Maximizing limitations: hospitality
Just when it seems business has made enough reasonable adjustments, something comes to mind that needs revision in order to produce the desired results! Workplace hospitality has taken a big hit.
Regardless of the venue, most businesses have at least one aspect that qualifies as simple hospitality. It could be the waiting area at a pharmacy or your auto repair shop; it could be the conferencing area of a law firm or the reception and waiting areas at medical or dental facilities. It could be the gathering of friends and associates for celebration. If your business has any accommodation for customers or clients waiting for an appointment, a service, a product or a party, there is a huge need for some revisionist thinking.
In the once normal course of service or product transactions, simple provisions to make people comfortable (and reinforce the virtue of patience) are or used to be taken for granted. Well, all that has changed!
Using all reasonable space for maximizing seating in a waiting room, for instance, is no longer a goal that tests your Interior designer’s skill! That skill is now redirected to calculating how much accommodation can be achieved and still respect social distancing! There are serious ripple affects that come with such downward quantification. Scheduling, for instance, is hugely influenced by how many individuals can be safely located in a holding pattern, in limited space, in a given period of time.
It’s not “News!” The rhythms of sales and service are changed — indefinitely. Recreational, physical fitness and eating venues have been quite seriously impacted by the forced limitations placed on workable controls of volume and spacing. The very nature of those businesses implies close contact, meaningful interaction, close physical proximity and obvious connection. All would agree that eating out is virtually a combination of all three of the above activities! Food is ordered, prepared, served and consumed — traditionally — in a reasonably orchestrated, intimate pattern! Re-creating those rhythms 6’ apart, masked, and with no touching, only tempts resistance and tests reasonability!
Your Interior design teams are in creative revision and adjustment mode! With a focus on the hospitality aspect of your business paradigm, we are challenged with confronting the maximization of limitation!
Oxymoron? Not at all! Partners would be a better characterization. Albeit, unwilling partners. But, unless something has changed concerning the pursuit of profits, the gauntlet has been thrown down and Interior designers, in partnership with our clients, must pick it up and run with new and revised paths to protecting and enhancing pre-pandemic profitability. All that, in the face of drastically changed rules of the game, comes into play with the revision design challenge.
Don’t just cancel — out of hand — all hope of future business-based hospitality and entertaining! Innovative, practical and successful revision is a matter of assessing each situation within the overall function of each specific business site. Sometimes the very face of your expectations must be revised. Perhaps, what you expected from your investment in workplace hospitality, before, must change. (And, we all know how much we all dislike certain forms of change!)
Who knows? You might get an entirely new perspective on business entertaining! If you were accustomed to large, undulating crowds of clients, customers, associates and friends nibbling goodies from trays circulated by crisply uniformed service staff — well, it might be difficult to envision entertaining those same groups that same way — and really keeping the social distance! Not!
Floor plans, elements placement, and access points for refreshment all influence how people circulate within enclosed environments. Your Interior design professionals don’t only know architecture, textures, color, furnishing, etc. We know people! More specifically, we know how people function with Interior space!
If your business hospitality and entertaining consisted of smaller, more intimate gatherings, your necessary changes for socializing might be a bit less drastic, but still important. Remember, smaller group gatherings tend to seek closeness just because it’s the nature of the beast! Revised seating layouts — maybe unmovable? — are part of potential solutions.
Achieving social distancing without the feeling of remoteness is greatly helped with innovative lighting, inanimate elements that help remove the sense of distance, intelligent color choices and non-optional furniture configuration.
Change? Try it — you just might like it!
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Facebook at Business Design Services.