Offices are places to create, not deliver.

When we established the Collaboratory space at Cognizant - with its inspiring tech access and demos, creative, soft-furnished spaces, multiple screens, writable surfaces everywhere you turned (etc), one side effect was workspace envy.
Colleagues more usually housed in row-upon-row of hot desks (when not on client sites) at the European HQ in London found multiple excuses to use the Think-Create-Make spaces a handful of us called home. They preferred to hold meetings in there, to chat with friends, to get creative.
I recall lobbying global HQ to consider rolling out the Collaboratory concept to become standard practice for all Cognizant office space.
Perhaps, at this time of crisis for the office, it's time to review that possibility?
The threat to the office/opportunity for new and better ways of working came up at last night's, increasingly regular, Beers & Ideas. Contributions came from Rory Yates, Jessica Yates, Pete Ahearn and Dean Corney.
We noted the two-speed nature of the journey 'back to work' - with those who had no choice but to be physically present at work being exposed to the greatest risks. We considered that those who had a choice should consider using it to offer some protection to those who don't.
We noted that home work brought environmental, local community and productivity advantages but that we had yet to understand the impact of our lack of human interaction on creative thought, serendipity and, of course, well-being.
The office is not dead. But it may be about to undergo a metamorphosis of the caterpillar to butterfly variety. We will continue needing spaces to come together, to be together. But those spaces may focus on the needs our social time best serve.
We will need less space for 'bums on seats' placed in dreary rows. Instead we will need spaces to ideate, create concepts, get hands on with prototypes. The office space should transform to one proactively designed for human interaction, prompting and promoting serendipity.
We will visit such spaces to actively spend face-to-face time with other people - rather than check-in, log-on and head-down. We can do the latter so much better at home. But the former - the bits that define what we could and should be heads-down about, that is the role of the office post-Covid19.
It may be a day a week or a week a month. The important realisation is that offices should be places optimised to create - the home can be where we get focused on the work and get the delivery done.
Like so many other trends that this Context Shock has revealed and accelerated - this one has been a long time coming.
Teams are already coping with a great deal of change - much of it sub-optimal. So, rather than watch the office stagger back on to its feet, let's see it leap forward and play its part in the creation of a new and better way of working.

Photo by Hillary Ungson on Unsplash