Is your office audio-visual ready to support your people’s return?

After nearly two years of disruption, organisations are rethinking their culture, workspaces and their technology stacks. We are all doing this because working from home has had a profound impact on the way we work – and want to work.

Our people have different ideas about what makes sense for the future of their work. While they’ve come to appreciate the flexibility and autonomy of remote work, they also crave in-person interaction and workspace collaboration. Getting the balance of these right will mean some variation of approach as we test where the “centre line” will be for each workspace, or maybe even for each team.

Accordingly, there is uncertainty and lots of questions surrounding how we’ll define each workspace post-COVID.  So, what will the state of the workspace be going forward? What are our people’s new expectations? How can we ensure that a workspace has the right AV and technology to support people collaborating moving forward?

How do people feel about the return to the office? Most organisations have done some research into what a return to the office will look like for them. These sentiments and plans reveal that the world of work won't revert to any pre-COVID “normal.”

Organisations realize that flexibility of when and where staff work is now vital to their people.   They have adapted and many will now allow workers to permanently work from home when previously it was not even considered. A survey by Live Career found that 29% of workers would quit their current job if they could not continue working remotely.  The change is permanent.

However, that doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to work remotely all the time. There are likely to be phased-in returns or hybrid models. Common messaging is 60/40 with either the 60% being at home or the office. What is 100% sure is that we will not know where our people are and so collaboration tools are now more important to maximise productivity.

That’s requiring a rethink on office spaces with many implementing changes to the workspace to ensure social distancing, including both physical spacing and technology solutions with contactless procedures and touchless fixtures complimenting traditional meeting space technologies.

Some team members have concerns about their health, with many worried about the safety of returning to the office and so are asking for a permanent hybrid model. In deciding when to come into an office most commonly people have said they’d like it to depend on what they need to do and who else will be in the workspace that day.

Our people want to return to the office but with caveats. When they are in the office, they expect to meet with their teams or do other high value work they can’t accomplish at home. Organisations moving forward with reopening will need to adjust their workspaces to better support safety, collaboration and interaction.

To execute on the return to office evolution, organisations are finding that they need to examine their audio-visual technology to deliver outcomes more aligned to our new way of working.   In assessing audio visual technology to better support collaboration for hybrid workers we must consider two things – technology and usage.

Are the right systems in place to accommodate employee return and the new mode of operating that they’ll require. The systems you had before, which may have less-than-optimal to begin with, will need to be upgraded.  Then is the ergonomic perspective and re-evaluating if your spaces are suitable post-COVID.

Based on employee expectations and concerns many elements in the workspace will need a redesign to balance collaboration and safety. How you go about that will depend on plans to reopen and why and when people will come to the office.

Collaboration and meeting spaces will be primary places where you’ll want to assess to see what changes you need to make. For example, you may want to go completely touchless. Another possibility is rearranging the layout to align with social distancing, and this could require additional screens or other equipment.

Seating in your office may move to hotdesking and implement desk booking while spacing things out more with an open layout. Central hubs of desks could also connect with screens or other technology pieces that enable people to work together effectively.

Consider also using digital signage screens throughout offices as a means of improving communication. This approach provides many positives and enables you to speak to people about current policies, who will be in the office that day, company announcements and more.

In reviewing these ideas, we can see that returning to the office isn’t as easy as switching the lights back on. People and the way they work has changed forever, and our workspaces need to adapt to those changing expectations and needs. 

An experienced technology partner like Generation-e can help you determine the best approach for your organisation and balance budget, safety and collaboration potential as the landscape of the way we work continues to shift.