How Can Companies Manage Virtual Space?

During a Zoom call with her company’s chairman, Meredith Heagney’s 10-month-old daughter Lillian screamed. Loudly.

Everyone on the line knew Heagney had a call later with a big client, so she tried to assure them that Lillian wouldn’t be screaming when that started. The chairman told her not to worry about it.

“He was acknowledging that we're people with lives,” said Heagney, 36. "I don't think that's always been okay in business."

Like many around the world, Heagney and her husband Mitch have spent much of the past five months in their 1,700-square foot, two-bedroom condo on Chicago’s North Side juggling their jobs and Lillian. It hasn’t always been easy, but Heagney is heartened to see that, for all its challenges, COVID-19 appears to have prompted a change in attitudes among corporate America’s leaders.

Heagney’s experience sheds light on how companies – faced with a pandemic that will be part of our reality for the foreseeable future – can best manage virtual space and how employees work remotely. That’s the theme of the fourth chapter of Work, Wellness & Space project, a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and communications firm Greentarget in collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam.

Dealing with Meeting Overload — and Different Personalities

A Gartner, Inc. survey of employers last spring found that 74 percent of employers will shift at least 5 percent of employees who worked on-site pre-COVID to permanently remote positions after the pandemic. For everyone else, working from home will continue on at least a limited basis for a while. Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 25 percent to 30 percent of the workforce will work from home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of this year. It’s the only way most offices – particularly those designed with close quarters in a pre-COVID era – can operate with social distancing.

But many employees would probably argue their performances in the COVID era merits expanded or loosened work-from-home privileges in any scenario. “People are learning, ‘Oh, I'm getting my work done in four hours where it used to take me six hours because I'd have Molly popping by and asking me how my weekend was,” said Dr. Eugénie Pabst, a biofeedback specialist.

That’s not to say the transition to remote work has been smooth or easy. A new study finds that the workday increased by 48.5 minutes since the pre-pandemic and that the number of meetings per person jumped 13 percent. Anyone who didn’t think there were too many meetings before the pandemic probably thinks so now, said Dr. Michael Horowitz, president of TCS Education System, a nonprofit system of colleges advancing student success and community impact. TCS has long embraced online platforms, which made the COVID transition easier. Horowitz’s organization is being intentional about the number and length of meetings to prevent employee burnout.

“Video meetings are tough and fatiguing,” he said. “For maximum impact and productivity, we are learning the right cadence and quantity for our remote environment. When is it important to have the whole leadership group together? What could be better addressed in a quick, one-on-one conversation? We need to be purposeful with our time and virtual interactions right now.”

Organizations also need to be mindful that work-from-home scenarios can affect workers differently. Introverted people might seem suited for remote work. But that’s only true to a point, said Monica Hakimi, the James V. Campbell professor of law and the associate dean for faculty research at the University of Michigan. As introverts are often drawn to academia, Hakimi has had the chance to see how many of them have reacted to working from home over the past few months.

“In some ways, introverts are well set up for it,” she said. “But the fact that this is their M.O. could lead to more isolation.”

To prevent that, the law school faculty two weeks after going remote began checking in with every law student to make sure they were taking care of themselves and getting the assistance they needed. The school also maintains community through weekly faculty workshops via Zoom.

Those kinds of check-ins are important for all employees amid growing feelings of isolation and uncertainty, said Nicholas White, managing director of Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam. In many ways, managers must relearn how to effectively manage workforces with an emphasis on the nuances of remote working.

“Without clear direction, coaching, or guidance, people are often left to navigate this difficult journey on their own,” White said. “Individuals can build stories that overwhelm – am I going to lose my job? Am I doing enough? Is my manager happy with me? This on top of managing everything else at home can be a recipe for disaster.”

The Future of the Home Office

But managing virtual space isn’t just about tolerance of screaming children, limiting video conferences or ensuring remote work doesn’t feed employees’ angst. Companies and employees are probably only beginning to understand what this all means. Some would argue that robust productivity over four months of working from home might justify broad changes – perhaps arguing that an office is no longer necessary. But there still are too many unknowns, said Ari Klein, vice chairman of Cushman and Wakefield, which specializes in representing corporate, legal, and institutional clients with their commercial real estate requirements.

