Designing the future office - easier said than done!

The office, and the physical technology within it, is changing in front of our eyes (well, when we’re in the office to notice, that is).

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Whilst that may seem a fairly obvious statement, it is not as straightforward as it appears.

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If you’re actively working in the evolution of hybrid work, you will have noticed that the future of the office, its demise or otherwise, or whether we actually need one, has never had more debate and airtime than this past couple of years.

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With so much already written on the subject, before I continue, let me first qualify where I am focused in this article:

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1. I’m only commenting on office and corporate environments. I understand and respect there are many challenges and potential inequity for frontline workers and their environments.
2. While a small number of organizations will operate 100% remote (ref GitLab), and a handful may feel the need to return as much as possible (ref Bloomberg article), the vast majority of organizations have, or will soon enough, settle on hybrid. And even the most flexible of these (e.g. Atlassian) see the need for physical space in some form.
3. Much has been written about office occupancy / utilization pre and post COVID, so I’ll leave that topic to one side as it would demand its own article.

So, where am I coming from?

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If you’re interested in remote first, friendly, partial, optional, hybrid, semi-hybrid or any other term you’d like to describe a mixed environment of in-office and remote teams, read on, as the future of work for many of us in the foreseeable future, is hybrid.

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Why is it so hard to get this right, especially at this moment?

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It’s still clear that many organizations are paralysed trying to figure out the role of their office - how much space do they need (or not need), how should it be reconfigured, and what technology is necessary to ensure people are engaged and productive? All vitally important questions.

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The current situation is dynamic and is going to take a while to play out. The industrial revolution played out over many years and the future of office based work will be the same (albeit in hopefully less time).

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Unfortunately, physical real estate is expensive and timeframes are often defined by the long lease cycles organizations have with their landlords. Physical fitouts and designs are often time consuming and expensive, which is why they don’t happen very often. Even though many offices actually need to evolve (and frequently), and not just the start of a lease or perhaps halfway through. But that type of flexibility is costly, it’s labour intensive to support reconfigurations, and we often fly blind to the needs and true utilization of the space.

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Workplace strategists, architects and designers are too often only engaged at the beginning of a workplace project. Truth is, they have so much more ongoing value to provide. But on the flip side, whilst they have an understanding of the realities of working at a moment in time, inevitable changes follow but there is no feedback loop on how people are getting on and the technology challenges being faced.

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Historically, workplace technology investment has been under budgeted, lacking the appropriate CAPEX and/or OPEX to extract maximum value. Efforts can also be siloed, too often stuck between technology and construction, lacking operational ownership and squeezed by budget, program, politic, etc. Finally, inconsistencies occur. Rarely is equal experience given the priority it deserves. Technology is often mismatched, selection processes flawed and purpose / objectives can be overlooked.

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I think workplace technology is becoming like cars. Yes, you can keep it for a long time, but the technology is evolving so fast, it can quickly become dated.  

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So what are we seeing out there?

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Here are a few observations:

• A significant shift to shared desking. It didn’t seem logical at the beginning of the pandemic given hygienic concerns. But the reality for the majority of organizations is shared desking may be the only way to balance capacity, team scheduling and return on investment in a reasonably hybrid environment.
• Technology solving real estate challenges. Case in point: shared desking. There is an arms race underway to schedule, manage and curate who’s sitting where and when. For those concerned with hygiene, technology will assist to manage both cleaning and contact tracing.
• Utilization data. We’re getting more and more data points from systems and devices like occupancy sensors, cameras, access control data, entry breaks, wifi, video conferencing people counting, desk sensors, etc. This is important data to analyze and support decision making.
• More and more semi open space. Some of the newest office designs I’ve seen are calling it out early - ‘ we don’t exactly know’  - so they are inherently providing a higher percentage of open space that will be re-configured over time (from team / collaboration spaces, project spaces / war rooms, to more desks on demand).
• Multi-purpose rooms. On one recent project for Seek in its Melbourne HQ, we enabled a large ground floor space to re-configure from an 800 person event space into five medium / large sized training and multi-purpose rooms. Mobile technologies allow endless orientations and configurations to suit various use cases.
• Smaller rooms are becoming more reconfigurable. In line with the point above, in a project for BCG in Sydney, we used technology and furniture to provide four layouts in an eight person room, and that’s before we consider swapping the mobile conferencing hardware to suit the desired platform.
• Quiet Rooms. Before the pandemic, there was already a shift towards one and two person quiet rooms / booths / spaces, and now two years on we’re seeing their purpose evolve. Aside from the need for privacy, the shift to a-synchronous work is driving many organizations to design podcast / studio style spaces with more focus on acoustics, lighting, production, etc.
• Evolution of personal offices (if they are required at all). Again, this was already underway to a degree, particularly in professional services. But these days personal offices are often dual purpose, allowing teams to use executive spaces for meetings when that person is out of the office. Technology has also provided a means to manage / schedule these spaces providing comfort for the executives.
• Boardrooms are being redefined. If dedicated boardrooms are required (some organizations are already questioning this) then their use cases, orientations and purpose are certainly coming under review in progressive organizations. The same applies in other areas where utilization is generally low compared to the amount of space allocation.
• Conferencing everywhere in the office. It goes without saying the likelihood is we’ll very rarely be in the same office together. So catering for remote participants is a given. Unless there’s a specific or unique edge case it is hard to argue why a space wouldn’t feature conferencing in some form. But that’s where it gets complicated. Not every space and not every technology is equal and the purposes can differ significantly (think creative / collaborative vs. high quality / interview style).
• Equitable experience for remote and in-person participants is the north star. Prior to the pandemic the remote participant was the poor cousin with an inferior experience. Now the tables have turned. Those in the physical meeting room are the dots at the table in the corner of the picture, whereas others get a better view and more access to collaboration (sharing, mark-up, controls, etc.)
• The search for an equitable experience. This has seen a handful of organizations implement extreme policies, such as everyone in the room together or everyone remote (or at least at their desks if in the office).
• Maximizing space. We’re seeing bets around offices full of desks and quiet rooms with less typical meeting rooms and more unique team / creative spaces (the assumption being that typical meetings will disappear as we’ll either be doing task based work or creative / collaborative work in larger groups). Alternately, many offices are doing away with a larger percentage of desks, betting on task based work being done remotely and in person requirements veering towards team, creative and collaborative purpose requiring different types of space.
• Standardizing technology. Interoperability between conferencing platforms and tools is one of, if not the biggest, technology challenge at the moment and the race is on to ‘standardize’ as much as possible.

