Office spaces adapt to post-Covid world with safety on its mind

The decisions RPG Enterprises had been making for its office spaces in the last few years unwittingly prepared it for a post-Covid world. The CEAT owner had pruned several of its satellite branches and allowed employees there to work from home or anywhere else. It had also started hotdesking — where seats were not assigned but used ad hoc by different people — which helped it give up real estate. These measures have paid off during the uncertain pandemic months where as little as 10 per cent of its workforce will be in the premises. “Flexibility is a necessity now,” notes S Venkatesh, the group’s head of HR.

Less will be more in office design going forward, several architects agree. “We will have smaller offices to design sadly. But when you think about carbon footprint and sustainability, it is a better style of working,” says Sonal Sancheti of Mumbai-based _Opolis Architects. Many employees will not be returning to workplaces for another financial quarter, or until a vaccine becomes available.

This has meant changes in the traditional layout of offices. No longer open for waiting, the reception areas have turned into zones for temperature checks and sanitation. Titan employees perform a daily declaration about their health on a company app before walking into their Bengaluru headquarters. At RPG House, the ground floor offices have been vacated so that meetings with outside visitors can be limited to this area. Some companies are even choosing to seat members of the same team away from each other. This way, if one contracts the disease, the rest of the team won’t risk being grounded. Boxes drawn on the carpet inform colleagues how far apart to stand from each other, and large ‘X’s on the backs of chairs remind them not to loiter into anyone else’s territory.

“In the last decade, offices were designed to leverage the power of teamwork, to bring people together, not to keep them apart. But this requires a sea-change in the current scenario,” says Sameer Joshi, associate vice-president for marketing at Godrej Interio. The designer’s predicament is how to make such safety tweaks without losing that essential collaborative quality of a workplace. “Invest in flexible furniture and settings, which you can easily reconfigure later when the pandemic ends,” Joshi advises his clients. Godrej Interio — which says 75 offices have approached it so far for tips on redesigning to meet medical guidelines — is recommending glass partitions that are easy to disinfect, as well as foldable separations.

Titan is relying on greenery and alternative forms of ventilation with 60 per cent of its force back at work on a rotational basis since May. “We experimented with plexiglass separators but we have a very open office, so that doesn’t work,” says chief human resource officer Raj Narayan. It switched to large, noiseless fans and air circulation systems instead, while some like clothing company Myntra have also minimised air conditioning by bringing in pedestal fans. Ghaziabad-headquartered Dabur has had air purifiers fitted for the small number of employees who occasionally use its offices.

Repairs and maintenance will be the first order of business for many properties when they reopen after long gaps. Shortly before lockdown, architect Apoorva Shroff of ReD Architects had given a private equity firm’s Mumbai venue a swanky redesign. But months of neglect and a heavy monsoon have meant that dozens of potted plants will have to be replaced and water damage from a leak corrected. The offices Shroff has designed post lockdown have incorporated sensor-activated doors, lights and faucets, and even a couple of folding beds and showers for support staff who live far away and cannot commute daily.

As a lot of business activity moves online, Sancheti’s architecture firm has been getting a new kind of request. Companies want small conference rooms and executives want elaborate studies in their homes with art and bookshelves. “They want it to appear a certain way in Zoom meetings,” she observes, with a laugh. “People are getting more and more conscious of what is in the frame.”