Workers worldwide return to weirder offices

New York

MASKED, desk-bound and unable to recognise their colleagues in an lift, people are starting to return to offices in cities around the world where the pandemic is receding. Many will find their offices transformed, too.

In the challenge to make offices both Covid-safe and attractive places to work, firms have been experimenting with working arrangements and space while employees toiled at home.

Some gave up floor space to adjust to less-rigid schedules, others introduced movable walls to create flexible areas. Many installed safety innovations such as touchless lifts and worked to improve air quality.

Lockdowns have provided a "fantastic opportunity to create and recreate a new world for each of us, which may, for each company, be slightly different", said Neil McLocklin, a Knight Frank partner.

Employees of Arcadis, a design and engineering consultancy, will be able to choose one of 20 different types of workspace via an app when they move into new offices in the City of London next month.

A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU

Tuesday, 12 pm

Property Insights

Get an exclusive analysis of real estate and property news in Singapore and beyond.

Sign Up

The company's Building Intelligence app, developed during the pandemic, provides options for meeting spaces, focused work and collaboration, as well as social and wellbeing areas such as a winter garden.

The app will help monitor the number of people using different spaces, ensuring capacity limits designed to prevent the spread of infection are never exceeded. The limit will initially be set to about one-third of the company's 1,200 London office users.

That also means less space is needed: its London office is about 30 per cent smaller than before.

At the Lloyd's Building, the iconic home of the 300-year-old insurance market, the externally-clad ventilation ducts inject fresh air from the ground-up and ejects it after it has risen through the floors.

"That way of keeping the air fresh in the space is the best," said Ivan Harbour, senior design partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, who cut his teeth on the Lloyd's building project as a young architect in the 1980s. "Our projects since Covid have really brought that home."

But ventilation is not enough on its own. As the building reopens, face coverings are now a requirement in most of it, underwriters sit at desks bordered by perspex screens and use an app to order their lunch to-go.

The importance of making the space accessible and interesting to be in is not lost on human resource departments. Bringing staff back to the office is already a retention issue: almost 30 per cent of people said they would look for another job if they need to come back to the office five days a week, showed a global McKinsey & Co survey.

Broker CBRE Group is advising its Fortune 500 clients on a range of issues, from short-term concerns around keeping people safe to longer-term considerations on what the office of the future needs to look like, said Kate Smith, head of workplace for the United Kingdom.

It's advising companies on how to "magnetise" their spaces to lure staff back, adding perks like live music that have been among the things people missed most during lockdowns, she said.

That is assuming you can actually fit people in your office. HSBC Holdings has scrapped its London headquarters executive floor as it reduces office space by 40 per cent globally and gives employees more choice to work from home.

But in the skyscraper, lifts are the biggest hurdle. Just two people are allowed in a lift at a time, in line with government social-distancing guidelines, keeping office capacity at about 3 per cent, said a company spokesperson.

The co-working industry - not long ago thought to be on the verge of collapsing - is cashing in on the demand for flexibility. Deloitte has moved its entire Manchester office in the UK to 3,250 square metres in a WeWork building in the city centre.

WeWork is also trying to make Zooming a little less two-dimensional, signing a deal with ARHT Media to integrate hologram technology in 16 of its offices around the world.

And bit by bit, the silver-lining amenities are coming back at London's quirkier offices.

At London's White Collar Factory, as many as 30 employees, policed by a traffic light system, can use the rooftop running track. At WeWork's UK sites, beer taps are reopening after running dry for months to follow government hospitality guidelines.

The experiments should keep going, CBRE's Ms Smith said.

"It is too early for most organisations to see what it means," she said. "They are in test-and-learn mode." BLOOMBERG