With five generations currently making up today’s workforce, Millennials are often a major part of the conversation. According to a report by PWC, Millennials are defined in part by their technological adeptness, their rejection of rigid corporate structures, and their propensity for flexible work environments. This generation ushered in a new wave of workplace design, where open floorplans replaced high walls, ping pong tables replaced conference tables, and couches replaced cubicles. Trends like remote working, alternative spaces, tech-focused workplaces, flattening hierarchical structures, and general flexibility have often been attributed to Millennials entering the workforce. This influence will likely grow as it’s predicted that by 2025, Millennials will make up 75 percent of the global workforce.
Not every workplace has been able to adopt these “Millennial trends,” whether due to legitimate reasons like scale, industry, and financial constraints, or simply due to an unwillingness to change. In the face of today’s pandemic, however, we are all forced to adopt remote working policies, to be flexible and learn to work from new environments, and to adapt to new technologies. Many of us are adding these new stresses on top of the immense pressures of safeguarding our families against the pandemic, looking after and homeschooling children, and finding ways to stock our homes with food and supplies, all while worrying if the job we hold today will still be here tomorrow. This stress leaves us with little time to think about what the workplace of the future will look like. Prudent planning dictates that as we are beginning to consider our return to our offices, now is the best time to start thinking about what we can do in the future to make sure a pandemic or other emergency has minimal disruption to our business as usual. And in many cases, it is the Millennial mindsets and trends I mentioned above that provide the answers. As a Millennial myself, I feel I have a good perspective to offer architects, designers and business owners who are curious about how, as we start to return to normal, we can best safeguard our businesses and workplaces against future emergency situations.
Embrace Technology
To start, when we return to the office it will be imperative that we rethink and update our IT infrastructures. Consider switching employees from desktops to laptops and investing in remote login software. Research the benefits of the various internal communication methods (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype) and determine which one best fits your company’s needs. Investigate whether your staff know how to use the various technologies already available to them, and ask them to put their knowledge into practice. You might assume your staff knows how to access files from home, but actually connecting to a VPN and knowing how to do it in theory are two different things. Improved technology can help make for a near seamless transition to working remote, which as we’ve learned, can become necessary whether or not it is company policy. To that end, if your company hasn’t yet become paperless, it will be more important than ever to start. Being able to access files remotely with as much ease as if you were in the office will help keep business running through the next emergency situation.
In addition to using technology to prepare staff for the possibility of remote work in the future, technology can be employed to make our physical workplaces safer. Touchless technology can help prevent the spread of germs within the office. Consider using apps for guest check-in and wayfinding, rather than a shared touchpad station. Voice-enabled technologies (think Siri and Alexa) can be utilized for controlling your environment (like HVAC and lighting), and face recognition software can replace card-swipe security systems, helping to mitigate the risks involved with sharing space in a post-pandemic world. Investing in technology will help prepare staff to be more flexible in the future, and make the workplace safer as we transition back into shared spaces again. And as an additional benefit, companies that embrace technology will have a better time attracting millennials to work there. The tech-dependent generation expects sufficient technology in their workplaces so they can have the tools they need to do their jobs most efficiently.