Government guidelines to ensure people can return to offices and other workspaces paint a somewhat dystopian view of the workplace.
Gone is the future vision of a workplace that is full of touch points, places where teams can collaborate, hang out and innovate and returned is the stereotypical vision of a 1980s cubicle office with individuals barricaded off from one another.
Guidelines, released late on 11 May, paint a picture of a future office with hand sanitiser dispensers at every possible point, hands-free access technologies, no more turnstiles, and absolutely no more collaboration. Not in person anyway.
To maintain social distancing wherever possible while people are at work, business leaders will have to reduce movement of their employees by discouraging non-essential trips within buildings. No more having a natter at the coffee machine. Businesses, say the guidelines, must encourage the use of radios and telephones for communication instead.
And if you are able to walk around your office, you will only be able to do so in one direction, under government guidelines.
There is good news though for everyone who hated hotdesking.
“Workstations should be assigned to an individual and not shared,” say the guidelines. “If they need to be shared they should be shared by the smallest possible number of people.”
All businesses will need to review their floorplans to make sure that workstations can be kept further apart. If that is troublesome, workstations, say the guidelines, should be side-by-side or back-to-back. People are not allowed to face one another.
The meeting room may also become redundant in a Covid-safe world. Virtual meetings are encouraged alongside holding meetings outdoors.
And forget communal kitchens or office canteens, you might as well eat at your desk (cubicle) in the Covid-safe office as guidelines call for a reconfiguration of seating in communal areas to “maintain spacing and reduce face-to-face interactions.”
While government says it expects the guidelines to continue to be updated as lockdown eases, the current guidelines to help bring offices, shops and warehouses back to use do not make it easy for businesses to return to anything close to normal any time soon.
Click here to read the guidelines in full.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
