If the blended world of work with equal time in the office and time spent on the road or in the home office becomes the new norm, it will have consequences for people’s use of space and IT equipment. If, on the one hand, companies can reduce space and use it for other activities, on the other hand, operations must be adapted. More and more creative and collaborative creative processes will be carried out in the company, and administrative work or communication with clients will increasingly be carried out from decentralized workplaces.

The result is a paradigm shift: the workplace is no longer equipped with ITC, but the working person must be supported by IT in the best possible way, regardless of where this person wants to perform his work. It is therefore important to think of the equipment of the world of work from the perspective of people. It depends on the operations. If there is a lot of communication, then acoustically optimized solutions, from space utilization to room design and headset, are required. If there is a lot of communication via video calls, a visually calm environment is also required, which at best becomes part of the brand communication.

So the sequence in planning and designing work environments for a mixed work environment in 2022 should be: People and Processes – Space – Information Technology. And exactly in that order. A simple example can illustrate this. When employees frequently switch between “remote control” and the office, workstations don’t just need an accessible connectivity option to connect the laptop to the monitor. The laptop’s power supply should also be handy, thanks to a table socket, so that no one has to crawl on the floor. This sounds almost ordinary, but far from normal. It becomes more complicated, for example, when screen content is simply shared from each peripheral device on smart panels or displays. W: Aside from the human orientation of IT and media technology – it should also be easy and simple to maintain. A level 1 help desk for user questions should be easily accessible.

The challenge in the coming months will be to build a viable and future working environment for the resilient organisation. Focusing on people and their business processes will be crucial to making the right investments in the long run.