COVID-19 Experience Transforming the Protective Environment of Office Buildings and Spaces

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected human life in every possible way and, alongside this, the need has been felt that office buildings and workplaces must have protective and preventive layers against COVID-19 transmission so that a smooth transition from ‘work from home’ to ‘work from office’ is possible. However, a comprehensive understanding of how the protective environment can be built around office buildings and workspaces, based on the year-long experience of living with COVID-19, is largely absent. The present study reviews international agency regulation, country regulation, updated journal articles, etc., to critically understand lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate the expected changes in sustainability requirements of office buildings and workplaces. The built environment, control environment, and regulatory environment around office buildings and workplaces have been put under test on safety grounds during the pandemic. Workers switched over to safely work from home. Our findings bring out the changes required to be affected in the three broad environmental dimensions to limit their vulnerability status experienced during the pandemic. Office building designs should be fundamentally oriented to provide certain safety protective measures to the workers, such as touch-free technologies, open working layouts, and workplace flexibilities to diminish the probability of getting infected. Engineering and administrative control mechanisms should work in a complementary way to eliminate the risk of disease spread. Country regulation, agency regulations, and operational guidelines need to bring behavioral changes required to protect workers from the COVID-19 pandemic.