Your office will likely survive the pandemic. Your desk may not.
As the coronavirus upends work, a number of employers say corporate spaces should exist largely, or in some cases entirely, for team-based projects. Companies in industries as varied as technology and financial services are now drawing up plans to rip out individual desks and renovate offices to include floors of meeting rooms and lounges, with workers directed to do their own work at home.
The change is an acknowledgment that, even once safety measures subside, the pandemic is likely to spur a broader restructuring of offices and the ways in which people do their jobs.
“We’ve gone through a one-way door,” says Drew Houston, founder and chief executive of the technology company Dropbox , which has spent months rethinking its offices and workplace practices. “This is a permanent shift.”
Dropbox is among a small but growing cadre of employers embracing the deskless post-pandemic trend. The company told staffers last year that, once its facilities reopen, it will declare offices near San Francisco and elsewhere essentially off limits to individual work, transforming them into what it calls “Dropbox Studios” for meetings and collaboration among teams.
