Space Designs Shift As More Employees Opt to Work from Home Permanently

With Twitter recently announcing that employees can stay remote workers after stay-at-home orders lift, the coronavirus epidemic may shift how and whether companies lease office space in the future.

According to a report by The Verge, another major tech company, Square, also followed in Twitter’s footsteps and announced that its employees will also stay remote workers after quarantines are lifted.

However, not all employees and companies may follow suit. According to a report by JLL, only 4.9% of office employees would prefer exclusively working from home permanently. About 60% of office workers would prefer to work remotely a portion of the week, and still go into an office the remainder of the week. And 34.5% expected to return to working in an office as they had done before the pandemic hit.

For those companies that still envision an office space for their employees, workspaces and offices will need a redesign. The trend in the last decade in offices went toward open concept layouts, such as benching, where workers sat in close proximity to promote collaboration.

Cushman & Wakefield predicts that trend will change, and unveiled their “6 Feet Office Project” this year, which includes redesigned workstations where employees maintain a distance of six feet, disposable placemats, unique clockwise walkway routes for each office, new rules of conduct that incorporate social distancing rules, and a “6 Feet Certificate” given to a company that successfully implements the project. Office furniture companies Steelcase and Herman Miller also predict a change, with both companies releasing reports and guides on post-Covid-19 office layouts on their web sites.

A Gartner survey of 229 human resources leaders reported that about 41% of employees will work remotely at least part time once stay-at-home orders are lifted. The drop in employees needing physical desks in office space may lead to a drop in office space renewals. CBRE’s report showed that commercial leasing activity fell by 18% since the fourth quarter in 2019, and was down 14% from the past year. The US office vacancy rate rose to 12.3%, though there was an increase in lease renewals as companies opted to stay in place instead of moving to new office space.