Future of Work – Offices and workstations

Hello!

If your college is implementing (or considering) work from home and/or office hybrid model, I am wondering how your Facilities teams are looking at space planning moving forward.

At Mohawk College, we are implementing remote and flexible working arrangements (with a student-first focus), and with that, we have asked management and staff to identify how many days a week they will work remotely and if they are working remotely more than 50% of the time, we’ve asked them to consider desk sharing arrangements, and if primarily remote that they consider no dedicated desks and we can then create hotelling space for staff to touch down at if needed. We’ve had a lot of growth since the Pandemic, and some new hires would not have space if we all returned to the office. It’s going well, and many efficiencies were found, but not enough as we are still receiving space requests for those that need to return to the office to serve students. We have not asked faculty to look at this yet, although we anticipate there could be significant efficiencies here considering they have previously not utilized their dedicated offices full-time and with remote working options included now, it’s even more likely they won’t need to use their offices to warrant a dedicated space.
Here are my questions:
1. How have you approached faculty offices in the past- do you have desk sharing situations for full and part-time faculty or do they all have dedicated space?
2. Are you implementing remote and flexible working arrangements? If so does it include all staff and faculty? Or just one or the other?
3. Have you asked management, faculty, and staff to consider finding efficiencies in their space needs if employees are working more than 50% from home? If so can you please describe your approach and how it’s going?
4. Are you implementing or considering implementing standards around dedicated and shared space, and enforcing them? (we’ve had some pushback and have not enforced standards now, just guidelines) If you are enforcing, are you making any exceptions, and what are they?

Thanks in advance!
Lise