ISSUE 6 - June 2022
Post Pandemic Landscape
Gannon Office Solutions is a Celbridge based family firm which is to the forefront of bringing ‘the office of the future’. The company is celebrating 41 years in business this year. Currently the company serves clients from one person operations, SMEs with offices typically holding 4 to 50 employees to large multinationals with 2,000 + employees. Gannon Office Solutions is accredited to the ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 management systems through the National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI). Offices and workplace practices have been revolutionised over the past 2 years as companies battled the fallout from the COVID 19 pandemic. Now workplaces are set to change accommodate these new work practices (hybrid working) and to encourage employees to return to the office environment in a safe and controlled manner.
Post pandemic landscape: In our previous Chronicle post (June 2020), we wrote about how the COVID 19 pandemic had become the catalyst for a number of changes that had been expected to take place within the workplace. Improvements in technology (video conferencing, file sharing etc.) had promised a mechanism for remote working, however, this concept had not been widely tested.
went each morning, were assigned tasks which were to completed under direct supervision. The pandemic forced us to change the daily schedule (get up, go to work, work in the office, come home, repeat) that we had become accustomed to over decades. It also forced us to ask ourselves some tricky questions like: •
Can we actually work from home”?
We also wrote that the pandemic would certainly affect how the workplace of the future would look, however, at the time, we were unsure how it would affect future work environments.
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Can we trust the employees to work from home?
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Can employees be as productive at home as we are in the office?
The pandemic forced us all to change how we worked. Prior to the pandemic “Work” was seen as a place where we
The pandemic proved that not only can employees be as productive working from home, some studies
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demonstrated that employees were in fact more productive working from home than they had been in the office.
How we work: While many relished the flexibility and avoiding the rush hour traffic that working from home offered, many missed the social aspect of work. There were also some aspects of remote work that did not work so well, the lack of body language and feedback in meetings, the loss of that casual interaction that happens within workspaces that so often sparks an idea or gets the creatin process going and the two minute in person chat that takes 30 minutes to arrange via video conference calls.
