Home-like or Open Space? Companies Look to Reinvent Workspace of Future in Post-Pandemic World

The balance between work and personal life, the attractiveness of offices in large cities, management of hybrid teams made up of in-office and remote workers… the challenges of the workspace of the future are numerous. According to a PwC United States Remote Work Survey published in January, conducted with 1200 office workers, 55% of employees would like to be remote three days a week post-pandemic. She was the one who announced in March that the streaming giant’s 6,550 global employees would be able to “work from anyplace, which is comprehensive to everybody having the option to pick any place they want to work from”: from home, the office, or both. Last February, at a Dezeen-organized conference on post-covid workspace design, Simmons shared her vision: “I think we have to look at creating spaces that mirror the kind of feeling that we’ve got from home so we can choose where we work.” The manager noted that workers were able to experience coziness, as well as periods of intense concentration, without being disrupted by colleagues. Neuroscientist Gaëtan de Lavilléon explained in an article in French daily Le Monde in October 2019 that “the treatment of noise in companies and recovery time of employees through the decompartmentalization of workspaces is inappropriate.” It remains to be seen whether all these spectacular arrangements will succeed in luring employees back in a hypothetical return to normalcy.