What Will the Office Look Like?

Offices will look quite different in near future, with the spread of COVID-19 in conference rooms a major concern for companies.

He’s paying thousands of dollars in rent for a lower Manhattan office that’s been sitting empty since March. But Neil Alumkal is committed to maintaining his company’s brick-and-mortar presence through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.

“You don’t look serious if you don’t have your own office,” said Alumkal, who founded Stuntman PR in 2010. “When a really big brand sends me an RFP, they want to see what the operation looks like – and that I have a real staff and a real office.”

That doesn’t mean Alumkal isn’t concerned about keeping his staff of four safe when they’re eventually back in the office again. He plans to buy a hospital-grade air purifier, abandon conference room meetings and might move to a space in his building with more traditional walled offices.

Business leaders like Alumkal – not to mention millions of employees who are scared and possibly ready for change – are faced with some big questions about what post-COVID offices will look like and even the real reasons for having them. Those questions and the broader future of the office make up the third theme we’re examining in the Work, Wellness & Space project.

The Office Building of the Future?

The average elevator call button has more germs, pathogens and bacteria than a toilet seat. Forty times more.

That’s one of the disgusting but important facts Bob Wislow discovered during late nights surfing the internet in the early days of COVID-19. Wislow’s interest went beyond curiosity. His Fulton East project – a new office building in Chicago’s bustling Fulton Market – was supposed to open in July.

Wislow, chairman and CEO of Parkside Realty, Inc., pushed the building’s opening to August and added an even stronger focus on health and wellness to his launch strategy. For the elevator buttons, Wislow explored a few options – including activation by smartphones and voice commands – before landing on a system that uses buttons activated with toes, not fingers.

That wasn’t all. To reduce cross-contamination risks and clean employee workspaces, Fulton East will use non-thermal, plasma technology that reduces at least 90 percent of viruses, bacteria and mold on both surfaces and in the air, Wislow said. Additionally, many of the original features at Fulton East are less about health and more about wellness, including biophilic design that brings elements of the natural world into offices.

“As a developer you’ve got a fiduciary responsibility to bring a building to market that addresses the needs of the population that’s going to occupy the building,” Wislow said. “And the business decision-makers are going to need to think about what’s going to make employees feel comfortable about coming to work.”

That level of comfort is something employees in existing office buildings may not feel as they report back to their offices in the next few months, said Robert Benson, design principal of Cannon Design. Twenty thousand people a day walked through the lobby of his company’s building at 225 N. Michigan in Chicago before the pandemic.

“The thought of that type of traffic, and then waiting on confined elevators to go to the 11th floor before even getting to the office, is a lot to consider,” he said. “The CDC does not recommend using public transportation, which makes asking our employees to come to work very problematic. Even when the CDC revises that guideline, if our team sees someone on the train without a mask they should not ride on that train, which makes an urban workplace a difficult proposition.”

Fulton East, set to open in Chicago in August 2020, has a rooftop with amphitheater-style seating and a large screen to accommodate meetings. Photo courtesy Parkside Realty, Inc.

Converting Existing Office Spaces

Offices new and old will take on some of the feel of hospitals, experts said. That means enhanced air filtration systems, antimicrobial paint, sneeze guards, hand sanitizer around the office, wayfinding measures (like those arrows on supermarket floors) and fewer dedicated desks to be wiped down every night. Some companies may even take a page from the past and move back into walled offices, scrapping the recent shift to open floor plans.

Detractors say that trend was always more about cutting down space and saving companies rent money anyway. Still, if done right, it had fans. Last year, Jon Talty, chairman and CEO of OKW Architects in Chicago, asked a group of young employees what made them comfortable and productive. They liked workstations in a “benching format,” a lot of breakout space to collaborate and an open and bright environment without barriers.

“We reinvented the office and did a good job with it – then COVID happened,” Talty said.

With social distancing part of office life, at least for now, the close quarters that Talty’s staff championed won’t look the same for a while. But OKW’s office reopened in June at 50 percent capacity, with employees rotating days and some staff members remaining remote. They’re taking other safety measures too, like mandatory mask-wearing when employees aren’t at their desks. “So far, people have been responsible,” Talty said.

That kind of approach – especially amid questions about the death of open offices – might be how modern offices successfully adapt, said Timothy Swanson, chief design officer at Skender, an integrated design and manufacturing company in Chicago.

“What a lot of people are doing is getting rid of the middle seat and pivoting to a functional open office that seats fewer people but allows social distancing,” Swanson said. That works, he said, because the last few months have made decision-makers and workers bigger believers in remote work. Indeed, a Morning Consult poll found that 75 percent of adults who can work remotely would like to continue to do so at least once a week after the pandemic is under control.

