Office workplace to focus on creating wide spaces to comply with social distancing standards.

COVID-19 outbreak and government-mandated social distancing standards will affect workplace requirements and designs in the coming future as businesses look at ways to safeguard their employee’s health. Companies working in commercial complexes are required to uphold social distancing norms and be able to confront any unexpected health issues.

Many firms, particularly in information technology and IT-enabled services, which used to allot 70-80 sqft per employee in the workplace is now supposed to be given more space per employee.

For certain instances, the room was 60 sqft for every employee against the default, 125 sqft as businesses are trying to conserve on costly real estate.

Although there can’t be any expansion of existing offices, effective planning and design would offer a way out. Negotiations over new office spaces are required to lead towards revised facility specifications.

Realty developers say companies’ space requirements will go up and these calculations would be the basis for discussions for future transactions.

Experts say companies will seek concepts such as creating workplace batches and allowing around 30 per cent of employees to work from home by rotation. It would mean reduced workplace density, with more room for everybody. This is far too early, though, to propose any concrete or sustainable approaches to social distancing norms.

Given the new health, sanitation and productivity problems, businesses are expected to start decentralizing their processes such that if one facility falls into containment there is business continuity.