Trendspotting: Does the Open Office Have a Future?

NEWSWIRE: 5/19/20

• The future of the open office is in doubt as businesses consider how to bring employees back to work. The American workplace is getting a pandemic-era makeover, with designers now prioritizing greater physical distancing along with new safety features like sneeze guards. (The New York Times)
• NH: The last big transition in office design was the shift from the cubicle to the open office in the late 1990s. Now, in the world according to COVID-19, everything old is new again. While the dreaded gray walls are unlikely to make a comeback, employers are laser-focused on adding more barriers and increasing the space between workers to comply with social distancing guidelines. Gone are the shared desks, elbow-to-elbow seating, and cookie platters in the break room. Say hello to sneeze guards, hand sanitizer stations, and outdoor meetings.
• But adapting the office to the reality of a pandemic isn’t as simple as just putting up some walls. At big workplaces, limiting the number of people in an elevator will undoubtedly result in huge lines. Attempts to control movement, such as one-way hallways or arrows drawn on the floor to maintain distance between colleagues, are unlikely to hold when Bob in accounting just wants to pop over for a chat. Gloves and masks don’t mix well with computers or casual conversations.
• Let’s not even mention the logistics of sanitizing communal items like elevator buttons or the copy machine. Cleaning crews will have to be working nonstop. The CEO of Boston’s Cambridge Innovation Center, which houses hundreds of startups, has ordered 11,000 handheld hooks for its tenants so that they don’t have to touch a door handle ever again. Workers will also be required to take their temperature every day and enter it into an app before coming in.
• This move speaks to the other half of the changes coming to the office: stepped-up surveillance. Employers are installing thermal cameras to measure workers’ temperatures and creating apps to track their movements. The real estate company RXR is working on an app that will award employees points according to how often they are 6 feet away from another person. PwC, meanwhile, wants to implement its own contact tracing program in order to minimize the impact on the whole office building if one person is infected.
• Are these changes temporary, or will they influence design in the long run? One thing that’s becoming clearer is that the pandemic is here to stay; as long as there’s the threat of COVID-19, the office as we knew it isn’t coming back. That’s why several major companies (notably, all white-collar) aren’t choosing to redesign so much as they’re abandoning the office altogether. Capital One recently announced that their employees can work from home until September. Google and Facebook’s employees can stay home until next year. Some of Twitter’s employees, meanwhile, can stay at home forever.