By Ariana Martinez, WELL AP

This is the third in a series of blog posts about wellness in the workplace. We’ve covered WELL Standards and mindfulness, and wellness and choice, always through the lens of how our rapidly changing world will affect the work we do as workplace designers.

“What will the post-COVID workplace look like?” We’ve had this question on repeat ever since the day we entered quarantine. If we view the situation from the half-glass-full perspective, the pandemic mixed with the current social climate is forcing us to make changes that are long overdue. And it’s an opportunity to dramatically redefine the purpose of the workplace and how people interact with it and with each other. As plans to return continue to fluctuate, we’ve been thinking about how we will create space and policies to foster a deep commitment to wellness and empathetic design in the future

1. Acceptance. To say that the world has changed dramatically over the past few months is an understatement. And while it may feel uncomfortable, the sooner an organization embraces the inevitability of change, the sooner it can grow with it. Friction in the workplace is reduced when organizations are willing to set aside the outdated strategies and policies that are keeping them from adapting to the new work model. Accepting that we can’t go back to working the way we used to is critical to the success of any organization and any physical workspace, and being constantly mindful of that change will help us as designers make better, more resilient, more holistic design choices on behalf of our clients.

2. Cultivate a system of trust. In our previous blog post, we addressed the importance of user choice and flexibility as a function of wellness. But a workplace based in the concept of user choice can only work when users are trusted to use the spaces as they see fit, to do the work they need to do. This includes working from home. Trust assumes good intent, turns scarcity into abundance, and frees people to be creative. Many of our norms are based in mistrust, and creating new systems of belief requires attention.

3. Re-Planning. For the foreseeable future, the office will shed some of its previous functions to support the most essential activities for an organization, such as building and sustaining company culture, providing space and tools for collaboration and teaming, being a hub to support technology and other resources that allow us to work remotely, and attracting the best talent. Organizations must ask themselves what they need from their office space that can’t be provided by a WFH policy. With the functions defined, they can set about creating appropriate boundaries around those functions to help reduce the spread of COVID19.

We believe the functions of any office fall into one of the following categories: Me, We and Us spaces. Me spaces are areas related to individual users like workstations and private offices. We spaces support teams like collaborative areas and dedicated team rooms. Us spaces are shared spaces that support the organization as a whole, including cafes, IT related areas, and spaces that communicate a company’s identity and culture.

We foresee the importance of dedicated “me” spaces will diminish, at least for the short term. Some essential functions will still need to be located in the office. Additionally, as people start to return to the office, heads-down space will still need to be provided, but we believe these areas will be shared, and not dedicated to individual users. In regard to wellness, it’s important to consider increasing the amount of restorative spaces within the office.

We” spaces will take on an even more important role in workplaces in the short term. Bringing teams together physically and virtually remains an essential function of any office space. We foresee semi-enclosed and enclosed spaces with robust, voice activated technology and collaborative tools, flexible enough to support groups of different sizes and requirements. Flexibility will be critical in new workplaces, so each team areas must anticipate user needs.

“Us” spaces will see a major shift in the short term. Identity and culture will be even more important moving forward as work forces are dispersed from a physical workplace. As such, spaces that support identity and culture will become even more important. Conversely, large café gathering spaces will shift from providing a place for entire organizations to gather to providing individuals a place to work heads-down away from workstations or offices, connected to others visually but separated physically.

We’ve created a preliminary diagram of Us, We, and Me spaces that represents new thinking in the ways we’ve planned office spaces in the past. While we’ve previously placed Us spaces at the center of a plan with Me spaces at the perimeter, we’ve now flipped the diagram. Centralizing Me spaces and separating paths and spaces used by visitors from those used by employees allows us to create two paths of travel that help to limit contact between staff and visitors. The quadrants create “sanitizing check points” as users move through different spaces.

We’ve been given an opportunity to shift our perspective on the way we work. The workplace as we know it has become an option, one of many ways to support the work we do. While we need to stay committed to wellness and empathetic design within physical space, this work needs to go beyond the office. Empathetic design embraces choice to support diverse workstyles and lifestyles. We’ve only scratched the surface as we study ways to strengthen this new network of options. Our philosophy of design follows the quote of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Me / We / Us