As Alberta begins to edge back to normalcy, it may be time to rethink your office’s design. While sprawling open-concept offices may be ideal for collaborative work, they’ve also been shown to be distracting. It’s harder for your employees to turn off everyone else to just focus on the task at hand. And more importantly now, an open concept space is far more open to contamination by microbes.
Now we’re not suggesting that everyone gets stuffed back into a gloomy cubicle for 8 hours a day, but as you consider your office space in a world with COVID-19, self-contained individual workspaces are going to be the best way to protect staff from your clients and one another.
We recommend using glass to create independent workrooms where staff members are able to work. The transparent glass will allow the same sense of community — as well as allow supervisors to know what everyone is working on at a glance. But, like the glass shields we are now all familiar with at the grocery store, glass walls will protect your staff from other people sneezing, coughing, or even (in the words of our Prime Minister) breathing moistly.
And speaking of glass shields, your receptionist is one of the most vulnerable members of your team. It’s their job to professionally greet everyone who enters your office and help to direct clients to the person they are meeting with. If you haven’t already invested in a protective glass barrier to ensure your receptionist is safe, you’re doing them a disservice. In fact, we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t become a standard expectation for doing business in Canada that administrators are securely protected from contagious infection by a glass shield along the perimeter of the reception area.
As a business owner, it is your responsibility to decide how to best get back to business while protecting your staff and clients, but that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. As many essential businesses have remained open throughout the pandemic, you’re able to look to them for guidance. Install glass shields in reception areas, work with Calgary custom glass experts to help convert open floor plans into individual workspaces, where employees will better be able to focus and won’t have to worry about a coworker sneezing or coughing on their keyboard. Finally, you may want to consider allowing employees to work from home once or twice a week. By effectively coordinating which staff are physically present on a given day, you’ll be better able to reduce the number of people in your office at any given time.
The last couple of months have been an unprecedented time for Calgary businesses. Business owners have been having to carefully consider how to best serve their clients while protecting their staff. At House of Mirrors, for example, we’ve made access to our famous showroom by appointment only. While we all may be facing new challenges, we aren’t worried. We know that Calgary businesses are resilient, and if you need any glass to make your business safer for Calgarians, know that we are open and here to serve you. Call us today.