But a hybrid solution, where a proportion of employees work from home while others report to the office, brings complications. “It’s understood that our capacity in the workplace has to drop,” Benson said. “But you have to ask the value of being in the workplace at all. My design studio has 40 people in it. If I have 20 there, then I am still jumping on a video call in order to reach the people who are at home, and that doesn’t make sense.”

But not everyone is convinced of that. The past few months have proven that work is not somewhere we go, but something we do, said Nicholas White, managing director of Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam.

“At no other time in history would this exploration of work even have been possible,” White said. “Through collaborative, office and personal technologies, we are empowered to work differently, and we are seeing encouraging data and trends that encourage exploring these alternative ways of working.”

Redefining Communal, Collaborative … and the Entire Human Habitat?

Organizations dealing with COVID-19 and whatever the new normal looks like must “consciously think about and continuously adapt to new information,” White said. But one thing that seems clear is that the office’s main function – what can’t be easily replaced by Zoom calls – is and will forever be collaboration.

Still, many communal aspects of the office – dishes, kitchens, coffeemakers – are likely gone in the near-term. COVID-19 wreaked havoc with the high hopes that many had for sustainability in 2020. Companies’ past encouragement of reusable water bottles is an example of “where sustainability and health and wellness are fighting with each other,” said Patty Lloyd, director of sustainability at Leopardo, a Chicago-based construction company that works with Fortune 100 companies.

“To fill my reusable water bottle, I have to use a communal water dispenser. That touch point might create too high a risk of viral transmission,” she said. “We have to be cognizant of the shifts happening in order to help mitigate any sustainability losses that might occur as a result of health and wellness gains. We also have to try to find a middle ground between health and wellness and sustainability, so we have collective wins.”

Indeed, talk around the water cooler will change when there are no water coolers – or even casual hallway talks. But what about conference rooms? One of the reasons organizations want office life to resume is a belief that in-person collaboration – “reinforcing culture, mission, successes and failures,” as Talty put it – can’t be done as well by video conference. Do in-person meetings in conference rooms run counter to social distancing guidelines?

“Even if you only have in-person meetings five days a month, the way those meetings happened before the pandemic meant people sitting around the same table and breathing the same air,” said Willie Hoag, principal with Mid-America Real Estate Corporation in Chicago. “So, the most important thing and one of the crucial functions of the office – collaboration – might be dangerous to pull off.”

There are ways to make conference room meetings work, some experts say. Wislow’s Fulton East has a rooftop with amphitheater-style seating and a large screen to accommodate meetings. Swanson said companies should limit how many people go into large rooms at the same time and that, in the short term, small conference rooms will become single-occupant offices or spaces where only specific teams work. Talty suggested lots of monitors to allow for many remote participants, and Benson suggested multiple cameras in conference rooms.

Benson also said the “amenities arms race” of recent years is probably over. Urban strategist Paul O’Connor put it even more plainly: “The ping pong table is gone,” he said.

Our understanding of COVID-19 continues to evolve – there’s less concern about germs transmitted via surfaces than a couple of months ago and greater concern about airflow. But O’Connor and other experts believe COVID-19 began a long-overdue reimagining of offices – and perhaps more.

“The opportunity is to really reimagine the human habitat, not just the workplace,” O’Connor said. “To do that, it takes architecture, construction, commercial real estate, urban planners, local government and labor, too. It needs to be a broader conversation.”

Experts agree that this will be a transformative time. No one will come out of this pandemic the same, and many businesses are likely to grow either stronger or significantly weaker during this time.

Collaboration remains the top reason for having an office, experts say. But how can collaboration — which was so easy just months ago — continue given COVID-19?

Conflicts Around the Office

As is our practice with Work, Wellness & Space, we identify social conflicts surrounding each chapter’s theme. The evolution of the office in the wake of COVID-19 presents these conflicts:

·         Safety vs. Collaboration: Fostering collaboration at reopened offices will be difficult considering that group meetings often involve close quarters. How will organizations strike a balance between safety and teamwork, especially in ways that can persuade weary employees that coming to the office is both valuable and safe?

·         The Half-Staff Conundrum: Further, if returning to the office, as predicted, depends on a split-schedule approach, are we meeting the goals of collaboration? In other words, if half the staff must participate remotely, what’s the point – amid safety concerns – of the others being in the office at all?

·         Open-Office Requiem? Critics argued the open floor plan trend was mostly a way for companies to reduce their footprints and save rent money. But some organizations successfully threaded the open-office needle, reducing costs and fostering teamwork. Can that be done in a social distancing environment? And if not, what is the next evolution in financially viable and safe work?