“Right now is not the time for someone to make a possible irrational decision based on data that has not been tested,” he said. “The space needs of yesterday have clearly changed. The space needs of tomorrow have not been defined yet.”

Tim Swanson, chief design officer at Skender, an integrated design and manufacturing company in Chicago., agrees. “Part of the challenge is not knowing what this looks like and what it means. Whether people can be productive in their home space. Open offices were supposedly a failure, especially when your staff feels under supported. If you thought open offices didn’t work, how will you work from home?”

But others think those questions have been answered. Forge Craft, an Austin, Texas, architecture and design firm, recently released The COVID Companion©, a white paper predicting that employees will go to offices about once a week for team meetings and collaborative projects – and that the 9-to-5, 40-hour work week becoming obsolete for knowledge workers.

“We think we’ll see primary or secondary spaces in homes that have to function as offices,” said Rommel Sulit, Forge Craft’s founding principal. “Your home is your single-most important investment – and that’s especially clear now as COVID forces us to optimize the space for work. And the evolution of that space has staying power.”

He envisions a wave of new construction where one side of a house includes a master bedroom and offices, children’s bedrooms and a home school space on the other side and a family/public area in the middle. Of course, the vast majority of housing isn’t designed like that – but workers will probably seek that kind of space, especially after working on card tables or kitchen counters for the past few months.

“There will be more intentional third spaces in apartments for people working from home – like people renting a place with a third bedroom to use as an office,” Swanson said. “But as we go down that path, companies and employees are going to have a little bit of a reckoning asking who’s going to pay for those slightly larger apartments, especially if companies expect these spaces to replace commercial offices permanently.”

A Swiss court ruled in May that companies in that country must help offset the cost of working from home. Even if they’re subject to no such requirements, companies might wonder how much they should change, and how much they’re willing to pay for change. Even if remote work continues in some capacity for the foreseeable future – which is likely – some experts believe employees should provide some basic amenities to home offices.

“People are asking to take their chairs home and they were not allowed – it’s a chair, not a NASA secret,” said Tanarra Schneider, managing director, design at Accenture Interactive/Fjord. “Companies have shifted from saying we should never work from home to doing it because of COVID, but there has not been an effort to truly listen and ensure that employees are set up for success.”

The Conflicts Around Managing Virtual Space

As is our practice with Work, Wellness & Space, we identify social conflicts surrounding each chapter’s theme. The management of virtual space presents these conflicts:

·         Zoom Overload: Leaders struggling to manage far-flung employees might overcompensate and schedule too many virtual meetings. But experts said that video conferences can be more draining and cause employees to lose focus in already turbulent times. How can leaders strike a balance between online collaboration and overdosing on Zoom calls?

·         Managing Personalities: Can leaders ensure that they’re thinking about how different personalities adapt to remote work – and provide assistance and check-ins to match? While extroverts will likely struggle not being around people, introverts working at home for months might end up dealing with feelings of extreme isolation.

·         Amenities vs. Cost: Hopes for a vaccine could keep leaders – particularly in a bad economy – from paying for work-from-home amenities. Will they pay for office chairs, monitors or even subsidize rent when employees need more space to effectively work from home? If not, will employees who can pay for those things have a leg up?

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?

Why a Post-COVID Working World Should Focus on Mental Wellness

When we talk about mental health in the workplace, two statistics from the World Health Organization get thrown around a lot. Depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion a year, and every dollar invested in treatment for common mental disorders returns $4 in improved health and productivity.

But those numbers predate the worst global health crisis in a century, its corresponding economic disruption and global civil unrest unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. Research conducted in spring 2020 shows a dramatic upswing in the number of adults in the U.S. at risk for serious mental illness.

