This week, the UK government is planning to announce its ‘back to work’ strategy, in a bid to identify a safe return to the offices for employees up and down the country. In light of the current public health crisis, the role of workspaces is dramatically changing.
At Incube, our mission has always been to ensure landlords and tenants have workplaces that can adapt to the people that use it, in the short, medium and long term. That is no different now, in fact, if anything we are even more convinced that putting people at the heart of the built world is the way forward.
The wellbeing and safety of the people that use our spaces is an important factor in our development roadmap and is something we’d been looking at improving in our upcoming product releases. When it became apparent the Covid-19 pandemic would change the future of workplaces in the UK and the rest of the world, we accelerated our thinking.
Office 2M
Social distancing has been a large part of the global effort to quell the spread of Covid-19 and will continue to be an important weapon in the fight against Covid-19. As one of the most effective ways to minimise the spread of Covid-19, it can’t be avoided on our return to the office. In response and following feedback from some of the CRE landlords we work with, we are repurposing Cubes, our smart modular partition wall system to support the implementation of social distancing within offices across the UK.
Cubes replace fixed internal walls with standalone, IoT integrated partition walls. This allows offices to be built up, broken down or changed in hours not days, weeks or months. The inbuilt technology gives insights into how rooms or areas of the office are being used by occupiers. CubeOS, our underlying technology layer for the built world aggregates those insights and provides recommendations on how the Cubes can be adjusted to maximise space utilisation, wellbeing and productivity. You can scan the QR code on the image below to jump into an augmented reality 360° view of a meeting room made with Cubes. Then read on below to see how we’re repurposing these for Office 2M; a safer return to the office.
We’re introducing some new use cases for Cubes to support on getting people back to work safely
- Social distancing: Cubes is effective at breaking up open-plan spaces. We also recommend spaces consider implementing a 2.5-metre wide track for people walking around the space. By guiding people down pre-designated routes it minimises accidental close interactions. Cubes partitions can help occupants and guests maintain a safe distance between each other.
- Smaller gatherings: Communal spaces such as meeting rooms and breakout areas can quickly be adapted to include partition configurations and safely maintain seating areas, albeit with reduced seating capacity.
- Built-in protection: Cubes come with an anti-microbial coating that can be applied to high touch surfaces. This stays active on surfaces for five years, killing 99.9% of pathogens that come into contact with the coated surfaces within six hours.
This is in addition to existing features that now have an even more important role to play in a post-lockdown world:
- Social distancing monitoring: Anonymised space usage data generates real-time insights, enabling office managers to track if social distancing measures are working – and make changes to the space layout or operational activities if required
- Non-touch: Smartphone-enabled access into the office and meeting rooms, eliminate the need to touch keypads. Voice-enabled smart assistants remove the need to use the remote in meeting rooms.
We provide Cubes on a monthly subscription with delivery, installation and IoT upgrades included. This reduces any high upfront costs and offers flexibility to adapt as the current environment changes.
Get in touch with our team to learn more and see if we can help safely get your teams back into the office faster. Stay safe.