An Investigation on Office-Based Workplace Modification During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Netherlands

This study sheds light on the office workplace environment and aims to investigate how organisations respond to the forces from the external environment (impact by COVID-19 pandemic) and how they modify their office workplace management strategically and operationally to suit the stakeholders’ needs and future development in the post COVID-19 period. A desktop study was conducted to provide the framework for the in-depth interviews with five corporate real estate managers and three workplace consultants. Thematic analysis including coding technique was adopted to analyse the qualitative data. The findings show that, during COVID-19 pandemic, most of the intended and implemented office workplace modifications are mainly related to two types of risk control: administrative control and personal protection. The environment control approach, such as modifying the building systems or redesigning the office area, has rarely been adopted in office workplace management during the COVID-19 pandemic so far. At a strategic level, organisations react to the external force by re-modelling their business and working towards to re-orient their corporate real estate strategies, such as portfolio transformation, agile portfolio strategies and redesign of the office workplace, etc. It is foreseen that office workplace management will encounter other challenges due to the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of this study provide a practical lens to look at the future changes of office workplace environment.