5 Things to think about as offices Re-Open

After more than a year, my office is about to open again. What do I need to change, now that some of my staff say they prefer to be working at home and some don’t?

Five changes to consider before you open those doors.

1. Yes, the office will reopen — but while everyone’s welcome, they’re not all coming back.

ZOOM conducted a Linkedin poll on April 8th, 2021 that revealed that a whopping 71% of respondents said they would like a hybrid work from home situation, sometimes working in the office and sometimes working at home; and another 25% want to stay at home forever. Only 5% want to go back to the office full-time.

2. Your workforce is now used to different IT equipment and working 99% digitally.

If they want to come back to the office part-time, they might carry a light laptop but no papers, files, or heavy desktop PC’s. Those oldies will stay in the office forever, and you may want to move the data to the cloud or a remote-access server.

3. Video conferencing is here to stay.

Even if most of your staff comes back to the office, they may still need to conference someone else in. Do you need a new approach to your conference room? Do you have adequate spacing in te room for everyone to safely move around?

4. It is expected that people will spread out throughout the building rather than sit together in large groups.

There will no longer be a need for so many seats; instead, the workspace should be converted to flexible workspaces where different people can sit in different group settings at different times.

5. The digital security challenge has become more complex;…

…the perimeter has changed from just the office to everyone’s home network. If you allow employees to connect to the guest WiFi network in their local coffee shop or on the road, that poses another threat. The easy and affordable fix is to outfit employees with VPN and mobile routers so they can safely access the company network from elsewhere.