By the time you read this we’ll all be working from the beach, the back bedroom or surrounded by artisanal coffee drinkers all fixed to laptop screens. We’ll all have become be digital nomads. This is not a new phenomenon, we’ve been reading about DN’s for years now with varying degrees of envy or annoyance – I mean that phrase, try saying it out loud, “hi, I’m a digital nomad!’. Of course you are.

But, as it is with the future, the rest of us have finally caught up. Among many other arguably more important impacts, Covid 19 has given everyone a taste of what it is to work from anywhere. Once available to only a freelancing few, grazing all day at a trendy restaurant or being seduced to work in a Caribbean nation the life of the digital nomad has now been sampled by the vast majority of the workforce and we don’t want to give it up, at least totally. Working culture has changed forever.

This is  a wholeheartedly good thing, a move away from the control and conformity characterised by the 9-5 office with its slightly sinister subtext that you can only think and do at a precise desk between precise hours. Where you can be watched, controlled and you feel like you sell your soul for 8 hours a day.

However, once the end of term euphoria subsided what has become increasingly clear is that we kind of like the office, or perhaps better described as communal spaces for work. But we want variation, freedom of choice, flexibility. The opportunity to express our inner entrepreneur and have a repertoire of workspaces. The challenge for businesses accustomed to a centralised and controlled culture of work is to adapt themselves and their space to this. This is an exciting time, we are at one of those brilliant and rare moments where we can see culture change, watch a shift in the collective mindset as it is happening. A shift that will soon make the phrase “going to work” an anachronism.

For we won’t go to work, we’ll go to connect, to get inspired, to collaborate, to get out the house for a day or two. And we won’t want it to be to the same place every time. Work spaces will mean more and will have to do more, offer choice, variation and locations. They will become more important, not less. Where once some nice desks, cool chairs and a mural by a local graff artist were enough, now real thought, strategy and design needs to go into how a business uses space.

As shops have shifted from transaction to experience, so the role(s) of work spaces will shift and with it their emotional position in our minds. Design deity Thomas Heatherwick – speaking here to the WSJ – agrees and suggests this shift should be optimised for human connection and interactions. If we’re going to spend less time together in a workplace, the time we do has to be exceptional.

We’ll all have to think hard about what we want our business spaces to achieve for us, how to make them work harder, what we want them to facilitate, communicate about us and how they can become a platform for people to thrive, in every sense of the word. Tesco had already developed satellite hubs away from their HQ before Covid allowing choice, variation and convenience for their people. After Covid we’ll see this becoming an increasingly important part of business employer brand. And one that will be key in the best candidates making decisions on who to work for.

And let’s not call it an office, a laboured, heavy word with old fashioned, grey, conformist undertones. Instead let’s find a descriptor that positively captures the flexible life enhancing platforms our work spaces could, and indeed should, become.