Post-pandemic workspaces

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected European economies as well as both private organizations and public institutions. Through the generalized move toward compulsory remote working, many firms experienced unprecedented transformations in their work practices and processes. Early studies of the emergency transition towards remote working illustrated that many of the measures taken were not temporary, with many employees - up to 85% in Baert and colleagues' study (2020, p. 35) - believing that teleworking was here to stay. While remote working has received much attention from researchers and practitioners in the past months, research projects on the longer-term impacts of the crisis on organizations have remained rather scarce. More specifically, the future of organizational workspaces in a postpandemic world has generated surprisingly little interest so far. Yet, early signs suggest that largescale transformations of workspaces and work contexts are about to unfold. A recent survey conducted among more than a hundred HR Directors of Belgian firms revealed that 41% of them had plans to "rethink" (i.e. shrink) their workspaces in the coming years (Jemine, 2023). This is indicative of a latent resurgence of interest among top managers for projects of workspace transformation - usually labelled "New Ways of Working" (NWoW) in the literature (e.g. Kingma, 2019), which, in many cases, have been abandoned or neglected in the past two years. It suggests that organizational leaders are increasingly looking to initiate strategic actions aimed at scaling down their workspaces and rethinking their work organization. This, in turn, is vowed to result in new spatial arrangements that might have a significant impact on social relations and managerial practices (Kornberger & Clegg, 2004). Consequently, this proposal builds on the observation that both public and private organizations from the third sector are increasingly prone to redesign and adjust their workspaces as a response to the pandemic and the rampant forms of hybrid work characterized by a mix of on-site and remote working (Ipsen et al., 2021). This project pursues three interrelated objectives: 1. To study the persistence of "old" forms of New Ways of Working and the ability of pioneer organizations to make innovative workspace transformations survive an exogenous shock such as the pandemic (O1); 2. To investigate the strategy work allowing "new" forms of space reorganizations to emerge in the wake of the pandemic (O2); 3. To examine organizational spaces under the lens of identity work, unveiling how space reorganizations affect organizational, team, and professional identities (O3).