The Office Of the Future Is Competing With Everywhere Else

Given the expense of office leases and the likelihood that many fewer employees will use them five days a week, as in the pre-pandemic era, companies are beginning to reassess what the office is really for, what it is best suited to do - and what that investment is worth. JL

Matthew Boyle reports in Bloomberg:

The office is in competition with other places where you can do work. Do we even need offices? It’s a question few people would have asked before the pandemic, but the massive shift to remote work over the past year and a half has forced companies to think long and hard about the physical spaces they occupy, and what role they play in fostering — or inhibiting — collaboration and inclusivity. Surveys show that executives are much more excited about returning to offices than rank-and-file employees

Do we even need offices? It’s a question few people would have asked before the pandemic, but the massive shift to remote work over the past year and a half has forced companies to think long and hard about the physical spaces they occupy, and what role they play in fostering — or inhibiting — collaboration and inclusivity. Surveys show that executives are much more excited about returning to offices than rank-and-file employees, while many Black workers prefer working from home, free from the microaggressions they face in the office. The decisions companies make now with their workspaces will not only impact their corporate cultures, but will influence the shape of cities for years to come.

Some office design improvements are obvious, like making conference rooms more Zoom-friendly, but it’s often not clear what exactly employees really want to see when they return to their desks. That’s where Ryan Anderson comes in. Anderson, the vice president of research and global insights for office furniture maker Herman Miller, leads a team of workplace-design experts who had in-depth interviews and roundtable discussions with leaders from hundreds of companies last year to understand their Covid-related concerns and map out their future office plans.

“It’s not a time for surveys,” Ryan says, referring to the quantitative research methods that typically kick off the design process. “Things were just changing too rapidly. Surveys are a snapshot in time, so they’re very helpful if done longitudinally, but not very good as one-offs unless whatever you’re measuring is fairly static. That wasn’t the case, so it was time to dig deeper.”

Herman Miller, whose designers created both the cubicle and the Aeron chair, is now pushing companies to evolve beyond the open floor plans that have dominated in recent years. Instead, it’s advising a so-called “neighborhood” approach that creates a dedicated space for people in the same department to collaborate, grab coffee or work alone if they choose.

I spoke with Anderson about the future of work, giving workers alone time, and getting real estate and human-resources departments to speak the same language.

What has the pandemic taught us about how offices going forward should look and feel?

We really began looking at this long before the pandemic, in 2010. What we were interested in then was distributed working, or the spreading out of work, which had happened already because of a shift from using desktop computers to laptops. We also began looking at remote-first companies to understand: What does it look like when an organization spreads its workforce out completely?

So when the pandemic hit, we needed to figure out if it was a catalyst for what we were seeing already or has something fundamentally shifted. We had hundreds of customer conversations and I spoke with 90 companies myself. From that, we realized that this was a major accelerant to things that were already happening. The pandemic was the catalyst we needed to finally rethink office design, which was not in a great state pre-pandemic.

Why not?

Because of the outdated assumption that all work had to occur in the office, they became increasingly generic. We have to recognize that the office is in competition with other places where you can do work. Imagine when an office space is only 40% utilized. That’s tens of millions of dollars wasted over a seven-year lease. So there’s a much better approach to this. Thankfully, organizations are saying that maybe filling rows of desks is not what’s needed.

So do we even need offices?

Some companies asked me that. I said to them, you’ve been cooking from home over past year, right? So have you ever asked if we need restaurants anymore? Of course we do. We cherish the experience of the restaurant. We connect there. So why are you not feeling that way about your office?

One way to do that is to make offices look and feel more like homes, which some call “resimercial” (residential + commercial). What do you make of that?   

I think the term is a buzzword but I believe in what Herman Miller’s design director from 1950s, George Nelson said. He said the office should be like “a daytime living room.” At Herman Miller, we have our roots in modern residential design and only got into office work in the 1940s. So we’ve always had a residential sensibility to what we bring to the office.

We need to talk more about the experiences people want to have in the office. The office has to be a place for community socialization, even with people who are not in your immediate work group. Sociologists talk about people having strong and weak ties. During the pandemic, when everything was done over Zoom, we became super-close with our strong work connections. I even know my colleagues’ pets’ names. But the weak ties are also critical and need to be re-established.

How do you do that?

 

Western Europe has embraced activity-based working, where everything in the office was shared. That didn’t do very well in North America. But there’s a different approach called neighborhood-based planning. You take a group of desks and collaborative spaces and give ownership of that neighborhood to your team. That’s your clubhouse. You can leave it and go see other people, but it gives you a sense of knowing where your people are, and you can spend quality time with them outside of all the Zoom meetings.

What’s often overlooked when these neighborhoods get created?

The number one thing people struggle with is finding space for focused productivity. Someone has to know that if they commute in, they will see people they do know, they will have social time with people they don’t know, and if they need two hours to dig in and escape everyone, they can do that.

 

I’d say only about 10% of companies do all of that now but at least half of them are thinking of making significant changes. Those offices often exist in the toughest markets for talent.

The migration back to offices has been slowed by the delta variant. How are companies approaching their returns to office?

The companies I talk to have a committee for this, either formally or informally. It includes legal, HR, facilities and usually the CIO [chief information officer]. Historically, HR departments did not show much of an interest in the physical workplace, but now they have gotten much more involved. Still, they have to take time to learn each other’s languages. The vernacular can really get in the way.

Returning to the office is not something just you do in a month. I often remind our customers that just because everyone left the office on the same day, coming back is not a one-day event.