Towards a Sociable Work Environment

Abstract

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced an important part of the population to stay home and to experience the telework. This context of major crisis was an opportunity for utopists and idealists to speculate about the future of the general organization of our civilization. On June 9th 2020, the New York Times wrote “What If Working From Home Goes On… Forever?”. In such climate of uncertainty, especially at the beginning of the crisis, this question was relevant to ask. One year later, the generalist utopia gave the floor to a more nuanced reality. The most common tendency suggests a hybrid solution between the office and the home working with one major argument: Flexibility. What is sure now is that the concept of office building will deeply change in the next years. Or did it already? In 2016, Carlo Ratti was already asking the question “If work is digital, why do we still go to the office?”. It is because an office space is much more than a place where employees work individually behind the screen of a computer. Otherwise, telework would be commonly used since its apparition in the 1990’s. There is a need of social interactions, of knowledge sharing. The intention of this paper will be to take a step back in the history of workspaces in order to analyze and highlight its evolution as well as the changing consideration of the employee and therefore the investments made to increase his comfort at the office. Focusing mainly on the situation in Belgium, the intention is to precisely understand the social, economic and political dynamics that influenced the evolution of work environment. An emphasis will be made on the New Ways of Working strategy (NWoW), a recent approach of the office space mainly developed in Belgium and the Netherlands.