I kind of get what’s going on. We are part of the corporate real estate world and workplace is a thing that we can control. Therefore, we all end up talking about what’s going to happen to the workplace of the future. We sit around in our virtual groups and discuss the spike in home working that will continue, the fear people will have about the office, how space standards and design needs to change, and all the other aspects that go into a workplace.
The problem is, those are all the wrong questions for the moment we are in.
We should not be asking what impact more work from home will have on space, we should be asking what that new work from home may look like from a colleague’s perspective. Only once we understand their new reality can we understand how the workplace can support that reality.
We should not talk about fear of the workplace, because the people who come back will be those most over the fear. We should talk about who should be coming back and how we best support them.
We should not be talking about space standards and design changes yet, because no one knows what the workforce of tomorrow is going to want yet.
Asking about workplace today is very much putting the cart before the horse. Workplaces do not exist because of some inherent quality they provide a business. Workplaces exist because they are necessary to support a workforce. Before now, we’ve all just taken it for granted how the workforce interacted with the workplace. Now is the moment to question those fundamentals that we used to believe.
If you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong outcomes.