Looking Toward the Future of Healthy Spaces for Office Workers

Over the past eight months, corporate execs and business operators have pondered, discussed, and agonized over what long-term effects COVID-19 will have on the physical spaces we work in.

Is your office safe to re-open? How much space do you need? Is remote work more productive?

Diane Hoskins is the co-CEO of Gensler, an architecture firm that advises businesses from Google to Bank of America. She says this is a critical moment to ask important questions about what your team needs to work smarter and successfully and to build a physical space that is not just healthy but enables both collaboration and individual work.

In a recent episode of the Masters of Scale: Rapid Response podcast series, Hoskins shared her thoughts about how new technology tools and data can help us move toward the answers we need.

The episode is packed with interesting conversation and great insights for businesses of any size. Hoskins talks about a utilization simulation tool called Graph, and ReRun, which can identify the most optimized plan for a variety of social distancing conditions, whether an organization has hundreds or thousands of seats.

“It’s about placing people and one-way signs and various ways of being able to control the movement through the space,” Hoskins said. “But we’re also working on and developing really what I would call more seamless and technology-based solutions. What we’re calling our ‘intelligent places platform,’ which is really a way of thinking about from when you enter the space at the front door all the way through the building, into the various spaces, a single seamless experience, which has touchless technologies, anticipating movements through the space, ensuring the safety and looking at the density of people at various times, controlling the airflow based on those densities as well.”

Even if that technology and Gensler-scale consultation seem light years away for your business, this episode will give you something to consider. Besides — as these technologies get deployed at scale and become more affordable, the future could be closer than you think.

If you’re not familiar with Masters of Scale, it’s a podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies, as Hoffman says, “from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.”

With the onset of the pandemic, Masters of Scale launched Rapid Response as a spinoff to share real-time wisdom from business leaders in fast-changing situations that demand lightning-speed decisions. The new series is hosted by Bob Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company.

You can find Masters of Scale: Rapid Response in your favorite podcast app, or listen to the Diane Hoskins episode now on Spotify.