1. What do you think are the key office design trends for 2021?
The longer we work from home and away from our colleagues, the more being together matters. Zoom is not a replacement for human connection and a shared experience — either with our extended families or with our co-workers and teams. We want to meet face-to-face, socialize, brainstorm, and connect with each other again. This is how we build community, strengthen relationships, coach and mentor, and reinforce our shared purpose and culture.
Employers will not need to sell the upsides of the office to their employees — they already know them. Post-pandemic, most office workers are looking forward to returning and prefer to spend the majority of their workweek there too. The Gensler Workplace Survey 2020 found that while workers have some new needs and expectations driven by COVID-19, most of the issues and trends raised were already here pre-COVID — and were just exacerbated by the pandemic.
Here are five workplace trends that have been accelerated and now are driving priorities for the new post-pandemic office:
1. Mobility: Workers will now expect the ability to work remotely, and the autonomy to match work to the right setting far beyond the pandemic.
Many organizations, including Gensler, maintained strong productivity when they suddenly had to transition to work from home last March. This was not a surprise, as our pre-COVID research has consistently shown that people who spend at least a portion of their typical workweek outside the office have higher workplace satisfaction, job commitment, engagement, and score higher on indicators of innovation. We’re not the only firm to measure this; Gallup writes that in order to attract a new generation of talent, companies will have to adopt a forward-thinking mobility strategy. The most recent Gensler Workplace Surveys in the U.S. and among global regions found that those in a “hybrid model,” or those balancing days at the office with working from home appear more deliberate with how they use their time, have better awareness of what their colleagues are working on, and have higher job satisfaction overall.
2. Choice: Employees’ variety of work settings must now include the home.
Workers’ desire for choice in the workplace is not new. In Gensler’s 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey, we found that employers who provide a spectrum of choices for when and where to work were seen as more innovative. They also had higher-performing employees. And in 2016, we found that innovative companies spend more time collaborating away from their desk and spend only about 3.5 days (74%) of their workweek in the office. That doesn’t mean that there is a one-size-fits-all strategy for all companies: many workers depend on specific resources at their office. But the nature of work is changing — we’re becoming more versatile, agile, and collaborative. We need a wider array of solutions — both inside and outside the office — to support all workers. And as cities begin to reopen after the pandemic, third places, such as coffee shops or coworking spaces, will likely re-emerge as additional choices.
3. Privacy: Many workers already struggled to find privacy in the workplace — now they expect to maintain the privacy they have become accustomed to at home.
The trend toward more open environments has led to the rise of shared or unassigned seating to provide more space for collaborative areas for group work, but to the detriment of space for focused or personal use. Employees don’t want a complete reversal of these trends, but better space allocation. In 2019, we created a “degrees of openness” scale to measure workers’ total work environment, accounting for the balance of open workstations with enclosed meeting, team, and focus rooms. We found that “mostly open” workplaces were associated with higher performance and greater experience, but noise, privacy, and the ability to focus remain key determinants of workplace effectiveness. Striking the right balance of open/private and individual/group spaces will be key in the future.
4. Unassigned seating: Already on the rise, but with new employee concerns about sharing.
Just months before the pandemic sent office workers home, the Gensler Workplace Survey 2020 reported that that workplace effectiveness was in decline. And those in unassigned seating were struggling the most. We reported that those who adopt unassigned seating must do so deliberately and strategically. But COVID-19 complicates matters. Workers overwhelmingly favor a desk assigned only to them and are not willing to trade an assigned desk for increased flexibility to work remotely. Organizations will need to develop innovative space reservation programs to balance space utilization, employee and team schedules, and safety considerations.
5. Health & well-being: Great workplace always supported more than just work — now people expect health and wellness to be built into everything.
In Gensler’s Workplace Survey 2020, we found that workers’ desire for a healthy workplace was not being met. As workers around the world reprioritize the importance of health and well-being, employers now face mounting pressure to synergize indoor and outdoor spaces, nudge healthy behaviors, and support a sense of psychological well-being. Across the globe, workers have experienced working from home, and many find their home environments provide better access to the outdoors and better environmental adjustability and comfort. Employers must now work harder to establish how their offices and workplace policies can support health and well-being.
As we rethink the future of office space, we must realize that most issues facing today’s workplace weren’t created, but exacerbated, by COVID-19. We now value space and the experience of being together more than ever. The office matters as a place to come together with each other for a common purpose. And for employees, choice, privacy, unassigned seating, and health and well-being are top of mind.
Our pre-pandemic research consistently found that great offices are employees’ preferred place to work. But there’s a catch — offices must be designed to support work for employees to want to use them. Our blueprint for what constitutes a great workplace will evolve as the pandemic eases, but that evolution is built on a deep, global, employee-informed vision of what organizations need to be successful. This is an opportunity to rethink the physical workplace to create spaces where employees not only want to be, but to do their individual and collective best work.
2. What are some of the latest technological innovations integrated into the design and design processes of these large-scale office campuses?
1. Rethink density to prioritize physical distancing.
For critical departments and workers who remain in the office or are soon heading back, we’re seeing utilization of the entire, now largely vacant, workplace being used to accommodate physical distancing. While maintaining the existing layout of desks and furniture, seating can be assigned to accommodate the latest recommendations for safe physical distancing.
Using generative algorithms, Gensler has developed a physical distancing tool, ReRun™ — a data-driven process for post-COVID workplace occupancy planning. Using the existing layout of a workplace, ReRun can quickly generate many scenarios and identify the most optimized plan for a variety of physical distancing conditions, whether an organization has hundreds or thousands of seats.
