Have you considered the impact of Covid-19 on your employees’ health and well-being?
How comfortable will they be returning to the office? Have you considered employee engagement when returning to the office following a long period of furlough or working from home? And what will the working environment even look like post-Covid? What happens after Covid?
These are some of the many questions being debated as we look ahead to a post-Covid era. Inevitably, Covid-19 has massively impacted employee health and well-being and not necessarily in a good way. Some side effects include isolation, less distinction between work and your personal life, and a lack of human connection.
Whilst part of your workforce may be experiencing burnout, others who may have been furloughed will feel underworked.
It’s important to bring these two halves back together in the return ‘back to normal’.
We need to ensure this is done in an engaging and healing way. It’s important to consider the future workplace and how it will function when bringing a disjointed workforce together. Working environments impact employee health, well-being and engagement. The question is, do companies need to be leasing offices or is there a more beneficial way of working? A trend that is likely to emerge is the increased use of co-working spaces.
5 million people will be working from co-working spaces by 2024, an increase of 158% compared to 2020.
Co-Working Resources
Another suggestion for the future workplace is ‘the 15-minute city’, a concept created by Carlos Moreno. This goes against modern urbanism and is the design of cities so that within a 15-minute walk or bike ride people will have access to work, housing, food, health, education, culture and leisure. This would also help tackle climate change and reduce carbon footprint.
According to Moreno, modern cities are currently a “bubble of illusionary acceleration” and aren’t working to our benefit. We need cities to adapt to human needs rather than the other way around, and this has become even more apparent during Covid. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that community and locality are very important to human needs and were vital during lockdown.
So could this be the solution for a post-Covid recovery?
There’s reason to believe existing offices will be used for hybrid and flexible working. Paul Dunn, Executive Director at CallisonRTKL has gone as far to say:
“There won’t ever be a generation looking to return to an office 5 days a week 9-5.”
Paul Dunn, Executive Director at CallisonRTKL
According to an article by ‘All work’ explaining workplace trends in 2021, the office will be a place where workers pass through and collaborate with their colleagues rather than sit and work which is likely to result in a stronger and more resilient workplace culture. Companies will need to make office spaces more vibrant and inspiring in order to achieve this collaborative environment.
Co-working, 15-minute cities, hybrid and flexible working or a full return to the office. Whatever the future of the workplace might look like it’s clear that times are changing.
The one thing we do know is that the way we communicate with our employees has never been more crucial. Talk to us about how we can craft your internal comms and help make that transition a little smoother.
Mocean is a multi-award-winning creative agency specialising in sustainable corporate events, brand activation and strategic storytelling.
