The post-pandemic workplace, for those who return, will prompt a whole range of ‘bring your own [thing]’. We trust our own stuff more than that of others, so what might we now bring to the office that’s ours? Neil Usher considers the options
More grizzled workplace types (those over 40) may remember the push for ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD).
This was a reaction to the company-issue 3/86 buckling under the weight of Lotus 123 coupled with the realisation that many of us had better kit and applications at home than we did at work. A simple bit of access trickery and we could get our work e-mails and files on our own laptops and tablets, thereby opening a legal minefield for a world that wasn’t ready and in which ‘cloud’ signified a harbour for water vapour seeking condensation nuclei.
In recent years, the rise of the experience economy has extended to our workplace where we’ve been sharing many of the resources that were once allocated to us, from incidentals to desks to storage to amenities, floating freely over and through generic space, unencumbered by the responsibility of ownership. Ironically, all just at the point that the IT kit issued by the organisation routinely outstrips the specification and performance of that at home, rendering BYOD unnecessary.
The post-pandemic workplace, for those who return, however, will prompt a whole range of ‘bring your own [thing]’ driven by emotions on a scale from caution to outright anxiety. We less-than-rationally trust our own stuff more than that of others, even if we haven’t sanitised it as well as others may have. If it’s had our grubby hands on it, as least they’re our grubby hands.
What might we now bring to the office that’s ours?
Bring your own transport
What is commonly found on a tube train seat or a slow-runner cross-country would likely cause excitement at Porton Down. Yet we have our hands all over them on a daily basis. Before we’ve been anywhere near soap and a basin, we tear up a croissant. So, from here we’ll sacrifice our safety for health, riding bikes and electric scooters, trading the risk of the roads (and technically still-illegal passage in the case of the latter) for the avoidance of overcrowded trains and buses.
Bring your own space
From the discipline known as proxemics, pioneered by Edward Hall in the 1960s, comes a new measure – an inviolable ‘no person’s land’ around each of us. It started as a medically-dictated two metres and has now morphed into a variable, personally-defined comfort zone. Hall’s definition of personal space extended only to 1.2 metres after which we were in ‘social’ space which extended from 1.2 – 3.7 metres. We’ll therefore be re-defining personal space. Yet most workspace isn’t designed like that: desking, circulation, amenities, meeting spaces. While we once allowed transitory encroachment on our personal space, we will no longer. We’ll bring it with us and take it everywhere we go. Vaccines or not, we’ve changed.
Bring your own standards
We’re used to organisations setting standards for the workplace and its services. But are they now enough? What happens when we don’t think they go far enough? There may be some that we would generally all accept but we’ll be far more disposed to drawing our own lines, defining what we’ll accept and what we won’t. Organisations will find their people far more vocal about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And generally, just far more vocal. At long last. Which will need channels and the ability and willingness to listen, understand and engage.
Bring your own friends
Who are all the people in my workspace? I know a few of them, I’ve seen a few others, and not seen the majority before. New starters? Contractors? Or just people I never bothered to notice before today. I’ll need to know who the people around me actually are, what kind of lives they lead and risks they take. Suddenly those I marked down as less interesting will be most welcome. If you spent the weekend in nightclubs, at gigs, at football matches, you might be living your best life but you’re channelling more risk in my direction than I can tolerate. If you stayed in, spent time with your family, watched TV, got a takeaway delivered – lets go for a coffee. We’ll want boring friends. Boring will be the new interesting. We may even let them into a little of our (revised) personal space.
Bring your own greeting
We used to go to conferences just so we could shake hands with strangers. Often the stranger the better. The handshake is an internationally accepted business greeting in a world where one culture’s friendly gesture is another’s a declaration of war. Yet the pandemic has made us nervous about any form of touch that might involve a degree of perspiration. And so – elbow nudges, fist bumps, semi-salutes and the ubiquitous involuntary web-call-wave have emerged as suitable alternatives. It’s even permissible to mix them. We may resort to exchanging pendants as association football once encouraged.
Bring your own peripherals
Many people are used to having their own company issue laptop, now that the standards have generally caught up since BYOD. Yet everything else remains shared. Docking stations, keyboards (complete with a loaf’s worth of mixed crumbs), mice, screens. The more ‘agile’ the space the more we share. And so we’re wondering whether we might carry a little more rather than risk contracting a little more. Mice now fold up (solving a problem that had foxed humankind for decades – we haven’t yet fixed the plug, but hey, one major solution at a time is progress) and keyboards can be condensed. Perhaps carting a 27-inch monitor around might be a stretch but who knows how long before they’ll roll up and we can pop and elastic band around them.
Bring your own schedule
A plethora of surveys have revealed that we all (mostly) no longer wish to attend the office any more than two to three days a week, those days being of our own choosing. Where organisations once provided space just in case everyone showed up – which they never did, leading to excruciating levels of waste that were simply tolerated – they will now need to consider a less habitually compliant workforce popping in and out at will. The degree to which our days in Mordor will be scheduled for us remains to be seen, and technology will be deployed to do the hard calculations needed, but suffice to say we’ll be ships passing with many of our colleagues. We may at least value more highly the time we get to spend together – and do something of more value with it than strap on our headphones and make ourselves unapproachable.
It’s not just our lunch and our pencils. The post-pandemic workplace will be one of ‘fat client, thin server’ – with us being more in control of our lives and our paraphernalia. We’ll be defining what we do, how we do it, what and with whom we do it with. To the extent that, in a ‘bring your own’ culture we’ll be bringing a huge slice of that culture, too.
With almost 30 years in industry as a property, workplace and change leader, Neil Usher has delivered innovative environments for organisations in a variety of sectors, all over the world including Warner Bros., Honeywell, Rio Tinto and Sky.
He is now Chief Workplace and Change Strategist at GoSpace AI. He has been actively blogging about work for over a decade. His first book The Elemental Workplace was published in 2018 and the follow-up Elemental Change in 2020. He is a sought-after conference and academic speaker, always bringing a fresh perspective while challenging assumptions and myths.
