the agile working trend, is an approach by which organizations provide a variety of workspaces to accommodate employees’ different needs at different times, depending on the specific task at hand.

•Planned seating. One of the biggest concerns right now is how to get the employees back to the workplace safely and social distancing will be a large part of the solution. Organisation can achieve this by using space management software to accommodate social distancing rules.

For example, it will give employees the option to sign up for desks and other work areas with appropriate distances from colleagues, and in the event that someone has a confirmed case of COVID-19, desks and rooms used can easily be traced and those nearby identified. Planned seating can also be used for other strategic purposes.

It is clear that the workplace is changing and a new normal is emerging to create a safer work environment. At the same time, the global remote working experiment has shown organizations the benefits of more flexible, agile work arrangements.

It is important for the organizations/facility managers that intend to thrive to embrace new ways of thinking and lessons learned from the pandemic. This will help usher in a more productive, collaborative, engaging workplace of the future.