Bring your own space From the discipline known as proxemics, pioneered by Edward Hall in the 1960s, comes a new measure – an inviolable ‘no person’s land’ around each of us. It started as a medically dictated two metres, and has now morphed into a variable, personally defined comfort zone. Hall’s definition of personal space extended only to 1.2 metres, after which we were in ‘social’ space which extended from 1.2 – 3.7 metres. We’ll therefore be redefining personal space. Yet most workspace isn’t designed like that: desking, circulation, amenities, meeting spaces. While we once allowed transitory encroachment on our personal space, we will no longer accept it. We’ll bring it with us and take it everywhere we go. Vaccines or not, we’ve changed. standards for the workplace and its services. But are they now enough? What happens when we don’t think they go far enough? There may be some that we would generally all put up with, but we’ll be far more disposed to draw our own lines, defining what we’ll accept and what we won’t. Organisations will find their people far more vocal about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And far more vocal generally – at long last. This will require channels and an ability and willingness to listen, understand and engage. Bring your own friends Who are all the people in my workspace? I know a few of them, I’ve seen a few others before, but I haven’t met the majority. New starters? Contractors? Or just people I never bothered to notice until today. I’ll need to know who the people around me actually are, what kind of lives they lead and risks they take. Suddenly, those I marked down as less interesting will be most welcome. If you spent the weekend in nightclubs, at gigs, at football matches, you might be living your best life but you’re channelling more risk in my direction. If you stayed in, spent time with your family, watched TV, got a takeaway delivered – lets go for coffee. We’ll want boring friends. Boring will be the new interesting. We may even let them encroach on our (revised) personal space. Bring your own standards We’re used to organisations setting
Bring your own greetings We used to go to conferences just so we could shake hands with strangers (often the stranger the better). The handshake is an internationally accepted business greeting in a world where one culture’s friendly gesture is another’s declaration of war. Yet the pandemic has made us nervous about any form of touch that might involve a degree of perspiration. So elbow nudges, fist bumps, semi-salutes and the ubiquitous involuntary video-call wave have emerged as suitable alternatives. It’s even permissible to mix them. We may resort to exchanging pendants as association football once encouraged. Bring your own peripherals Many people are now used to having their own company-issue laptop (standards having generally caught up since BYOD). Yet everything else remains shared. Docking stations, keyboards (complete with a loaf’s worth of mixed crumbs), computer mice, screens. The more ‘agile’ the space the more we share. And so we’re wondering whether we might carry a little more around with us, rather than risk contracting a little more. Mice now fold up (solving a problem that foxed humankind for decades; we haven’t yet fixed the plug, but hey, one major solution at a time is progress) and keyboards can be condensed. Carting a 27-inch monitor around might be a stretch but who knows how long before they’ll roll up and we can pop and elastic band around them? Bring your own schedule A plethora of surveys have revealed that we (mostly) no longer wish to attend the office more than two-to-three days a week, those days being of our own choosing. Where organisations once provided space just in case everyone showed up – which they never did, leading to excruciating levels of waste that were simply tolerated – they will now need to consider a less habitually compliant workforce popping in and out at will. The degree to which our days in Mordor
will be scheduled for us remains to be seen, and technology will be deployed to do the hard calculations needed, but suffice to say we’ll be ‘ships passing’ with many of our colleagues. We may at least value more highly the time we get to spend together – and do something of more value with it than strap on our headphones and make ourselves unapproachable. It’s not just our lunch and our pencils. The post-pandemic workplace will be one of ‘fat client, thin server’ – with us being more in control of our lives and our paraphernalia. We’ll be defining what we do, how we do it, and with whom we do it with – to the extent that, in a ‘bring your own’ culture, we’ll be bringing a huge slice of that culture, too.
‘We’ll want boring friends. Boring will be the new interesting’
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Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
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