In other words, already stressed employees are facing a whole new set of stressors, none of which is going away anytime soon. That means mental health and wellness in the workplace have never been more important. It also means smart investments in those areas will pay far greater dividends than ever before.

That’s one of the major takeaways shared by experts from a variety of fields in spring 2020 for the Work, Wellness & Space project.

Accelerating the Mental Wellness Conversation

Alex Simmons spent most of his 20s working in investment banking and private equity. Eighty-hour plus weeks became the norm and after a while, it started taking a toll on him in the form of stress, anxiety and burnout. It’s a common story in modern work life.

Simmons’ wife introduced him to talk therapy, meditation and later coaching. The experience made Simmons realize that the systems in place at most companies to provide mental health services – Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) – weren’t working. That, combined with the growing mental health epidemic in the United States, led Simmons to start Boon Health in late 2019. The Michigan-based company seeks to revolutionize the way companies think about and deliver mental health services to employees because, as Simmons puts it, employers and workers “need something more – something that doesn’t focus on short-term crisis management but rather preventive mental well-being.”

Simmons assembled a team of 40 ICF-accredited coaches, therapists and clinical psychologists. In the early going, the company has achieved over 20 percent employee utilization for its customers, while traditional EAPs typically yield less than 3 percent, Simmons said.

“If you're a mom working from home with multiple kids and you're having to support those kids and entertain them while trying to work a full day, there's just a whole host of other stressors that have entered your life that never existed before,” Simmons said.

As reported in The Washington Post, approximately 20,000 people texted a federal emergency hotline for people in emotional distress in April 2020, a more than 1,000-percent increase compared with April 2019. That might be why conversations about mental wellness in corporate America are accelerating, experts said. A senior officer at a venture capital fund focused on healthcare, who asked that her name not be used, said that before COVID-19, conversations about mental wellness were “on the upswing.” That’s increased since the pandemic, in part because of technology, she said.

“COVID has accelerated the adoption of telehealth, including telemental health, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc.,” she said. “Because of COVID, employers are even more focused on employees’ well-being – which includes mental wellness.”

That acceleration is making its way to other parts of the reimagined workplace, including workplace design, with architects and designers finding ways to bring fresh air and daylight into buildings, for starters. That could be even more important in a post-COVID society, where “a holistic approach to productivity and human wellness and happiness” should merge mental health and building design, said Paul O’Connor, an urban strategist.

“The best way to drive numbers in a business is not through demands but through employee production – which is the product of happy, engaged people and not drones at a desk,” O’Connor said.

Coaching, not Just Counseling

One issue that has long plagued workplace mental health efforts is the idea that seeking help means something is wrong with the person seeking it. But that mentality appears to be fading as organizations start to look at mental wellness through the lens of coaching employees to augment performance and productivity.

“If C-suite teams can move somebody from bringing in $10 million or a $100 million to half a billion dollars, they’ve just made a ton of money,” said M. Todd Puckett, founder of Skycrest, which provides performance and life enhancement services to executives and other high-performing businesspeople. “But they can’t say, ‘Hey, to get you to a better spot, you need to go see a therapist.’”

A National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions survey in the early days of the pandemic found that 53 percent of employers were providing specialized emotional and mental health programs for their workforce, including changing employee assistance programs, discounting mental health apps and offering more virtual services like remote yoga. Those services are important, but they’re similar to what’s been offered for years. As the new normal around work continues to develop – and if employers take this moment to learn some lessons about how they can improve mental wellness efforts – an emphasis on coaching will be crucial, Puckett and other experts said.

“We're kind of in this terrifying space that could either paralyze us or it could be seen as an opportunity,” Puckett said. “I truly think it's about having a team of people. It's not just going to the doctor. Maybe you go to the doctor, your massage therapist, your yoga person, your regular therapist or a strategist – and you go to all of these different people in one space.”

And that space, Puckett said, could easily be the workplace.

Designing the Right Culture – and Addressing Racial Tensions

But such a vision only works in the right culture, which is missing at far too many organizations. A 2019 report by Mind Share Partners found that 60 percent of respondents had not spoken to anyone at work about their mental health in the previous year and that they were least comfortable talking about it with HR or senior leaders. Meanwhile, 86 percent said a company’s culture should support its employees’ mental health.

