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Four back-to-work-archetypes to help leaders better understand what employees want and need as they return to the workplace. Who does the future workplace serve?
T he COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the way we work, forcing many companies to shift to remote working for more than a year. With more vaccinations available for people around the world, we are finally seeing the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. As organizations begin to plan their “return to office,” they are rushing to understand what the future workplace experience should look like. Safety, technology, space allocation, and occupancy strategies will all be important in the post-pandemic workplace, but after 2020 – a year defined by the pandemic and by America’s ongoing reckoning with various complex social issues – organizations must put their people first in redesigning the workplace experience.
Yukari Yamahiro
RETURN-TO-THE-OFFICE ARCHETYPES. Through our collaboration with clients and experts across industries, we have developed four key employee archetypes for the workplace of the future: 1)The Hand Shakers: ❚ ❚ “I like the way it used to be in 2019.” ❚ ❚ This group wanted to go back to the office yesterday. They are some of the first to return to indoor dining, and generally want life to go back to the way it was as soon as possible. It’s not that these individuals aren’t thinking about safety, they just recognize that risk is everywhere. In the
frog is working with multiple clients to navigate this transformation while keeping their people at the center. One way we have been reflecting on the return to the office is by understanding people through archetypes, which help focus and prioritize design efforts by describing patterns across individuals within a group. Archetypes highlight unique and overlapping behaviors, identify the motivations that underlie behaviors, and demonstrate how behaviors and motivations change in different contexts. They aren’t rigid or absolute – any person may, over time, demonstrate multiple behavioral archetypes, and individuals may span multiple archetypes depending on the situation.
See YUKARI YAMAHIRO, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 11, 2021, ISSUE 1412
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