Will the coronavirus kill open-plan offices?
Private spaces will have to make up for well-distanced hot desks. But sanitizing will be a constant issue. (Smartworks/Unsplash/)“What will it take to encourage much more widespread reliance on working at home for at least part of each week?” asked Frank Schiff, the chief economist of the US Committee for Economic Development, in The Washington Post in 1979.Four decades on, we have the answer.But COVID-19 doesn’t spell the end of the centralized office predicted by futurists since at least the 1970s.The organizational benefits of the “propinquity effect”—the tendency to develop deeper relationships with those we see most regularly—are well-established.The open-plan office will have to evolve, though, finding its true purpose as a collaborative work space augmented by remote work.If we’re smart about it, necessity might turn out to be the mother of reinvention, giving us the best of both centralized and decentralized, collaborative and private working worlds.Cultural resistanceOrganizational culture, not...