Any rethinking of workplace wellness needs to address that disconnect – and consider the experiences and needs of diverse employees, especially in the wake of the racial reckoning sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, some business leaders have fumbled the initial attempts to address this malignant problem.

“Stop making black people or people of color tell you their story so you know their pain,” said Tanarra Schneider, managing director, design at Accenture Interactive/Fjord. “The tough thing about that is the listening sessions are meant with the best of intentions. But you know what those experiences are, so stop asking us to repeat them.”

Showing that kind of sensitivity – along with taking diversity initiatives out of silos and ensuring third-party wellness partners include diverse faces – will go a long way toward creating cultures where company mental wellness efforts are embraced by employees. But it’s just as important that leaders embrace these efforts and make it known that they’re participating in mental wellness sessions while making it mandatory for employees to do so, too, Schneider said.

“You are not going to incentivize or disincentivize people to change behaviors without implementing structural changes that may cost something and go beyond performative measures,” she said. “Otherwise, the onus continues to lie with the individual.”

Conflict Identification and the Immediate Frontier

Starting with this chapter, Work, Wellness & Space will articulate pressing social conflicts that emerged through our conversations with experts. Our goal is to prime the pump for relevant stakeholders to come together to innovate solutions to these conflicts designed around measurable structural change.

Specifically, regarding mental wellness, we’ve identified the following conflicts:

●        Mental Wellness — from Benefit to Necessity: Growing demand – and corporate prioritization – of mental health comes just as budgets tighten. How can employees get what they need, and can mental wellness be viewed as a necessity, not a benefit? This is harder given the likely (and important) focus on health and safety. But will mental health become an afterthought?

●        The Difficulty with Metrics: Offering mental health services seems humanistic, but data and metrics still must apply. If it's not measurable, no one is served. What will those metrics involve? How can organizations incorporate them into any new wellness initiatives? How can employee feedback and increased engagement inform high-level decision-making?

●      The Importance of Cultural Sensitivity: We must address mental wellness in a culturally sensitive way, particularly in light of racial tensions. How do companies design programs and change their cultures? Further, can corporate leaders who have historically focused on providing a broader vision and managing people act as coaches who help employees navigate an increasingly crazy world?

Coming Next Week in Work, Wellness & Space: What Will the Office Look Like? Think elevators that you activate with your toes, fewer communal areas and new ways to hold meetings.

Opening Note - The Era of Holistic Preventative Design Is Here

By Howell J. Malham Jr.
Founder, GreenHouse::Innovation

The 20th century officially ended on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

In a matter of weeks, longstanding social norms that governed every aspect of life in America vanished.

While new norms – mutual, unspoken expectations about what we should and should not do in our market society whenever we venture outside of our homes – are just beginning to emerge, one thing is certain: If we want peace, equity and prosperity in an era with a host of complex social and environmental challenges that are unique to this century, we must optimize the workplace and the work culture for health and wellness.

We call this emerging theory holistic preventative design, and we see its beginning across corporate America in part because of the rampant disruption wrought by COVID-19 and the longstanding issues of social inequality and injustice that the pandemic brought into sharp relief around the world.

This theory stems from the Work, Wellness & Space project, a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and communications firm Greentarget in collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam. Since the beginning of 2020 – in varying methods and formats dictated by the enormity of this year’s disruption – we’ve spoken with subject matter experts across an array of industries, including commercial real estate, architecture, urban planning, healthcare and mental wellness. Their thoughts at this pivotal moment inform our views and theory.

Because many challenges remain unresolved, we contend that a logical starting point, particularly if some sense of normalcy returns post-COVID, is adopting a preventative approach to design in order to significantly reduce threats to the health and wellness of the workforce – and to the environment upon which that workforce relies for its well-being.

