- [Holly] With every major world event,
we see an impact on office design.
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- [Narrator] The offices workers left
aren't the ones many will return to,
for those who return at all.
- We have been through crises before,
whether it was 911, Superstorm Sandy,
where you really have to take a step back
and move with a sense of urgency.
- [Narrator] Thermal scanners, plexiglass shields,
and one-way hallways are now part of the workplace,
as concerns about coronavirus spread have forced firms
to retrofit spaces to bring workers back.
These modifications are only a start.
- Innovation comes out of
moments like the ones we're in right now.
- [Narrator] Offices are also being redesigned
and re-imagined for an uncertain future
where health is the focus,
even if COVID-19 is no longer a threat.
So, what's changed in offices open now?
And how will the future office look
and function differently?
Let's start with the retrofit.
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At its office in Midtown Manhattan,
RXR Realty employees are back at work, with modifications.
- So our objective is to use the tools
and technologies that we implemented
to make the new abnormal at the office
feel as normal as possible.
- [Narrator] Employees now start their days
by opening up the company's mobile app
to answer a series of health questions.
Once cleared, they will get a green,
allowing them to enter the 32-story building,
which the real estate firm owns.
Inside, thermal cameras take employees' temperatures
as they walk through the lobby.
- [Scott] The goal is not to let people not come to work,
but to really ensure that they're not coming in sick,
to potentially make other people sick in the building.
- I will say that there's no such thing as a no-risk.
And I think there has to be a good reason
to bring people back.
- [Narrator] RXR owns more than
25 million square feet of office space.
- [Scott] We want to test out a lot
of what we put in place for ourselves,
to make sure that it works
as our tenants come back to work.
- [Narrator] Some of the things they're testing:
touchless entry at turnstiles
that automatically call elevators
that take workers to their floor,
rotation staffing that keeps floors
at less than 50% capacity,
plexiglass dividers between workstations,
reduced seating in conference rooms,
and small social distancing devices employees wear.
- If I'm within six feet of someone else,
this will vibrate and go off.
The same thing for that person.
It also serves as a contact tracer
so that if someone does get sick,
we can then determine who was around that person
and make sure that we can notify them.
- [Narrator] Many of these solutions
are aimed at preventing transmission
through large droplets or shared surfaces,
but the virus can also transmit
via smaller aerosolized droplets.
- So this is trickier to deal with in buildings.
For the typical office building today,
we heat and cool the space with air.
This means that we spend a lot of energy
heating and cooling that air,
and we don't want to just exhaust the used air.
So we re-circulate a portion of it, meaning
that if occupants introduced pathogens into that air,
they can remain airborne.
- [Narrator] One way of mitigating this
is by increasing the building's intake of natural air,
which is something RXR is doing.
The company is also replacing that air more often.
Another way is through filtration of that re-circulated air.
Some buildings are upgrading to filters
that can catch smaller particles
such as the MERV-13 filters RXR uses.
But existing air systems limit exactly
which filters buildings can use.
- Another strategy is ultraviolet germicidal irradiation,
which means that you have light fixtures,
and instead of outputting visible light,
it's ultraviolet light
that can inactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
- [Narrator] These retrofits, of course, cost money.
RXR said it spent millions of dollars
across all of its properties to make these changes.
- Some of the extremes might shed away
once we have a vaccine,
and we can move more freely around,
but some of it's going to stay
because people will say, "You know what?
I'm more sensitive about my health and wellness."
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- [Narrator] Plans for Gensler's new office in Miami
were set in February.
Then, as the coronavirus took hold in March.
- The design, as it stood at that point of time,
no longer worked.
- [Narrator] So Carlos Valera,
the architecture firm's managing director in Miami,
began the redesign, starting by identifying
what potential problems existed in the original plans.
- Here we see an area in which
there is a row of workstations that align
with what we might have done prior to the pandemic,
in which you would see a lot of density.
- [Narrator] Prior to the pandemic,
dense offices were the trend.
Average square footage per employee had decreased
from 211 square feet in 2009,
to 194 at the end of 2017.
- We see here,
what we had conceived as a hospitality lounge.
That type of design solution is no longer possible.
- [Narrator] With the pain points identified,
Valera and his team set out to design
an office that would be ready
for both pre-vaccine and post-vaccine futures.
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- The thinking behind this new re-imagined workplace
is really more about experimentation.
- [Narrator] One of the ideas Gensler is testing,
separating the office into zones.
Clients and employees enter separately.
- We have here what we're referring as a sanitation room.
We also have created an isolation room,
in case, again, that someone is not feeling well.
- [Narrator] The two zones will also have
separate ventilation systems
to help limit potential exposure.
And by putting these reconfigurable booths
into the client zone,
Gensler is also creating a space
for meetings outside of the main office.
That flexibility extends to the employee space as well,
where Valera has removed many of the fixed elements.
- We have workstations that have the option
to be reconfigured into a two-person pod,
three-person pod, four-person pod,
but also that the workstation itself
can move around and be set in a way
that, you know, facing each other.
- [Narrator] The firm is using a spatial intelligence tool
called Graph, to map out distancing scenarios
it may need during the pandemic.
It could also help determine
where more seats are needed after a vaccine.
- So, what would you see in this plan is kind of
what a phase one high-risk transmission scenario is.
But also, we are tooling this space
in a way that we can densify as needed.
- [Narrator] But how much is still unclear?
Global Workplace Analytics estimates
we will see 25 to 30% of the workforce
working at home multiple days a week by the end of 2021.
That will not only impact density,
but also change workers' relationship to the office itself.
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- I think that in some cases,
we're realizing that we don't need the office
as much as we thought we did.
I also think that we're realizing
how much we miss the office.
- [Narrator] A June survey of corporate leaders
found that in the future, 82% plan to allow
remote working at least some of the time.
Valera calls this the hybrid model.
- When you're working from home,
some of those spaces could be used for something else.
- Maybe the idea of large expanses of desk space
and a small cafe might be flipped.
And maybe we end up with more of a cafe and less desk space.
- [Narrator] In a hybrid model, focused work
could be done at home.
Offices could be more flexible spaces used for meeting.
- I think the whole idea of the office
might even become more flexible.
So maybe we might see a new type of business pop up
that's kind of a restaurant
with individual conference rooms.
- [Narrator] Of course, these solutions only work
for firms that can keep workers at home
at least some of the time.
The National Bureau of Economic Research found
about 37% of US workers
could plausibly do their jobs from home.
So, experts say what workers
will most likely see in the future
are some of the smaller changes
aimed at keeping occupants safe,
including touchless tech,
more access to outdoor space,
and better ventilation inside.
- Now, as you think about the workplace,
you've got to think what would have been five,
10 years from now and start incorporating that today.
- [Narrator] As for larger design changes,
it's still too early to know.
- If we build for flexibility
to explore what works and what doesn't work,
the process is going to teach us
what the future workplace should be.
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