Why Your Office May Start Feeling More Like Home
This time, it’s for real. After several false starts, the return to office is happening. In recent weeks, a Who’s Who of Fortune 500 companies have called employees back to their desks, at least on a hybrid basis. But what will the office look like now? Will there even be desks? Since many employees would rather keep working from home, however, and very few want to be in the office five days a week, it will have to look and feel different to keep them coming in. “The workplace, more than ever, must be worth the commute,” said Todd Heiser, managing director at the design and architecture firm Gensler. “Talent wants a workplace that provides them with a platform to thrive. Thriving, to me, is that joint experience of vitality and learning. This means something a little bit different for each person, but for the most part, it means offering them flexibility and choice.” From Day One spoke with Heiser and several other design innovators to sketch a picture of how offices will evolve in the post-pandemic era. Among their forecasts: Spaces will be more distinctly purposeful, designated for collaborating, learning, or allowing privacy. The environment will be more wellness-conscious, embracing natural light, fresh air, and organic materials. Technology and even the furnishings will be designed to be inclusive not just of workers who are there, but also those working outside the building. And home offices will be designed more thoughtfully to support hybrid work over the long haul. All told, offices will tend to look more like home, and home will look more like the office. “Perhaps no other Covid-19 phenomenon will have a more lasting impact than work from home,” said Manhattan-based architect Lilian Weinreich, who specializes in residential spaces. “Many remote employees going back to work now want the choice of where they work, with many preferring a flexible mix of office and home. That is a profound shift and needs to be accommodated in the design.” Responding to Mixed Feelings About Returning The mass movement of 50 million U.S. employees to remote work was truly a revolution. Before the pandemic, only about 6% of white-collar employees worked exclusively from home, but by May 2020 that portion rose to 65%, according to a Gallup survey. Over the course of two years, remote work reset the standard for a working environment, with obvious benefits like flexibility, comfort, and the lack of a grueling commute. With the pandemic easing, however, employers want workers back on premises. Surveys of C-suite leaders, like one by McKinsey & Company, have indicated that a large majority of them expect their typical “core” employees to be in the office three or more days a week. In recent announcements, Apple and Google said they will require workers to report to the office at least three days a week starting in April, while Microsoft’s guideline is that workers who want to work remotely more than 50% of the time need approval by managers. Designer Adrian Chan’s work focuses on maximizing small spaces in flexible ways (Photo by Kevin @ 1km Studio) Managers say they need workers to gather in offices again to restore a lost spirit of collaboration. During the pandemic, “our innovation pipeline got significantly worse,” Luis von Ahn, CEO of the language-learning platform Duolingo, told NPR. As workers started returning to the office, he said, “the number of new ideas started popping up again.” Workers too, have their reasons to get out of the house. In the McKinsey survey, many of them reported that report that “working from home through the stress of the pandemic has driven fatigue, difficulty in disconnecting from work, deterioration of their social networks, and weakening of their sense of belonging.” At the same time, however, many workers don’t want to return to the old grind–often for cultural reasons. Many surveys, including a study of 10,000 office workers by Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack, showed that “executives’ preference to return to the office is threatening employee satisfaction and retention, particularly for women, working parents and people of color.” The traditional workplace and its culture, many believe, was designed for white males. “There’s not much point in returning to the office if we’re just going back to the old boys’ club,” Karen Gifford, an information technology worker in Pittsburgh, told Emma Goldberg of the New York Times. “What a relief not to have to go in day after day, week after week, and fail at making friends and having fun.” Clearly, employers have a golden opportunity for workers to be happily surprised about what they find when they return. Making Spaces Equitable and Purposeful Collaboration is the keyword in the great post-Covid office redesign. Space & Pepper, a Berlin-based creative studio, envisioned a café-style approach in a research project they call the Two-Day Office, where workers sit at a bar-counter-style communal desk, with a “facilitator” standing on the opposite side of the counter. “The benefits of a human factor or people connector are tremendous. A connector in a workspace would facilitate the entry/exit experience for a coworker,” said studio co-founder Hana Ahriz. “Whether it's your first day, looking for a silent space to focus, looking to meet someone new, the connector will guide you from the moment you enter the space to the moment you will leave it.” On the other hand, in a hybrid work environment, where perhaps half of employees are working remote and half are on-site, equity of experience is a requirement to avoid “proximity bias,” the tendency of managers to favor workers who are close-by. Solutions include spaces for video conferences and team meetings that are acoustically sound, as well as digital tools that facilitate community-building in a virtual world. “When we return to the office, those tools will still be available along with others,” said Heiser. “For example, we’ll use technology to know who’s in the office that day. Seamless technology, like sensors, will be prevalent in the way we marry digital and physical experiences.” In the Two-Day Office project, the emphasis is on adaptable furnishings to boost collaboration (Illustration courtesy of Space & Pepper) Microsoft, which has a big stake in hybrid work with its Teams platform, is thinking about how to create a leveling experience. “It’s counterintuitive. You have to design your physical space for the people who aren’t there,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s