Changing Places…

Covid changed a lot about the way we all work. Zoom and Teams calls have become the norm in place of face to face meetings and many businesses have never returned to an office base but took the decision to continue working entirely remotely.

While this shift has brought many benefits it also comes at a cost. Human beings are naturally social animals and companies are now finding that people are missing the social interaction of the office environment. The “fun” seems to have gone from company life – lots of hard work but the “play” not so much any more.

And it isn’t just about fun. Younger and more junior members of staff are suffering from the lack of that all-important daily contact with their more experienced colleagues – this isn’t so much about formal training programmes but about those informal conversations, discussions, debates that take place all the time in the office.

The result is a very different approach to office space. No more serried ranks of desks…

…but now a focus on more spaces designed and furnished for collaboration, socialising, informal chat with separate areas for more formal meetings, calls or just quiet space. It all has a very different look and feel to it.

rhbr has been and continues to be involved in a range of office refurbishment projects, changing the face of the workplace to accommodate these different needs and at times reconfiguring whole floors.

Banquette and booth seating to create collaboration spaces has been a very common feature of our work, together with modular seating designs which can be used to configure areas in a variety of innovative ways.

Flexibility is the byword here – it may be a one-to-one meeting one minute, a small group the next, or a coffee break after that. The key is to provide areas which are designed to encourage and facilitate social interactions and to put back that balance between work and fun.