While healthy, sustainable development as the UN defines it is essential, it falls short when it comes to addressing and contextualizing new, complex needs of work culture across all industries; it is a critical social component that requires the most work in the present configuration of business in America and, consequently, where there can be the biggest impact for systemic change.

The best designed and most well-appointed workspace in the world won’t make a bit of difference if adverse environmental and social conditions are conspiring to undermine the health and wellness of tenants and their respective work cultures.

If we want to significantly reduce these threats and eliminate the stress they place on our economy, we must consider more than form and function. Feeling, the third F, in all of its expressions, must now be on the table – the feelings of individuals who comprise the workforce, specifically how they feel at work, wherever “work” is, online or off, in a traditional or nontraditional space.

Such a shift will require LEED and WELL and additional types of certifications for buildings with new criteria. It will also increase the demand in the profit-based sector for licensed clinical social workers. And don't be too surprised when you read about a new role in the corporate C-suite: chief social worker.

Starting today and over the next several weeks, we’ll report on some of the most significant trends around the issues of work, wellness and space in the eyes of some of the world’s foremost experts. We’ll also identify points of conflict preventing change as a primer for larger conversations now and in the future.

These conversations are, however, a beginning – an important, necessary and inevitable one that is bringing the curtain down on the 20th century in terms of how we should be thinking about our relationship to the environment – physical and natural; the animal kingdom – especially as another novel influenza virus was discovered in China as I write this; and, not the least, our relationship with another: the neighbors next door and throughout this ever-shrinking, ever-spinning world of ours.

Work, Wellness & Space – and the ‘Pause’ COVID-19 Provides

Even amid soaring profits and stock prices, savvy American business leaders entered 2020 knowing they faced a threat to their most critical, valuable assets: their people. Employees were stressed and burning out, attracting and retaining top talent was getting tougher and employers were only beginning to understand the importance of keeping their employees not only physically healthy but holistically well.

Then COVID-19 hit, essentially closing America and much of the world. But amid the unimaginable damage of the worst pandemic in a century comes a moment – a pause – to rethink norms, some decades old, around work, wellness and space.

The ensuing conversations inform and propel the Work, Wellness & Space project, a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and communications firm Greentarget in collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam. In spring 2020, we interviewed more than 30 experts and developed an emerging hypothesis: Corporate America is preparing itself for a new era of holistic preventative design.

We believe our insights, gathered through what we’re calling consultative, qualitative research, signal the beginning of broader conversations, which could take years. But we believe these conversations will help lead the transition to a world optimized for health, wellness and sustainability – and fuel the actions required to get there.

“Businesses are finally discovering the importance of holistic wellness,” said Willie Hoag, principal with Mid-America Real Estate Corporation in Chicago. “Because of the hard choices that executives have to make around COVID-19, we have an opportunity to improve how workplaces function and to better integrate health into our everyday norms.” 

But true improvement will come at a cost – one that may be hard for some business leaders to swallow, especially until they see some proof of concept. And it will require them to embrace a collective approach that brings together such fields as architecture, construction, commercial real estate, urban planning and local government. Our interviews focused on individuals from those groups in hopes of priming what we think is a much broader conversation.

We’ll release our insights on a weekly cadence between now and Labor Day. Here’s a sampling:

Expect a Stronger Focus on Mental Wellness

More than we ever could have imagined when 2020 began, world events have driven our efforts. The racial tensions that sparked protests and widespread reckoning in late spring – following months of shelter-in-place and economic disruption – heightened the stakes. It’s increasingly clear that when employees return to their workplaces, it will be during or following the most stressful year in our collective memories.

One thing we expect in the coming weeks and months, at least among smart employers, is a stronger focus on mental wellness and related services. But experts said those services should not be framed as therapy, but as performance assistance – or even coaching.

“Even in today’s world of advancing acceptance, close to half of a staff thinks that people go to a therapist because they have a problem,” said M. Todd Puckett, a licensed clinical professional counselor and the founder of Skycrest, which provides performance and life enhancement services to executives and other high-performing individuals. “But if it’s instead seen as an asset that can stimulate their profitability – and increase their bonuses – then they’re all in.” 

