Work Around
Why real offices matter, and how they can be better
Despite high productivity reported from home-based employees, 70% of remote workers want to return to the office at least four days per week, if safety permits. With little variation across industries, many miss collaborating with colleagues face-to-face, feeling accomplished at the end of the workday, finding serendipitous moments of connection, accessing the tools and spaces that support their work. At the same time, people find themselves asking: Will we step back to the old workspaces and old habits?
Organizations are using the lessons learned from this year’s work-from-home experience to reposition, redesign, and reengineer the collaborative workspace. When it comes to physical design, considerations include finding ways to improve indoor air quality, lower space density, blur indoor-outdoor boundaries, and experiment with hybrid physical-digital experiential design solutions. By way of organizational culture and practices, teams are becoming more selective and choosing physical meetings only when body language plays an essential part, or when it’s a brainstorming workshop where everyone is needed in the room. This, in the end, is helping people form a positive association between physical meetings and collaboration, creativity, and team-building.
While it is still early to make bold predictions about what the “new normal” for office-based employees will look like, resilient organizations that can identify problems and implement solutions will create the physical workspaces of the future.