Working from home isn’t an option for all types of work, but when it is, a new mass-market can be expected to declare an interest in it.
What was once a way to ‘put up, and ‘make do’ has become a ‘great workaround’ that will be studied for decades to come. The changes we are noticing are not all taking place in the individual workers however. Companies have been deliberate about experimenting in this transition as well.
New programs for onboarding, job shadowing, and front-end planning have become normal ways of working and will all have an effect on the scale and design of a corporate office.
The Oxford English Dictionary has 26 entries for the word normal. Most uses of the word tell us something about a specific discipline, such as physics or engineering. Normal also has something to say about how people behave and how they are expected to behave in social arrangements.
Normal means many things. It comes filled with notions about things we share and things that make us an individual. Making sense of the normal can evade our consciousness. Much of the discussion about working from home arrives as a simple question. Will people go back to normal? Or will this whole working from home thing change work forever? From everything we learned through our Dayshift studies the answer is going to land somewhere in the middle.
Design in context: The norms that people knew as of January 2020 are not normal anymore, not in the sense of the ways they held people back from working remotely. The universal assumption that face to face work is better, is evolving and being challenged.