A senior officer at a venture capital fund focused on healthcare, who asked that her name not be used, said that before COVID-19, conversations about mental wellness and such topics as mindfulness and resilience were “on the upswing.” That’s increased since the pandemic, in part because of technology, she said.

 “COVID has accelerated the adoption of telehealth, including telemental health, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc.,” she said. “Because of COVID, employers are even more focused on employees’ well-being – which includes mental wellness.” 

Not everyone is convinced that this new focus will bear fruit. Tanarra Schneider, managing director, design at Accenture Interactive/Fjord, warned against “entirely performative” efforts by companies to address mental health and wellness within their organizations.

 “You are not going to incentivize or disincentivize people to change behaviors without implementing structural changes that may cost something and go beyond performative measures," she said. "Otherwise, the onus continues to lie with the individual.” 

Reimagining the Human Habitat: How Offices Will Change

What will American workplaces look like when employees return? Think more General Hospital than Dunder Mifflin. Much of the equipment and safety precautions formerly found in medical facilities will become common in the workplace – which makes sense amid a global pandemic.

Additionally, existing workplaces will be reconfigured, and new spaces designed, to emphasize worker health and safety. That means antimicrobial paint on the walls, sneeze guards and hand sanitizers across the office, UV lights to disinfect phones, wayfinding measures – like the ones appearing in many grocery stores – to direct traffic flow, devices that let individuals open doors or activate elevators with their feet and enhanced air filtration systems.

 “All people in the industry are talking about is how to make people feel safe in the workplace,”  said Jessica Sherwood, director of business development at Leopardo, a Chicago-based construction company that works with Fortune 100 companies.

That also means six feet between workers, which could cut against the open office trend of recent years where employers tightly packed workers into spaces meant to encourage collaboration – and lower companies’ rent expenses.

“I was talking with a friend who’s a lawyer, the managing partner for an office, and he’s used to the cushy, hard-walled offices,” said Scott Ginder, principal and founder at Forge Craft Architecture + Design in Austin, Texas. “Our company likes collaborative environments, like the open studio. My friend said, ‘Yeah, go sell that now.’ And he’s right – it might not be the safest arrangement.” 

Common office amenities of recent years might also be a thing of the past. “The ping pong table is gone,” said Paul O’Connor, an urban strategist. But removing those types of amenities and making offices safer is only the tip of what should be an iceberg, O’Connor said. 

“The opportunity is to really reimagine the human habitat, not just the workplace,” O’Connor said. 

New Difficulties in Managing Virtual Space

Even if offices reopen in a big way soon, employers are expected to allow and even encourage employees to work from home more than they did before the pandemic. That’s partly about safety, but it’s also about offering employees the flexibility they’ve earned over the past few months.

“People are learning, ‘Oh, I'm getting my work done in four hours where it used to take me six hours because I'd have Molly popping by and asking me how my weekend was,” said Dr. Eugénie Pabst, a biofeedback specialist. “There is benefit to that – you are creating friends at work. But in terms of productivity, it’s important to understand the value of giving your employees enough space and privacy.” 

Many employees, as one expert put it, will now blanch at “driving three hours roundtrip for a one-hour meeting.” But to learn from the past few months, organizations should make detailed studies of how employees effectively worked from home – provided they can do so with open minds. “Don’t judge them for wearing slippers or shorts, or for sitting outside,” Schneider said.

Still, the work-from-home transition has created challenges too. Anyone who didn’t think there were too many meetings before the pandemic probably thinks so now, said Dr. Michael Horowitz, president of TCS Education System, a nonprofit system of colleges advancing student success and community impact. TCS has long embraced online platforms, which made it easier to transition to video meetings. But Horowitz said his organization is being intentional about the number and length of meetings to prevent employee burnout.

“Video meetings are tough and fatiguing,” he said. “For maximum impact and productivity, we are learning the right cadence and quantity for our remote environment. When is it important to have the whole leadership group together? What could be better addressed in a quick, one-on-one conversation? We need to be purposeful with our time and virtual interactions right now.” 

