Office Sector Prepares to Return to Work

David Whan • 11 March 2021

With the successful vaccine rollout and the careful lifting of restrictions, it is predicted that life in the UK will return to near-normal by the summer of 2021. But many people don’t know what ‘normal’ is anymore. A huge percentage of businesses were forced to reimagine how they operated in 2020, and the ‘new normal’ involved working from home out of necessity, but as we see glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel, businesses are beginning to question whether working from home is really for them.

It is easy to imagine how many businesses have settled comfortably into new work patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have sought to cut costs by having people working from home. Perhaps a short term measure has become a long term requirement merely to help balance the books, but as lockdown restrictions start to be lifted during the spring, the benefits of face-to-face office working begin to re-emerge and business will have to start preparing for life back in the office.

Preparing the office for the ‘new normal’

With businesses slowly returning to work over the next few weeks, employers are faced with the challenge of preparing offices as a safe and welcoming environment after they have been left empty and abandoned, in some cases for a full 12 months. Preparations for the ‘new normal’ of working under the continual threat of COVID will include office pre-cleans, new protocol for hand hygiene, social distancing, health monitoring and strict procedures for ongoing cleaning.

New policies and procedures have to be discussed and implemented internally, but professional cleaning companies such as It’s Clean can help with the organisation of preparing the office from a hygiene point-of-view and installing new hygiene measures. This applies whether people are returning full-time, part-time or only one day a week.

The physical return to the office has strong support from the business sector too. A BBC report has detailed the concerns of banking giant Goldman Sachs, whose boss David Solomon rejected remote working as the ‘new normal’. He explained how Goldman Sachs had operated with less than 10% of their workforce physically in the office, but with 3,000 new recruits expected in the summer of 2021, all of whom require direct mentorship, remote working was not sustainable for them.

Post-COVID office hygiene

Solomon expects that the long term structure of the organisation won’t be much different to the pre-COVID environment, and that view is supported by other financial stalwarts such as JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon and Barclays boss Jes Staley. Clearly big business needs physical interaction and will also have issues with IT infrastructure and security, which prevents people working from home as a rule.

Many industry sectors have obvious limitations, such as leisure, retail, hospitality and healthcare, but with office work, bosses may just have issues with a loss of productivity, even if they think morally and financially working from home has its benefits. At a time when the bottom line figure is crucial, creating the best work environment is a balancing act for many businesses and it is not surprising that working from home is okay for some, but not for others, and it is not simply down to the culture a business wants to create.

So for businesses wanting to prepare offices for a physical return, now is the time to employ professional contractors to do the hard work. This can include a thorough pre-clean of an office, and routine fogging and touch point cleaning to retain ongoing hygiene standards. You can also install hand hygiene stations and re-organise the office with one-way systems, new barriers and partitions for isolation. It’s Clean can help with all of this, so get in touch today and get yourselves prepared for whatever the ‘new normal’ means to you.

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David looks back on his 60th birthday volunteering week in Ghana

by david • 1 March 2026

When I hit 60, I didn't want a party. I wanted to do something that would actually matter. So instead of celebrating at home, I flew to Ghana and spent a week volunteering with a charity called Village by Village getting my hands dirty, sitting in open-air classrooms, and meeting some of the warmest, most resilient people I have ever encountered anywhere in the world. This is what I found there, and why I think you should know about it. The Charity Village by Village was founded by an old school friend of mine and has, over the years, evolved into something beautifully self-sustaining: it is now predominantly run by Ghanaians in Ghana. That is not an accident, it is central to the charity's entire philosophy. The approach is simple and powerful. Before a single brick is laid, the charity asks the village what they need, and what they can contribute. There is no imposition, no outside organisation deciding what is best for communities they don't understand. The result is genuine local ownership, stronger outcomes, and projects that endure long after the volunteers have gone home. The work focuses on two areas: education and healthcare. In the remote villages of Ghana that the government's budget cannot reach, Village by Village builds schools and medical centres from the ground up and then keeps them supported. What a Volunteer Week Actually Looks Like I'll be honest: I wasn't sure what to expect. What I got was a genuinely physical, genuinely meaningful week that I will never forget. Most mornings began on a building site, mixing cement alongside professional local builders, plastering walls, shifting materials. I wore a bright pink polo shirt bearing the logo of my company, It's Clean, which helped fund the trip, and I got absolutely filthy in it. There is something grounding about hard physical labour in service of something real. There were also two young men — just finished their A-levels — who were wrapping up three months of volunteering. In that time they had helped build playgrounds and medical facilities with their own hands. Their energy, their commitment, and what they had achieved at their age was genuinely extraordinary.

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