The COVID-19 pandemic is changing our understanding of the workplace. As nonprofit centers and their tenant organizations prepare to reopen for in-person operations, there will be many new health and safety protocols to implement. There may also be opportunities for workers to continue virtual work arrangements or flexible scheduling, reducing workspace density. These strategies have potential to vastly impact nonprofit center and tenant facilities, operations, workspaces, and cultures now and in the long-term. This is a very complex situation to plan for but as advisors to organizations considering new workplace strategies, we suggest that the place to start is to proactively seek feedback from staff to better understand, from their point of view, what will be needed to support a workplace that is safe, healthy, comfortable, and productive.

Our friends at the Northern California Grantmakers (NCG) recently published a report on COVID19 impacts on nonprofit real estate. The report is a part of NCG’s effort to understand and address nonprofit displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area and was done in partnership with Harder+Company Community Research. The Bay Area’s pandemic shelter-in-place order, issued almost exactly one year ago, was one of the first issued as well as the most stringent in the country. This makes the pandemic’s economic consequences on Bay Area nonprofits and their ability to sustain mission-enhancing workspaces particularly compelling.

For those of us running a nonprofit center, the myriad daily decisions -- troubleshooting HVAC issues, managing tenant improvement projects, determining where to store all that hand sanitizer -- can seemingly occupy our whole brains. It’s easy to forget that we’re part of a movement: a movement of social purpose real estate. Social purpose real estate, or SPRE, is broadly defined as spaces that serve the common good such as public parks, affordable housing, libraries, museums, and, of course, community-serving workspaces, i.e., nonprofit centers. At NCN we’ve recently been refocusing ourselves on this movement.

Around every corner seems to be another opinion on the future of workspace. The sector is certainly ripe for speculation, given that commercial real estate continues to be one of the most impacted industries of the pandemic. As I've consumed article after article, some themes have emerged. First, many workers will choose not to (or cannot, because of transit or childcare) return to offices in dense urban cores, at least not every day and not anytime soon. This is mostly linked to shifts in priorities around affordability and quality of life, especially among workers 25 to 40. Companies that can employ a hybrid model wherein some employees work in the metropolitan headquarters while others are based out of smaller satellite offices in lower-density geographies -- but all with some work-from-home flexibility -- will likely do just that. Next, workspaces must prioritize human connection, physical health/safety, and shared values, three critically important elements of our 2020 experience, to attract workers who will now have a choice on where and when to work.  Buildings will need to offer dynamic meeting spaces that blend the physical and the digital alongside demised private spaces that provide a safe and quiet environment for focusing in ways that can rarely be achieved in most of our homes.  And, finally, a hope of my own: in an era when our collective social consciousness has grown in unimaginable ways and seemingly every company on the planet is regularly issuing statements about values, now is the time for our workplaces to also have a conscience.