How will the work life make an impact ? Here is what it would look like :
It's very hard to imagine now - many of the employees are working from home now, working under the best comfort zone. As most of us reading this would be under quarantine, working sitting on your couch or bed having your spaghetti noodle.
But one day everyone have to go back to work as old times where Covid-19 wont be eradicated and not everyone will be immune. But we’ll still be expected to sit at a desk and work. So how will work…work?
Using learnings gathered in China, along with World Health Organization data and the advice of medical specialists, a firm developed a new concept inside its own Amsterdam headquarters dubbed the Six Feet Office. It’s both a working laboratory and a showroom for the firm’s clients meant to call attention to how people might safely go back to work in offices :
Head of the firm led a rapid, one-week redesign of the company’s own office space to encourage better hygiene and social distancing. The core premise is to ensure that six feet, the recommended measurement for safe social distancing, stays between people at all times. This behaviour is encouraged through properly spaced desks, but also visual signals, such as a circle embedded in the carpeting around each desk to ensure people don’t get too close.
Using arrows on the floor, people are also encouraged to walk clockwise, and only clockwise, in lanes around the office. This one-way traffic is the same approach that healthcare workers take in hospitals to help avoid the spread of pathogens.
Each morning, employees are also asked to grab a paper placemat for their desk. At the end of the day, the paper is thrown away, which could help mitigate some contact-based spread of COVID-19 on office surfaces.
They even installed beacons into its office, which track the movements of employees throughout the space via their phones. Those beacons will be a way for the company to audit the efficacy of its own design—did people get too close or not?—and they may be used to audibly alert people when they break the invisible six-foot barrier. (Yes, to anyone who works outside an office management company, this sounds extremely invasive.)
While these ideas do hold some promise, the question remains whether or not a six-foot buffer really is enough to prevent the spread of a virus as contagious as COVID-19. The virus can live on surfaces for days at a time, and it can float for three hours in the air, waiting to infect people who breathe it in. Through that lens, the efforts to keep people separated may help for a brief encounter, but they probably don’t go far enough in spaces that many human bodies are sharing for eight or more hours at a time—especially spaces that are as notoriously poorly ventilated as office buildings.
Improved air filtration is probably the single most important lesson learned from China,” says Katsikakis(Head of Occupier Business Performance at Cushman & Wakefield). One reason that the labor force has returned to work so quickly is that China’s office buildings have been installing high-end air filtration systems for several years now, and the country even introduced its own indoor air certification standard, in response to rising pollution. (Many offices are also running in rotational shifts, to keep the number of people in an office at once to a minimum.)
Katsikakis imagines that COVID-19 will cause many companies to acquire extra air filtration solutions in the short term in an effort to promote healthier air. Longer term, businesses and landlords may “design buildings that plan for higher quality clean air as the norm,” says Katsikakis. “I think we’re going to see a lot of that.”