As autumn begins, more and more businesses have successfully brought limited numbers of staff back into the office. For sure, this has been a major achievement by management teams to complete risk assessments and make their office spaces socially distanced and COVID-19 secure for both employees and staff.
But unfortunately, today as staff and those in charge of businesses look out over the new office environment, many of them will be struck by the feeling that it’s just not the same - the office space is now sparsely populated, with some areas like ghost towns and others sectioned off with tape that resemble crime scenes. COVID-19 has not, as some initially speculated, led to the death of the office but it has certainly been a buzzkill.
To combat this, the team at Cityspace is today sharing 5 simple and cost-effective ways to bring back the buzz into the office environment by moving towards a ‘blended office’ approach, in order to make the mix of onsite and remote locations work seamlessly in tandem with each other.
#1 Refocus your larger meeting rooms
Pre-COVID, the main focus of these spaces was to gather groups of people together in one place to meet and collaborate around a large table.
With social distancing requirements and a majority of staff still working from home, these spaces can be easily adapted to better rebalance smaller numbers of people now being present in the room with much larger numbers working remotely.
To accommodate mixed location working, meeting rooms can be easily changed to facilitate both office attendees and their remote working colleagues. To do this, we have been helping clients by reviewing the existing screen size, the table's position and the camera angle, in order to bring whole teams together once more by providing the illusion of one single gathering. This can be accomplished regardless of the preferred technology platform being deployed.
By doing so, the traditional board or conference room can now become a vital new part of the ‘blended office’ concept.
#2 Make sharing desks a better experience
For many people, having your own specific desk and a sense of personal real estate is an important aspect of office life. With offices now having to adopt desk sharing and an end of day clear desk policy for cleaning, this cultural sense of having your own space is now diminished.
A practical and cost-effective way to improve this is to make the experience of desk sharing better for staff. We at Cityspace have been helping clients do this by introducing easy to use software packages that staff can use to book their desired desk each day when required, and installing lockers with containers which staff can use to transport their belongings in order to set up their own personal deskspace on a daily basis.
#3 Bring office-based and remote teams together
With desk seating now arranged in a social-distanced zig-zag pattern, where for instance a bank of 8 desks has now become a space for 4 people, this has had a significant impact on peoples’ sense of being part of a team.
Yes, video conferencing software such as Zoom has been successful at bringing teams together for meetings, but many staff still miss the more informal across desk interaction that took place between teams throughout the day.
To counter this, we have been installing screens on banks of desks that allow teams to run Zoom continuously during the day, connecting together those working in the office with colleagues at home. By doing so, companies can successfully leverage technology to bring back the more informal interaction, collaboration and conversations that traditionally take between teams working together.
#4 Repurpose smaller meeting spaces
The close proximity of smaller meeting rooms has made these spaces impractical for social distancing. Even with reduced numbers occupying the room, many staff may be reticent in spending periods of time in such enclosed spaces.
Smaller meeting spaces can be refurnished for use as quiet rooms for concentrated tasks or simply adapted to provide rooms for collaborative working with remote colleagues. By adding in smart screens, software apps such as Zoom or Teams can be deployed with the simple addition of a £60 camera.
#5 Reconfigure social spaces
In recent years, the trend in office design has been to create informal zones within the office as breakout spaces for conversations, sharing ideas and social interaction. Currently, within the office many of these informal areas may not meet social distancing rules.
The changes here do not have to be dramatic - simply reducing seat numbers for social distancing and respacing furniture allows greater widths between furniture clusters enabling these spaces to be used once more.
At Cityspace, we believe that even under COVID-19 the office should still be a critical hub for collaboration and driving teams’ ideas, interactions and productivity. If you would like any help or advice on ways to bring back the buzz to your office, please give us a call on 0207 638 4250 or email info@cityspacemanagement.co.uk.
