The pandemic is over! The pandemic is over!
I’ve heard the cries up and down the streets worldwide from individuals, colleagues, business leaders, and governments. The declaration of freedom has been loud and excited from all quarters. The theory seems to be that by saying it often enough will also mean that it never happened.
Coming back to reality, the effects from the pandemic will continue to be seen for years. Right now, in March 2023, no one in the world knows when or at what level occupancy levels will restabilize. No one knows what long-term impacts the new technology deployed rapidly will have on team dynamics. No one knows the effects from long-term remote and hybrid working will have on relationships within teams. We are guessing about so many things.
Early returns to the office (and we are still in the early phases) are not going to be representative of how people use offices three years from now. Using data from this early return to design for three years from now means you will, by definition, be designing for use patterns that are wrong. You may have what seems to be great data, but that data does not show what you want it to show.
Hope is not a business strategy. Wanting the data to be of a nature and quality to influence your workplace strategy does not make it so. Hoping that simply having people back in the office means you know how many will be there in the future does not make it so. Praying that you are doing more than guessing when you build your new post-pandemic workplaces will not make it so.
This does not mean that the data and direction you can see today have no value. It means that the way you need to use data to inform your workplace today is completely different than how you would have done it three years ago. The data looks the same but is not. Treat it differently. Look at it critically. Question how it may be misleading you. Estimate how it may change up, down, and across time. What things will the new workplace be most sensitive to? What aspects will not cause future headaches and problems and can be ignored?
I see any number of companies measuring their workplace more now than they ever have before. Then I watch in horror as they make the mistake of assuming that because “the pandemic is over” it means the data reflects a new normal. Do not make their mistake.
As someone that has been monitoring occupancy analytics way before the world really got started on it, you have the advantage of knowing history of changing data during ‘normal’ times. The ebbs and lows of this natural process has not returned but the importance of continuous monitoring is loud and clear. The notion that you can decide your near future design based on snapshot analysis (read clipboard) existed before the pandemic and unfortunately the same people are making the same decisions with analytics data today.
The right way to do it is to make data part of continuous decision making, essentially operationalizing it to drive incremental change.
You are right. Having historical data always, always, always helps to understand the data you are looking at today. If you only look at the most recent 4 months of occupancy when planning a new site (whether today, before the pandemic, or 5 years from now), you will end up designing for occupancy that is not representative of what it is for the year. Maybe you get lucky and your sample set happens to be a good average for the year, but too often it covers off-peak periods. People are always surprised that December and January have some of the highest occupancy days in the calendar, because the monthly averages are below average!