VP for Modern Work, told Bloomberg News. At the Hive, the company’s test center near its headquarters, “the typical conference table, for example, was redesigned to a triangle pointed away from the screens, or a truncated semi-circle facing the screen, United Nations-style. Both setups address a big problem with standard conference rooms: Attendees don’t fully face the camera and in-person participants migrate toward each other,” Bloomberg reported. This focus on more community-oriented spaces is set to coexist side-by-side with a need for more private spaces. “I think the pandemic has highlighted to us the importance of private space in addition to social space,” said Adrian Chan, a designer and researcher whose studio, ADRO, is based in New York City and Hong Kong. “A lot of workers, especially introverts, realized they became more productive working alone than in a busy environment 24/7. In terms of wellness, I foresee more extensive use of sleeping pods, private mediation chambers or massage rooms.” While employers may want to do away with assigned desks to allow for these new features, some experts think assigned seating is still an important source of familiarity and comfort for workers. Adaptability Will Be Empowering Chan’s studio is most notable for maximizing small spaces in flexible ways with modular furniture and fixtures, a design philosophy he has been cultivating since 2015 during his academic studies. “For better or for worse, Covid accelerated a lot of the trends that were already under way, whether it’s design, technology and even the economy,” he said. “Paradigm shifts do happen once in a while, and I think humanity is programmed to make the best out of every situation. Interestingly, the idea of adaptable spaces has always been an investigative interest of mine, and my approach just became more in demand by clients since 2020." His project called “Office of Blocks,” made for a Hong-Kong-based HR and financial-advisory firm, converted a poorly lit, tightly enclosed office with low ceilings into a light and airy space where horizontal lines are emphasized and where areas can be adapted to various usages, accommodating meetings for four to 20 people. “Forty percent of the square footage is adaptable, meaning that it could be used for collaborative work, free-lancers or whoever happens to be working in the office that day,” Chan explained. Still, evaluating possible hybrid workspace solutions doesn’t require overt risk or a significant investment from the get-go. One can start by, for example, turning a cafeteria into a social hub during off-meal hours. “Workspaces aren’t intended to be precious; they should constantly change and improvise fresh solutions,” Gensler’s Heiser said in a Harvard Business Review webinar. “It’s about thinking of work as a verb, not a noun … and using whatever you have.” Physical Spaces That Promote Well-being The pandemic has put an emphasis on employee wellness. “Providing employees with an abundance of natural light, engineering systems that offer more air changes with a higher percentage of fresh and filtration to remove particulates, and a stronger emphasis on biophilia really set the stage for an effective user experience,” said Bob Varga, design principal at Smith Group, and Denise Bates, senior designer. As examples of natural elements, they cite green walls, hanging gardens and plants throughout, in addition to textural nods via carpeting, textiles, and wood tones. This assessment goes beyond specific workspace aesthetics. “The trend towards hospitality-focused workspace design continues to gain traction as we return to the office and the lines between work and home remain blurred,” assert Varga and Bates. “Regardless of the aesthetic, the workplace will need to be a magnet of activity rather than just a requirement for attendance.” Creating the Sustainable Home Office When the pandemic broke out, Madhurya Hariharan, head of HR for the Microsoft Business Unit at Tata Consultancy Services, realized she could finally design her own workspace at home, she said in a From Day One webinar on hybrid work. A yoga practitioner for the past decade, she started working while sitting on the floor, cross-legged, with a low table. It was great for her back. “I would love to work like that,” she said, “but nobody at work gave me the option!” Since most employees will insist that working from home will be at least part of their work regimen, they’ll now be motivated to make longer-term investments in their home offices. Weinreich, the Manhattan architect, advises clients to future-proof their spaces by making them flexible and natural. “There is a renewed relationship with nature and an enhanced appeal for open-air and sky to extend the indoors into the outdoors. A planning strategy is to design open-plan spaces allowing deep daylighting with full-height glazed sliding partitions to provide privacy when required.” In Chan’s designs, light fixtures have a modern-home touch (Photo by Kevin @ 1km Studio) For a client, Weinreich created a home environment, including a home office, based on the principles of Feng Shui. “Water is a significant element needed to generate Chi,” or energy, she explained. Since the client’s home has a view of the Hudson River to the North, “the office desk was placed facing North,” in what Weinreich called “the career sector” of the home. “In this highly efficient space where every inch was utilized, a wall corner at the end of the dry bar becomes the office closet, housing a slide-out printer/fax machine, stationery, pens and file storage.” The hybrid movement has inspired workers to invest more in their technology as well. “Rapidly shifting needs drove the sudden demand for connectivity and technology. During the pandemic, many upgraded their home broadband, reinforced Wi-Fi, and expanded their mobile data plans," Weinrech said. “Households were tasked to manage a wide range of devices and services as communication became necessary for work from home. Post-pandemic, there is a flood of connected devices and digital services that are now marketed to be integrated into a Smart Home.” Workers have gone to sometimes surprising lengths to bring office tools into their homes, observed designer Chan. “Recently, a client of mine has requested me to subtly incorporate some kind of marker board in her living room, since she is working from home but has gotten used to using these boards to brainstorm ideas.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.
