Start by evaluating the new normal

- The pandemic had much of the world on some level of lockdown for all of 2020 and many are still there in 2021. However, as the world gets a better handle on the virus causing all the panic, many areas are seeing a return to some level of normalcy. This is especially true when it comes to people's work lives. The last 12 months have seen the work environment completely uprooted with many companies around the globe shuttering their offices completely and almost all others at least partially. Now, we've heard this referred to repeatedly as the big work-from-home experiment, an experiment that was forced on all of us, ready or not. Now, some people say the experiment was a huge success, declaring an end to the office environment and the beginning of a new era where we all work remotely from wherever we want to be. Now, of course, others are declaring it a total disaster, coining new terms like Zoom fatigue and work-from-home burnout. So what does this mean for the future? What is the so-called new normal? I've actually written about this in several editions of my newsletter on LinkedIn, I've asked about it in several posts on LinkedIn and I had over 4,700 people around the world respond to a related poll, trying to decide what the new normal will be. My conclusion is that the new normal will not be static. It will change and evolve and it will probably do so much more slowly than we were all forced into this changed environment. The best way to prepare for a new normal that may evolve into something that we can't even predict will be to prepare to be resilient. There will not be a one-size-fits-all solution. When it comes to determining what your office space will need to look like and what changes you'll need to consider, your company's needs may be different from another company's needs. It will depend on the functions carried out in your facilities and on the attitudes, the beliefs and the desires of the people that work there. I've talked to a number of facility managers that manage office space for large companies. They've already begun to evaluate the new normal by sending out polls and questionnaires to their people to determine what they will want to see before returning to the physical office environment. One trend that I see emerging across the board and one that I validated in the poll that I mentioned is that there is a very small percentage of people who seem to state that their preference is to just return to the physical office environment as soon as it's safe to do so. It's less than 10%. More than 30% of people want to just stay working from home or working remotely. The majority of the people, close to 60% state that they want to return to the physical office environment but on some sort of modified schedule or in a hybrid manner where time at work is split between the company's physical office and then remote work or work in a virtual environment. Based on all of this, I think that it's clear that many companies need to be prepared for a new normal and they're going to need to alter their physical spaces to accommodate that new normal. If you're responsible for managing this, for figuring out how to configure your office space to get people to come back in, prepare to be flexible. Build resiliency into your plan and remember that there will probably not be a one-size-fits-all solution.