If you are going back to in-person work at a tech company these days, you may be greeted by bands, balloons, and beer blasts, according to a recent article in The New York Times. And you could well see your old office with a new post-pandemic look. As companies increasingly operate under a hybrid model, with employees continuing to work from home as well as the office, making the workplace more alluring, comfortable and flexible is a key design strategy, as we explore in this issue of RECORD.
As RECORD has often noted, architecture of offices began to change radically in the digital age, long before Covid, with an emphasis on collaborative spaces and amenities—and shrinking individual workstations. Besides the goals of the tech industry, which sought to keep staff laboring for long hours with the lure of free food, foosball, and on-site dry cleaners, the realities of real-estate costs also pushed further change. Those luxurious but often empty corner offices of CEOs, who spent most of their time traveling or in meetings, became a target of budget-cutting. Smaller and smaller cubicles gave way to shared benchlike desks, where an individual spot was measured in inches, not feet. And hoteling became ever more prevalent, with no designated desks at all.
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