We’re here to help you think about your post-COVID-19 office space and how to create new office fitouts that make your employees feel safe. Reimagine your office space in a forward-looking (big idea) and a simple (and affordable) way to protect your office and employees from current and future pathogens, and help them feel safe when they return to the office. The way we work is changing, and customs offices with unique layouts can help you brand your business, encourage employees to think outside the box and unlock new revenue opportunities. Designed for more collaborative and creative work, office spaces are making their way into all workplaces, far beyond tech companies and startups.

Before COVID-19, commercial office design favoured large, light, and open office spaces with shared spaces designed to encourage social interaction and collaboration among colleagues. The evolution of flexible working is nothing new, and we expect our offices to continue to change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created the need for everyone to transition faster than expected. Support working from home, social distancing, and a cleaner, more productive workplace. As businesses seek to understand how spaces can support individual users, we are seeing a hybrid model of people working from home and the office.

For example, some employees will come to the office on a certain day, while the rest will work remotely. The biggest change in the workplace will be the hustle and bustle of the office. This shift will have a significant impact on how companies envision the office space, floor space, infrastructure and technology that will be required over the long term to support the new work paradigm. People expect more flexibility, better technology and incentives to come to the office, and businesses should heed that call.

By allowing employees to add personal touches to the space, they will feel more connected not only to the office but to the work they do and to their colleagues. Businesses may provide people who arrive with a more personalised, high-quality work experience suited to their specific preferences and work styles with fewer workers in the workplace.

While employers around the world are trying to bring their employees back to the office, management must take immediate action to ensure the workplace is productive and safe when they return. In the office of the future, technology will play a central role in allowing employees to return to the office and work safely until a vaccine is widely available. Our workplace experts discuss the need to plan for your eventual return to work based on location, and what it takes to prepare the environment for your return to the office. As people adjust their home offices to create more “permanent” work-from-home spaces, lighting upgrades will be a key element of any renovation.

Lighting controls are now required to enable these new spaces to adapt quickly to increase flexibility and collaboration in the new post-COVID workplace. However, lighting design also needs to adapt to these new office space trends, and we may see the rise of pendant lights. With private offices and even taller partitions, this will change the overall lighting design and control system for these spaces. Office lighting will accommodate a more flexible workforce, with collaboration-focused spaces requiring adjustable lighting levels and different controls to suit different users and their collaboration needs.

As a result, from outside the landing areas, the design concept of the workspace will come to affect furniture shops. While this “hotel” concept is not a new idea, offices will now offer all sorts of work configurations, including desks, high floors, phone rooms, small boarding rooms, padded seats, pods, and open utility configurations.

Going forward, workspaces will be designed with efficiency and effectiveness in mind, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Design and fit out companies are there to help you in achieving that. Whether it’s using furniture to encourage physical separation and distance, designing wider corridors for safer two-way traffic, or changing the way the workforce works in space, offices in open environments need to be deconsolidated when companies return to full capacity.

Studio Eagle came up with architectural solutions and ideas to redesign workspaces that not only allow for physical distancing (sitting back to back or side to side; helping people maintain 2m distance) but also adopt a design approach that encourages employees to leave.

Organizations will need to manage which employees can come into the office when they can come and sit, how often the office is cleaned, whether there is sufficient airflow, and whether they stay far enough as they move around the space. The greatest accomplishment an office space can achieve will be meeting in the office to socialise and collaborate. Industry leaders will use the lessons of COVID-19 to creatively and boldly rethink how work is done and what role offices should play.