Will organisations be more about mindsets than workplaces, where people work for them because of their values rather than the tangible benefits you get? What does that mean for organisations that are rooted in a physical place?
Or will the opposite happen, where people have missed out on face-to-face interaction, that people will look to employers that invest in the safe face-to-face contact that helps people collaborate and innovate rather than sit next to each other?
Will the vulnerability that people demonstrate with their colleagues continue when they return to the workplace, or will it be just a blip?
People can be more accurate to themselves on video calls — what we see around us now is likely to be a much better representation of who our colleagues are.
By bringing your child into the workplace and for work meetings, you are putting into practice your values of family and even people-centred working. Still, you are also “reality testing” the importance of the people you are meeting or working with.
They may like the idea of a family-friendly workplace, but do they enjoy it when the baby needs changing nappies, and the toilets in your funky co-working space don’t have these facilities or where the mother needs to breastfeed the baby? It’s also about bringing the aspects of being a family that traditionally have taken place in people’s homes into non-personal spaces, such as the workplace.
It’s where we see whether our work is a public or even common space or a contested space (you can argue that even public and shared spaces need to have the potential to be challenged if they are to be democratic). What will the equivalent of this be, virtual?
Organisations need to question everything we thought we knew about our residents and their new routines and discover how their behaviours have changed and are continually changing.
They will also need to constantly engage with their workforce as people’s attitudes evolve on issues like how many days they want to work from home and how they can collaborate or be supported to develop themselves professionally.
They will need to create more immersive experiences online that compensate for the lack of face-to-face contact while also seeing open spaces like parks as a new platform that can better enable people to interact safely than crowded high streets.
They will need to make trade-offs between:
- Transition workspace to being more collaborative
- Positively affecting staff wellbeing
- Focusing on activities which can only / best be done in an office as opposed to working remotely
- Prioritising activities that require face-to-face contact with our residents
- Enabling the organisation to free up space to rent/sell or repurpose for other needs (i.e. housing/community)
- Space which can flex to a changing social & economic environment
- It helps the organisation work with its different communities
- It helps reduce carbon emissions
Like with sustainability, where you have both a growing proportion of people who are taking greater responsibility for the impacts their behaviours have on the environment, but also a balance of people who are tired of having the issue in their faces all the time, will people grow bored or exhausted of having to stay safe in the front of the virus, particularly now we’re moving into successive lockdowns? How do you maintain people’s sense of responsibility and solidarity?
