The coronavirus pandemic has brought in a paradigm shift in the way we ‘work’. As a long-term impact of this, ‘office spaces’ as we know it might be a thing of the past.

As shared with The Quint, when you return to office, you are likely to find far less tables and chairs, and a partition between work stations, if you are in an open-office set up.

You are also likely to find screening.

Grab their table, grab their chair, sit in the corner and work. When they have to collaborate,they pull the chairs together, pull their desk together – and the Google Jam Board comes in and the office itself turns into a meeting zone. If you already have an office and cannot turn it like this, then you need to install clip-on partitions between work stations. Have some screening devices between team tables so that one team stays together and another team stays together.

For instance, in the reception, if you have a bigger waiting zone, you turn that into a sanitisation zone. The minute you enter, you understand, okay, there is a temperature check kiosk. You have a humid machine, you have your hand sanitizer. You have a small box, wherein you can disinfect your bags. Everyone is going to carry a laptop bag. So that also needs to get disinfected.

We would just say that we need to stop jumping to conclusions and we need to analyse every situation for what it is and be ready for things to change, as and when. You can’t say, I have designed this and that’s done. This situation is such that every few days is going to throw up something unseen.