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Why we still need to be cautious

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Most organizations don’t really know who’s coming in, when and why (in a meaningful way).

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So, at the moment, we’re making decisions based on surveys and data, which is quite possibly skewed by mitigating factors. Sure there are trends, but this is going to be an evolving situation for quite a while.

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With an obvious need, many organizations are compelled and often despite the best of intentions, to apply quick ‘band aid’ solutions, perhaps without truly thinking through the objectives and desired outcomes. For example, the quick uptake of desk booking tools in a number of organizations I’ve worked with has been met with limited end user engagement and poor utilization. This is likely as a result of introducing friction rather than convenience.

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Experimentation should be applauded because in many cases no one knows the right approach. However, some strategies seem questionable and based on old perceptions of technology and human behaviour. I believe the policy of everyone in the room together or everyone remote (or at least at their desks if in the office) is impractical and doesn’t give technology enough credit. The challenge of equity for in-person and remote participants is too big a problem not to be solved, and it is already being addressed in one regard by camera and video conferencing vendors.

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An additional side effect of the above policy involves adding further pressure to the already strained challenge of acoustics in the modern office. Despite rapid improvement in audio processing technology (example here), the more we introduce two way conferencing into open and semi open spaces, the more we’re going to encounter significant trade offs to those in surrounding areas (unless the silent disco scenario becomes viable).

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The inequity of experience isn’t only about the camera picking up multiple faces in the room. How we work, collaborate and co-create virtually e.g. share, mark-up, brainstorm, etc., needs to be facilitated equivalently or arguably with greater functionality in physical spaces.

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Right now we almost have too many data points. It’s gotten to the point where multiple dashboards provide all the analytics, but many organizations don’t have the time, resources or expertise to analyze it. We can’t just make spaces flexible, we have to allocate time, tools and resources to re-configure the spaces and maximize their utilization through technology, and in some cases, with training and guidance.

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Despite a lot of spin, many of the workplace technologies we require are still in development. As a result, there’s a dangerous precedent being set where organizations are procuring based on a roadmap. The knock-on effect here, whilst we wait extended cycles for new features to be released, is that employees will continue to have a poor experience. As an example, consider native video conferencing interoperability where the user experience is barely a minimum viable product. I often compare native interoperability to the hybrid car. It’s not a good EV nor a petrol alternative, rather it's a compromise worse than both.

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A few predictions for the future office

• Data and purpose will define design more than ever. However, this won’t be historical analysis that is used and then discarded once the design is finalized. Trending and live data, including employee preferences, will further define how space is managed and re-configured via workflow automation.
• We may well have less space in the office, but we’ll get more out of it. Think re-configurable and multi-purpose spaces that are tailored to the purpose of particular users at a specific time. This re-configurability will also mean underutilized spaces can be repurposed to drive return on investment.
• We’ll spend more per square m/ft than ever before. With less space and/or a higher expectation and understanding of purpose and utilization, we will be forced to stop value engineering aspects like acoustic performance. OPEX will also increase with workplace experience and vibe teams curating spaces and progressive organizations coaching users to get the most out of people and real estate.
• Working together in a physical space won’t always mean the head office. Moving around or between offices, or co-working / event spaces to suit all team members at various stages, will become more common. For organizations who are large enough and can afford it, this may see the creation of hub and spoke / satellite offices.
• Office leases / durations will change and we could see a broader shift towards hospitality models with the ability to flex up and down in terms of size, and potentially turn on and off swing spaces for periods of time or projects.
• To enable this inherent flexibility, technology such as network, carriage, print, access control etc., may become part of the building fabric i.e. provided by the landlord ‘as a service’, so IT teams can focus on the more pressing matters such as security, productivity and collaboration.
• Some organizations will turn their office experience into a competitive advantage, so far as customer offering. We’re already seeing some leading professional services firms broadening their client facing value add to include access to amazing real estate designed flexibly for purpose.

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It’s a marathon not a sprint

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Here’s a shout out to those currently working on these challenges and opportunities. Be it employers, employees, team leaders, advisors, vendors or others, we know it’s tough. And, there is no one size fits all solution either. Working with tight deadlines, budgets and most importantly the care for employee experience and workplace operations, we share the daunting task of designing, implementing and managing our future office.

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I do believe we are in the midst of a revolution of our time, with ongoing rapid transformation happening all around us. No doubt we will get it right, and new technologies will help us, but we are going to journey through some bumpy terrain along the way to get there!

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Jeremy Pollak, Co-Founder and CEO of Calven

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