Rethinking Our Working Environment

Since the beginning of the Corona pandemic, Drees & Sommer Executive Board member Steffen Szeidl has been answering the ever-same questions about working from home, the future of office space and isolated solutions to current challenges on a daily basis. However, it is much more important to view the crisis as an opportunity to rethink the workplace of the future in a holistic way.

It seems to me like every possible trend has done the rounds over the last few months – whether it’s about needing less office space in future as a result of people working from home because of the coronavirus or whether social distancing rules will mean that we’ll be left needing about the same amount of office space as before.

But what if all this is missing the point? What if it’s not about the sheer number of square meters, but rather whether the spaces themselves will be flexible, digital, sustainable and valuable enough to meet the requirements of the future? At the heart of it all lies a dilemma: workers are craving to return to the office and work alongside their colleagues yet are also afraid of missing out on the positive aspects of the giant pandemic home office experiment.

The coronavirus has suddenly brought us face to face with issues – such as digitization and sustainability – that the construction sector would have had to address sooner or later anyway. One thing is certain: the office itself is still relevant.

How it will actually look like, which aspects are the most important for the workplace of the future and how they affect the people who work there, we answer in numerous articles and interviews in our dossier “The Workplace Reloaded”. In doing so, Steffen Szeidl not only answered the constantly recurring questions, but also approached them holistically in a much broader way. Read for yourself.