Personalize Your Work Landscape for Productivity and Fulfillment

For many of us, work has looked a bit different for the past year: makeshift home offices, pets strolling through Zoom calls, family members and housemates jockeying for quiet spots and wifi.

After a year of adjustments, non-essential businesses are seeing some early movement back to centralized work areas. We’ve been longing for this, for some semblance of normalcy in our work lives — a return to something familiar, or at least to seeing familiar faces unfiltered by screens, plexiglass, and standing 6’ apart.

But before we go rushing back to “normal,” let’s consider building something better. If you could design your work world to ensure that you are inspired, productive, and fulfilled, what elements of the pandemic workstyle would you keep or modify? What components of pre-pandemic work would you revive or tweak? What would you jettison in search of something more fruitful?

Workspace experts predict the next era of work will employ a hybrid of locations: days in the office for teamwork, days at home for heads-down productivity, and days working near home for flexible space, convenience, and community engagement. In short, individual office workers will have more flexibility in where they work more of the time. 

I’d argue it’s high time we claim this agency regarding where we work, and also when and how and with whom we work. As we emerge from this global WFH experiment, let’s build on what we’ve learned and adapt the way we work to better fit our individual needs and situations.

I invite you to return to these blog posts over the next few months as we reimagine the “Six Ws in the World of Work”: What, Why, Where, When, hoW and with Whom.  For now, you might start with a snapshot of your personal “World of Work,” reflecting on what productivity and fulfillment looks like for you.

Explore one exercise a day or build in a mini-retreat to explore all seven one sitting, and you’ll create a baseline measure of how your work serves you. It’s the first step toward YOUR better way to work.