The post-Covid-19 workplace

Submitted by Tedora Aibu on 20 July 2020

Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 17 July 2020.

The morning session was dedicated to the changing of workplaces in a post-Covid-19 time, thanks to the contribution of architect Pablo Gonzalez Bootello. He presented the white paper written by the Smart City Cluster and Batch Arquitectura, which gives an overview of the situation and trends and proposes suggestions for the design of the future workplace.

The Covid-19 pandemic has abruptly transformed the way of working and interacting, leading to a greater development to remote work. However, the virus has not been the only cause of the workplace changes, but it simply accelerating them. There are two scenarios that are and will define the design of workspaces: the pre-vaccine and the post-vaccine period.

In short term, the priority is the health of the employees. People need a safe workplace and companies develop new ideas to implement the social distancing measuring. In the pre-vaccine phase worker need to have a guarantee interior air quality, security, and well-being.  The measure that is possible to adopt are: (i) remote work, (ii) physical boundaries, (iii) work post rearrangement, (iv) social distance strategies, (v) secondary uses and (vi) digital tools.

In a mid/long term, the new workplace will be a collection of spaces to catalyse human abilities. This way it will host mostly face-to-face, creativity, design and any other type of work that require presential contact. Spaces will be dynamic but the flexibility is the key pillar, since it allows to: (i) create new individual posts, moving posts and standing posts, (ii) improve the concentration, (iii) develop new spaces for calls or 2 person meetings. Moreover, digital tools play an important role in the new workplace for user experience and to build a new type of “digital and touchless” office.

The new type of office must provide creative spaces for concentration, collaboration, learning and socialisation, and must adapt perfectly to all scenarios. Adaptability in terms of design, health, and wellbeing will be a key feature in the post Covid-19 office. This new idea of workplace can be developed, according to BATCh Arquitectura, in 5 phases: (i) workplace due diligence to extract an accurate picture of the client’s use of their current office, (ii) project development, (iii) bidding process, (iv) execution management and (v) complete life cycle management.

A recording of the session is available here 

These are the complete minutes of the meeting: 

20200717 ECA dailyminutes_v2.pdf

This is the presentation from the meeting: 

20200717 Post COVID Workplace BATCh ENG Lite.pdf

Find information on the previous meetings hereinformation on the upcoming agenda here 

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