With vaccine distribution underway throughout much of the world, we’ll begin to establish a new at-work-onsite “usual” in the months ahead.
It seems likely that the new usual will be fundamentally like the old usual in most significant ways – although we never saw hand cleaning stations and decontamination entry zones in most pre-pandemic workplaces.
We’ve learned during the pandemic that people need to be co-located to perform effectively as creative teams, so corporate offices will become even more specialized locations for strategic/creative thinking as we move forward, even as telework will likely become ever more prevalent. But corporate offices were being fine-tuned as places for creative/strategic/innovative thinking long before any of us had really considered the possibility of a microbe that’d keep us at home for a year.
In future workplaces it is important that, in the words of the Boy Scouts, we’ll “Be Prepared” for “unusual” disease-related work situations, more prepared than we were at the beginning of the current pandemic. Because if there’s anything that the past decade has taught us, it is that there will be future health crises.
In recent memory our world has dealt with AIDS, SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, Ebola, and Zika. Not all of these diseases have affected all communities equally, but they all seemed to have the potential to become pandemic. Who knows what will be next?
Being prepared for things such as pandemics can be a challenge, not least of all because the future, and the information available to us then, may be dramatically different from the present.
For example, at the beginning of this pandemic there was great concern with surface transmission of disease and that morphed over time to more attention to airborne microbes as disease spreaders. Future illnesses that spread through our population may not be transmitted in any way we can now imagine, but moving forward with life requires that we consider the most probable set of future conditions and how they align with situations we’ve experienced in the past.
To deal with the inevitable next, it makes sense to build flexibility into our workplaces that makes transforming them easier when illness is prevalent. For example, we could incorporate support for between co-worker physical dividers into all workplaces, maybe even via attachment mechanisms on shared benching-solution type table tops, while also providing some way to keep those dividers readily at hand, between pandemics, when they don’t need to be clamped onto those benching table tops. Perhaps, for example, the dividers could slide into table top slots during times of disease but link together into some sort of wall-mounted art when virulent disease is not afoot. Similarly handy would-be conference room tables that can be used ganged together to form a single large surface when possible or slid apart for effective distancing (with table top surfaces for laptops), when required. At workplace gates that keep people from moving from one part of a floor to another when disease is an issue there could be “decorative” elements that are always present, Perhaps gates could even serve some sort of everyday technology-related or wayfinding use, for example.
If barriers, gates, etc. are always present in a workplace, when they’re needed during-disease epidemics they will already be familiar and familiar spaces are places where we’re calmer and feel more trusting. People get a particularly positive boost from familiar environments and design elements when they feel stressed.
Always present gates and barrier artworks, etc., will also nonverbally signal to employees that the organization writing their checks cares about them and their wellbeing, that their employers have made actual investments to keep them healthy; this sort of apparent concern does wonders for employee performance. These impressions of apparent concern will help beat-back the negative effects of remembered during pandemic challenges and issues, which will inevitably be top-of-mind for many employees for quite some time.
Pre-, post-, and during-pandemics people are fundamentally the same, from a cognitive, and yes, even emotional, perspective. Creating spaces now with the flexibility to serve people at work during future disease outbreaks – places that will seem familiar during those, apparently inevitable bad times, will augment current and future employee performance and quality-of-life.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.