Rhubarb Seating: The Changing Face of the Workplace

Covid really did change a lot! The final COVID-19 lockdown in England officially came to an end on July 19, 2021 and looking back on it all now feels like a mixture between a nightmare and the sort of reality TV show that sets your teeth on edge because it seems so far-fetched.  If we all expected everything would return to “normal” we quickly readjusted our definitions of what normal looked like.

One of the seemingly lasting shifts is in how we all work. We are well used to sitting for hours on Zoom and Teams calls, even if many of us still haven’t quite got used to seeing ourselves on screen all the time (and there have been some fascinating psychology studies into the impact of that on our behaviours). There is no doubt that remote working and meeting is effective, saves time and money and reduces carbon footprint; but it comes at a cost. Human beings are naturally social animals and many companies report a backlash against entirely remote arrangements with increasingly loud cries from their workforce for more face to face interaction with their colleagues and what is universally referred to as “fun”.  “We don’t have fun together anymore”, “The fun has gone out of work”, “We need to balance work with more fun” are all oft-repeated pleas.

It isn’t just about fun, though. Younger and more junior members of staff have been starved of input from their more experienced colleagues, not so much in terms of formal training programmes – those still run remotely, albeit perhaps not quite so effectively – but because those informal conversations, discussions, debates that take place all the time in the office provide a huge amount of day to day absorbed knowledge.

The result of all this is a very different approach to office space.  Gone are the serried ranks of desks, and the hush associated with them, to be replaced by spaces designed and furnished for collaboration, socialising, informal chat.  People work remotely when they want to get stuff done.  They come to the office now to engage with colleagues and renew their experience of the company culture.

Rhubarb Seating has been and continues to be involved in a range of office refurbishment projects, changing the face of the workplace to accommodate these different needs and at times reconfiguring whole floors .  Banquette and booth seating to create collaboration spaces have been a very common feature of their work, together with modular seating designs which can be used to configure areas in a variety of innovative ways.  Flexibility is the key here – it may be a one-to-one meeting one minute, a small group the next, or a coffee break after that.  The key is to provide these areas which are designed to encourage and facilitate social interactions and to put back that balance between work and fun.

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