A Broad Shift to Preventative Care

As where we work and live changes, experts believe – and hope – that there will be a renewed emphasis on preventative measures to keep us healthy.

This focus on preventative wellness also presents an opportunity for commercial real estate – to fill newly vacant office space with medical services. Combining that with the concept of concierge medicine – where patients essentially have physicians on retainer – could mean doctors setting up shop to serve workers in large office buildings.

“There’s a real opportunity for medical and commercial real estate to come together,” said Jack Siragusa, first vice president of the CBRE Retail Advisory Group in Chicago. “It’s almost like selling a doctor as part of the building amenities.”

That kind of synergy will be needed if COVID-19’s disruption can lead to benefits in the coming years, experts say. Beyond getting the right individuals and industries to the table and making the necessary investments, improving work, wellness and space comes down to an interplay between environment, culture, personal power and norms. The challenges and constraints in realizing wellness in this complex ecosystem start with understanding the various stakeholder motivations.

“Health and wellness are often treated as a conflict to financial gain and seen as an additional investment rather than a core requirement in value creation,” said Nicholas White, managing director of Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam. “COVID-19 has given us a rare opportunity to analyze and quantify investment against results that can accelerate the change. The code has not been fully cracked – but some important conversations certainly are happening. They’re long overdue.”

In the weeks ahead, we will explore the issues that organizations must consider and the efforts they must collaborate on to bring holistic and preventive wellness to their organizations. In each chapter, we’ll identify points of conflict preventing change as a primer for future discussions.

Lessons From Academia About Working From Home

In this preview of our Work, Wellness and Space project, set to launch July 15, we feature Monica Hakimi, the James V. Campbell professor of law and the associate dean for faculty research at the University of Michigan. She discusses introverts in academia and whether the legal industry will ease up on work-from-home restrictions in a post-COVID world.

You might think introverts are well-equipped to handle the work-from-home world of the past few months. Heck, they might even enjoy it.

But experts point to an array of reasons why that’s not necessarily the case. And with some amount of remote work likely to persist in the coming months – and possibly years – employers must understand its effects on different personality types.

Doing so is crucial in managing the virtual office space – which is itself a major theme that emerged from Work, Wellness & Space, the inaugural research offering by Immediate Frontier. The project, a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and Greentarget in special collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam, will launch on July 15.

One area ripe with introverts is academia. Like much of the economy, universities across the country were shuttered in March, forcing classroom instruction to occur over Zoom, Skype and other platforms. At the University of Michigan School of Law, this meant finding ways to teach interactive classes in new ways, making sure that faculty, students, and staff -- many of whom lean toward being introverts -- did not become alienated.

“We are all independently in charge of our personal and professional well-being,” said Monica Hakimi, the James V. Campbell professor of law and associate dean for faculty research at the University of Michigan. “In some ways, introverts are well set up for it. But the fact that this is their M.O. could lead to more isolation.”

Two weeks after going remote, the law school faculty checked in with every law student to make sure they were taking care of themselves and getting the assistance they needed. Additionally, the school is now having weekly faculty workshops via Zoom instead of in person to maintain community, Hakimi said.

Hakimi also said the past few months might make the legal profession reconsider its hard stance on work-from-home privileges, which she said would be a “major quality of life enhancement” in an industry known for burnout and long hours.

“You still want to have those collaborative spaces,” she said. “But it seems crazy to me that the expectations in most white-collar jobs mean that people have to commute 45 minutes or more every day to sit in an isolated pod and work for 12 hours per day and then commute another 45 minutes or more to go home.”

Whether the legal industry loosens up on work from home once some sense of normalcy returns to the workplace depends not only on employers but employees, Hakimi said. Modern students make clear that they want more freedom in their working arrangements – but that could come into conflict with a desire to succeed and get ahead.

“How much will they actually fight for what they think they should be getting?” Hakimi said. “The people who are focused on these things are also focused on personal advancement, so there’s a friction there.”