It's not about when we open the doors, but why and how.
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When I worked at design firm IDEO, periodically a client would ask for a replica of their physical product, but digital. We’d gently reframe the question, noting that the benefit of digital is that it can do things differently. If you’ve ever shopped at a digital supermarket, you know what I mean. Walking the aisles online would be a nightmare, but being able to populate a cart from your previous order is a benefit that wouldn’t emerge from a copy of the bricks-and-mortar store.
More impactful questions are: What are the customer needs we’re trying to solve? And, how might we use physical and digital components to create the best solution?
We ‘office’ workers face a similar opportunity now, in this amorphous time before we go back to our campuses. We’ve experienced extremes on either end of the pandemic: spending all our working time in the office, and all our time out of it.
Leadership teams are asking themselves whether to go completely remote, full-time in the office, or hybrid. Like “how do we make this digital” begins with the solution instead of human needs, so too does the question of “remote, full-time, or hybrid.”
Instead, we might ask ourselves: What are the needs we’re trying to design for as we work? How might we use physical spaces and digital tools to create the best solutions for each need? In other words, why (for what purpose) are we opening the office doors, and how will we function when we’re together and apart? <read more here>