The covid storm has stopped and epidemic waves of force 12 has now decreased almost to null. Today it's high time to speak about how the office design has changed and learn a modern style of work.

Let's just look back and trace our life during last two years. Humans' behavior was unpredictably changing from unfathomable panic to indignation and sabotage of any rules. When people were afraid of coming outside and shun society the business sphere was to adapt. The priority in life has shifted to the health of people we love and the requirement to save wellbeing is now a main criterion when choosing a job.

As a design studio and an employer at the same time, we have identified the three main categories when designing offices today.

Postcovid office

The main goal when creating or renovating a space according to new standards is to give employees confidence in their safety and health through equipping an office with special technologies and adjusting the planning solution.

The methods are familiar to all of you:

• marking on the floor
• increased distance between desktops and protective partitions
• antiseptic sensory sanitizers etc.

In our opinion, these measures do not have such a profound impact on business processes and may even disappear from our lives some time later. The next two types of offices are probably more perspective and the quantity of people using them is increasing each day.

Homeoffice

Long-term remote work is no longer an amorphous concept with a picture of a freelancer sitting with a laptop on the couch. Nowadays working at home presupposes a fully equipped soundproof workplace.

Do you remember a sheet of paper on a door saying "Do not come in! Father is working!"? Many of you were on a meeting call when in the one-room apartment on the background children were grimacing or crying?

What a short and magical way from the bedroom to the home office through the kitchen – sounds very comfortable to a lot of us although working from home is not a perfect solution, and not for everyone, and certainly not for everyone all the time.

For some employees working at home is quite good and is suitable for them depending on their position, personality types or lifestyle. Then the task of the employer and HR department is to help to organize a comfortable workplace at home. Some companies organize centralized furniture procurement - ergonomic work chairs and desks for employees. It's very important to realize that you can work on a kitchen stool for a month or two, but such working style for two years or longer is impossible.

Hybrid office
For many organizations the spring of 2022 set a new goal – to return people to the office after two years of remote work taking into consideration several attempts failed before. Have you read about Elon Musk experience?

Three out of five leaders will tell you that managing a virtual team is difficult.

It should be mentioned that even before the pandemic, some companies combined different types of cooperation for their employees. Are the words "mobile, agile, hoteling" familiar to you? Perhaps it was not available to the majority of us to allow themselves a day or two a week to work from a cafe or in the country. Managers used this approach mostly in order to reward employees for outstanding achievements or when meeting KPIs.

What are we look like today? Not only processes, logistics, interactions have changed, but also the reasons to return to the office. "Personal work with my team/colleagues" has become in most cases the main reason to return to the office, without reference to the business sphere or age.

Hybrid type of work reduces the need for endless jobsite compaction. Some companies try to save funds through reducing space, others find a balance in dedicating most of the office to informal areas to improve communication and social ties among teams. Today interaction and negotiation zones are expanding and occupy up to 40% of office space, forming an internal co-working space where employees who work in the office every day can meet and interact with people who work remotely.

So what does this transfer to a more hybrid lifestyle mean for the workplace, amenities, neighborhoods and cities?

Here you need to understand that the hybrid type of work affects not only the office or your home, but also public spaces. Coffee houses, libraries, parks, and other places play an important role in the new workplace ecosystem. People want to be able to answer a call from a cafe, connect to Wi-Fi in the park, or to be able to work for a couple of weeks in a house in the forest. At the same time, the man efficiency and quality of work should not deteriorate.

We feel how our clients adapt to new conditions and all these changes lead to experimenting with new forms of work. The sphere of office design is going to face new step of development where the office interaction and spaces for these purposes will take a leading role.

Tengo team is ready to create an agile and comfortable office that will correspond to all your company's needs, will grow with you team and will be the right place for inspiration, communication and great perspectives.