The New Office
When in-office restrictions hit at ITN, we were lucky that our office had a lot of private offices and we made sure people had a door they could close to stay safe. But we are currently prepping to move to a new space, and like a lot of businesses in the area getting creative to keep our employees safe.
Our new space isn’t as flush with private offices. But we did make sure that we have the square footage to spread out a bit. Cubicles are big, to make sure employees are more than six feet apart, with high walls to keep exposure to a minimum. We will be seating people every other cube to start – and as restrictions ease and business returns to more normal conditions, we will have plenty of space to grow.
That means our technology must be able to accommodate that. We are putting the cabling in to accommodate our growth now, to make it simpler down the line. Our engineers did a thoughtful design for AP placement for Wi-Fi (the new space has some stone and brick walls to accommodate). We know that our office staff is going to be doing a ton of video conferencing moving forward so our bandwidth needs to be up to the task.
As your business plans to get back into the office – whenever and whatever that looks like (are you doing a couple of days a week, virtual for another year) it is a great idea to plan out how to meet your technology needs along with physical facility needs. If you need to spread your people out (maybe you were hot desking or using an open plan) you don’t just need partitions or cube walls – you need new cabling drops. Your Wi-Fi might have worked out just fine before, but does it support enough ITOT devices? You want to make sure that you are getting good speed and coverage in the corners of your warehouse if you have had to spread your inventory out to accommodate social distancing.
It can be painful to reconfigure your space – especially since some of the accommodations we are having to make are not aesthetically pleasing. Plexi doesn’t always work with design. It is a challenge to see how to make your space look beautiful, allow for communication and workflow between employees and keep everyone safe. By making the cubes extra large and seating employees every other cube we have plenty of space to add more employees as the business cycle bounces back and it becomes safe in the office. We are doing the same with our network, planning for the number of devices we will need in the future.
