In response to the recent recommendations released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Matt Richtel with The New York Times has outlined some of the key takeaways of the guidelines, mainly that, for some employers, it may be easier to keep employees working at home. Architecturally speaking, the new recommendations present numerous spatial constraints for the workplace.
Some of the guidelines for office spaces include: desks being kept six feet apart, and if not possible, the raising of plastic shields around workstations; barred seating in common areas; face coverings should be worn at all times; no handshakes or fist-bumps; a complete rethinking of common food areas; and a lot more.
The CDC has even recommended that employees drive to work alone, discouraging the popular encouragement of the recent past to carpool and take public transportation.
2 Comments
I'm headed back to work on Monday, to try out being back in the office. Employees have been given the option and I'm ready to try. Honestly I've loved working at home but it's also starting to take a toll on my mental health having absolutely no separation between work and home!
My firm has handled it great, we had a virtual meeting this week to go over all of the new standards and I'm very pleased with the intentions. For example: we have the main studio space on the second floor, so one stair has been designated "up-going" and the other "down-going" to limit close encounters. They've made some screens to put between desks, although most of our desks are already 6-8' apart, and even with a portion of the staff in the office we'll still be having most meetings virtually, seated at our own desks.
Since we're a combined architecture-interiors firm we actually have A TON of those same plastic bins as in the picture for holding fabric and other samples - maybe I'll show up Monday with one on my head as a joke.
(The other truth is it's going to be really hard not to want to hug a bunch of my coworkers when I see them again!)
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