Workspace planning with flexibility: interview with Knotel

As part of our ‘Future of Workplace Experience’ series, we explored the impact of Covid-19 as it relates to workspace planning with flexibility and real estate portfolio strategy with Edward Shenderovich, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Knotel. Check out our interview below:

How will workspace management and design change?

• Integrated modes of working: Workplace trends such as flexible working and virtual communication have been accelerated. In the post-pandemic world, we will start seeing new and mixed modes of workstyles and workspace design will need to cater for both virtual and on-site modes of working.
• Emergence of satellite offices: With more employees going to work remotely, companies will need to take into consideration where employees live and how they commute. Rather than leasing one large space, we will start seeing more companies taking up several smaller satellite offices in urban and suburban areas to enable flexible working.
• De-densification of office design: In the pre-Covid world, a company will roughly account an average of 50 to 250Sq per employee when designing a space. Setting up satellite offices will also help de-densifying the workforce, ultimately we can also expect a de-densification of the urban environment in general.
• Expect short-term and more flexible leases: Fewer companies will be willing to sign long-term leases as they look for more flexibility in workspace design. Many of our customers are also looking at a lease that allows their staff to access a network of Knotel workspaces, rather than one single centralized space with high density.

Working with landlords to address employees’ needs

• Alongside office space planning, our priorities for us right now are to work with landlords and building owners to ensure employees can arrive safely to their Knotel workspace. For example, allocating different companies with different time slots to access facilities such as the elevators or stairs, setting up UV lighting or giving visitors more space in the lobby with social distancing measures.
• We recently introduced Geometry, a collection of flexible modular conferencing furniture (e.g mobile walls, modular phone booths with UV lighting) that will help our customers to enable flexible office space design with health and safety measures.