O escritório físico cria um sentido de identidade

A sede da Microsoft em Lisboa

Com a pandemia do Covid-19, um dos grandes debates tem sido qual será o futuro dos escritórios num mundo que requer um maior distanciamento social e medidas apertadas de higiene. Acentuando a tendência da digitalização e de uma maior flexibilização da forma como e onde trabalhamos, o Covid-19 oferece a oportunidade para se repensar os escritórios, mas nunca será um fim para estes espaços de trabalho.

Num futuro onde o trabalho remoto será cada vez mais uma constante, o escritório continuará a ser instrumento essencial para a cultural empresarial, um ponto de encontro para os colaboradores e o local ideal para o surgimento de novas ideias e inovação.

Nesta entrevista (em inglês), Pirjo Kiefer, a directora de design de interiores da Vitra, fala das mudanças que estão em curso e da importância dos escritórios para a identidade das empresas.

Pirjo Kiefer

At the moment, Vitra’s Interior Design Services team is very much focused on practicalities, as people are slowly moving back into the office. Both at Vitra and in your work for clients, your team is helping adapt offices to current hygiene and distancing provisions. What are the key considerations here?

You would be forgiven for thinking that this is mainly a matter of removing office furniture like chairs and tables to increase the distance between staff. However, the job is actually far more involved than that, which makes it a fascinating challenge. The question is how to get employees to observe distancing rules and comply with regulations. If you just post warning signs all over the place, it makes everyone uneasy and they end up feeling patronised, but by the same token we all know how quickly people can forget to apply precautionary measures. So it’s a balancing act. We have noticed that existing pieces of furniture – like the chairs in a conference room – can also be used as natural distancers if you put signs on them saying they shouldn’t be used. In other words, it’s all about empathy and thinking ahead in planning terms.

Área de lounge e reuniões na Microsoft

Zona de trabalho no Deloitte Hub em Lisboa

Área lounge e de trabalho na Deloitte

Are there particular office typologies that lend themselves more easily to adaptation?

We have certainly made some interesting discoveries in that regard: for one thing, the more open and flexible an office design is, the more efficient you can be about implementing an appropriate response to Covid-19. At the moment, many people are predicting an end to open-plan offices, but it doesn’t actually matter how the space is structured. What is true, though, is that offices where the possibility for change was part of the original design now have a clear advantage – Stephan Hürlemann’s Dancing Office and Sevil Peach’s Citizen Office spring to mind here. Individual or even double offices provide much less scope for flexible capacity planning. All you can do there is downsize them to one single person who ends up being just as isolated as in their home office. So why come in to work in the first place?

Planta de escritório antes do Covid-19

Planta de escritório depois do Covid-19

So how are we going to work in future, and in what kind of environment?

That’s a really exciting question for planners right now. In our work, we are increasingly concerned with «soft» systems, and not just physical structures. We have to plan ahead: what kind of meetings actually need to take place, and how? Or how should different areas be organised to allow a whole range of different things to happen?

One more thing. What we’re all missing at the moment in the home office setting is a sense of identification. We miss our teammates and the corporate culture, a clan or tribe with which to identify. There are also people who say they’re not going back to the office, as they can operate just as well from home. So employers need to be asking, what can the physical office provide that employees cannot get at home? Identity takes on a key role here, for both employers and employees. The company office is where the company culture is experienced, where meetings are held and ideas are exchanged. In future, the job for us planners will be to enhance the physical workplace.