As workplaces begin to phase in more employees, ReRun can continue to generate scenarios that increase in density to help inform organizational return planning strategies.
2. Plan phased scenarios for returning to work.
With limited seating available and essential workers identified, organizations can plan for phased re-entry to the office based on role criteria. The time frame between each group phasing back in may be based on need and the continued health of employees.
We’re seeing organizations with hundreds or thousands of seats challenged with the logistics of planning a phased model. With scenario planning in our space management software, Wisp®, we’re helping clients visualize and communicate to their teams which seats are available for occupancy at a floor, neighborhood, or departmental level. This high-level approach of color coding a floor plan can be quickly implemented across a portfolio for immediate physical distancing planning and future scenarios.
3. Track who sits where.
With essential employees spread out across the office and temporarily sitting at a desk previously assigned to someone else, clear communication regarding the expected seat assignments can add transparency and clarity to all parties. Indicating the respective desks, break rooms, and bathrooms to be used can also help facilities teams prioritize cleaning plans for spaces being used.
Knowing where employees are assigned and their likely circulation paths throughout the day can support a focused cleaning response if an employee does exhibit symptoms, and also indicate other employees assigned to the same vicinity. Using Wisp, our clients are putting names to seats to clearly communicate which desks are assigned to each individual now and for future states as more employees return to the office.
3. What are some of the critical challenges faced by the industry in this vertical at present?
The pandemic has taught us how to come together virtually, but many of us have lost the sense of community and belonging that’s inherently cultivated through in-person, face-to-face interactions. With encouraging news of COVID-19 vaccines and a good sense of what we’ve learned from working remotely, we now have an idea of what the future of work will look like: a hybrid model of in-office and remote work. When we can return to the office and resume other in-person activities, creating places for people to spend time together and rebuild community — not just in the workplace, but in every aspect of our daily lives — will be more important than ever.
We all belong to a variety of different communities — physical and virtual — but ultimately, we eventually need to come together again in person. And when we do, we’ll want to look for what we have in common. How do we rebuild and restore a sense of community after being physically apart? Across industries, brands and employers are trying to cultivate belonging, purpose, and meaning that people crave. But as we shift to a hybrid future, we see a set of nested problems: How can we rebuild the workplace that sparks innovation, connection and community? How do we ensure those connections extend beyond the workplace? And how does one office or building fit into the newly reshaped city fabric? It starts by connecting people at the human scale, a few people at a time.
The human scale: the new hybrid workplace.
With the shift to remote work, many people are wondering what impact this will have on the future of workplace real estate. We’ve confirmed, through our Workplace Survey data, that offices will still remain an important part of the workplace experience; and instead of questioning whether we’ll need more or less real estate, we now understand that this is an opportunity to use real estate differently, more intelligently. In our latest Workplace Survey 2020 findings, conducted in summer and early fall, we found that over most of the workers would prefer a hybrid work model where they are in the office for a portion of the work week. Their reasons for returning to the office, however, are largely weighted towards collaboration and cultural connection, resulting in a re-evaluation of how space types are allocated within the office.
If we translate this desire for collaboration and person-to-person connection into types of space, we can see the shape of a hybrid workplace. Consider the “front porch,” a new feature of the open office neighborhood, where colleagues greet each other in-person and connect with remote colleagues via virtual dashboards. Or a tech-enabled “connected kitchen,” where co-workers can hang out, grab coffee, virtually chat with people working from home, and feel connected to a sense of purpose and community that extends well beyond the physical workplace.
The building scale: the building and the ground plane.
To rebuild the communities that support the urban core and central business districts, we can explore what a “front porch” looks like at an architectural scale, how it might be extended down to the sidewalk in order to engage neighborhoods and the city at large. Perhaps our greatest opportunity lies in reimagining the ground plane of our office buildings and transforming single-use storefronts into multi-use destinations. With new ground floor programs, buildings can extend their operating hours and become a more integral part of the community. We can design open, accessible spaces and programs that bring people and local organizations into the building, or conversely, extend company culture from the workplace to the street — creating valuable workplace amenities at the edge to be enjoyed by everyone — not just the daytime workforce.
The city scale: the central business district and the city at large.
According to the Gensler Research Institute’s City Pulse Survey, many people in global cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Singapore were contemplating moves before the pandemic, largely due to affordability concerns. We found that as economies began to reopen, people started to resume the activities that they wanted to experience in person again, where virtual alternatives couldn’t compare, such as visiting friends and family, or visiting public open spaces. As we emerge from the pandemic, community building will be an essential part of cities’ revival. When people need to connect, spaces that allow for physical proximity will more often than not win out over virtual communities.
There’s a radical re-envisioning of the public urban realm currently underway, creating true urban places where people can connect and community is restored. We’ve seen creative interventions, such as parking lots and abandoned spaces transformed for community use. The quick implementation and propagation of slow streets and parklets that have taken shape over the past several months will last beyond the pandemic.
A century ago, the 1918 pandemic was followed by a period of rapid growth and dynamic social upheaval, but it was growth that affected many communities in drastically different ways. As we rebuild our sense of community at all scales, we can leverage this current period of disruption to usher in a new era of positive transformation — one that ensures a more inclusive society where everyone benefits.
By grounding our designs in the human experience, we can transform our workplaces, buildings, and ground planes into hubs for connection and engagement that extend beyond walls into the surrounding city and community. The steps we take now to rebuild and restore community at the workplace, building, and city scale will test how we design our cities in the future.