After last year forced a huge portion of the country to work from home for an unspecified amount of time, the headlines indicating the end of the office started growing.
Regardless of whether this sentiment is even true, the reality is that the new era of work is less about the end of the office and more about the increased need for workplace personalization.
The truth of the matter is the office is still needed, and some employees are actually growing to desire it as remote work fatigue takes over.
Still, the way in which people come together in the workplace will have to change and office design will not look the way it did pre-pandemic.
Instead, organizations will have to focus on how to utilize their spaces to keep employees safe, engaged, collaborative and nurture their overall culture.
According to the book “The Organization and Architecture of Innovation” by Tom Allen of MIT and German architect Gunter Henn, the physical distance between colleagues is crucial to developing working relationships.
“Rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distances, as face to face probability decays, our data shows a decay in the use of all communication media with distance,” the book reads. “We do not keep separate sets of people, some of which we communicate in one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face to face, the more likely it is that we will telephone the person or communicate in some other medium.”
