How can we create thriving offices that support employees to do their best work?
Our Senior Workplace Consultant, Danielle Adler, has helped some of the UK’s biggest brands find solutions to this crucial workplace conundrum. So, we sat down with her to gain a deeper understanding of how workplaces can tackle this question head-on.
Ask them! It’s easy to make assumptions about the struggles employees are facing, what they need from an office or how they feel about their current space. But the best workplace projects are built on evidence and research.
For me, this means getting employees involved in the project from the outset and taking both a quantitative and qualitative approach. From multiple-choice surveys to in-depth interviews and going to see a space in action, there are many ways we can gather these insights.
Once we have this data, we can start to weave together a workplace strategy and design vision, considering this input from people alongside business goals, sustainability targets and brand ethos. When we combine all of these elements, we ensure the solutions meet the needs of the organisation as a whole.
I think the main thing is to create a variety of spaces to support both focus work and collaborative work.
The feedback we often receive from people is that their homes are better equipped than the office to support meetings, phone calls and focused work. So it’s about providing private, quiet and comfortable areas where this work can be carried out. This is especially important in a post-covid world, where our calendars contain lots more video calls than they did before.
That said, we also want to create areas where employees are encouraged to come together and connect, share ideas and express themselves. Social settings are so important. Connecting with colleagues is one of the main reasons employees do come into the office, so we want to enhance this experience as much as possible with features like good coffee, inviting seating and music.
We can’t talk about productivity without also mentioning wellbeing, and natural light is a huge component of this. When we take the time to track the sun’s path across an office we can identify areas of primary and secondary daylight and make smarter decisions about where to place workstations, enclosed offices and phone booths, for example.
Natural daylight can have a massive impact on our mood, health and of course productivity. We want to get as much of it flowing through the office as possible and supplement this with leafy green plants and natural materials. A little biophillia goes a long way!
For me, it’s about thinking: ‘What can we do to incentivise and naturally encourage people to spend time in the office?’ I find that people almost always come into the workplace seeking out moments of connection and we can use design to encourage this in really creative ways.
Creating a workplace culture with this connected, community feel starts with the environment. Adopting activity-based settings rather than your traditional banks of desks encourages individuals to move around the space, cross paths with other teams and build connections across the business.
This flow of movement throughout the space brings a great energy into the office and also increases the volume of those moments of connection that matter most. It’s those quick catch ups, unexpected encounters and human interactions that the home office simply cant replicate, how can we engineer more of those? The answer will be different in every project.
Attendance at the office can vary greatly between different organisations. Some find that Mondays are the busiest, and for some, it can be the quietest. We commonly find that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays seem to have the highest occupancy rates, which can be a challenge for those who are looking to downsize their spaces.
I always encourage people to remember that everyone is different. And while there will be a cohort of people who will prefer to visit the office on busier days, there is probably another group of people who will choose to go into the office on a Friday precisely because there is nobody there.
When we provide spaces that excel in comparison to the home office, people naturally gravitate to spend more time there across the week as a whole. We can also support this by arranging activities across the week such as a coffee morning, lunchtime walk group or more in-person meetings.
The workplace has undergone significant changes in recent years, impacting organisations in various ways. Gone are the days of signing a 10-year lease and updating the office once a decade for a major overhaul.
Instead, there is a need now to continuously refine, evolve, refresh, and refine the space. This can mean testing out new technology, revisiting changes after 90 days to see how they are working for teams, trying out new furniture without waiting for an entire workplace transformation or integrating flexible fixtures and fittings so the office can adapt as the business changes and grows.
This new approach goes hand in hand with a sustainability lens, when we’re introducing a new design, it’s crucial to think about how the different components can evolve, be repurposed or take on a new lease of life in future years.
Our workplace strategy experts have helped some of the UK's leading organisations create productive and thriving offices. Get in touch here to see how we can help you do the same.
How can we create thriving offices that support employees to do their best work?
Our Senior Workplace Consultant, Danielle Adler, has helped some of the UK’s biggest brands find solutions to this crucial workplace conundrum. So, we sat down with her to gain a deeper understanding of how workplaces can tackle this question head-on.
Ask them! It’s easy to make assumptions about the struggles employees are facing, what they need from an office or how they feel about their current space. But the best workplace projects are built on evidence and research.
For me, this means getting employees involved in the project from the outset and taking both a quantitative and qualitative approach. From multiple-choice surveys to in-depth interviews and going to see a space in action, there are many ways we can gather these insights.
Once we have this data, we can start to weave together a workplace strategy and design vision, considering this input from people alongside business goals, sustainability targets and brand ethos. When we combine all of these elements, we ensure the solutions meet the needs of the organisation as a whole.
I think the main thing is to create a variety of spaces to support both focus work and collaborative work.
The feedback we often receive from people is that their homes are better equipped than the office to support meetings, phone calls and focused work. So it’s about providing private, quiet and comfortable areas where this work can be carried out. This is especially important in a post-covid world, where our calendars contain lots more video calls than they did before.
That said, we also want to create areas where employees are encouraged to come together and connect, share ideas and express themselves. Social settings are so important. Connecting with colleagues is one of the main reasons employees do come into the office, so we want to enhance this experience as much as possible with features like good coffee, inviting seating and music.
We can’t talk about productivity without also mentioning wellbeing, and natural light is a huge component of this. When we take the time to track the sun’s path across an office we can identify areas of primary and secondary daylight and make smarter decisions about where to place workstations, enclosed offices and phone booths, for example.
Natural daylight can have a massive impact on our mood, health and of course productivity. We want to get as much of it flowing through the office as possible and supplement this with leafy green plants and natural materials. A little biophillia goes a long way!
For me, it’s about thinking: ‘What can we do to incentivise and naturally encourage people to spend time in the office?’ I find that people almost always come into the workplace seeking out moments of connection and we can use design to encourage this in really creative ways.
Creating a workplace culture with this connected, community feel starts with the environment. Adopting activity-based settings rather than your traditional banks of desks encourages individuals to move around the space, cross paths with other teams and build connections across the business.
This flow of movement throughout the space brings a great energy into the office and also increases the volume of those moments of connection that matter most. It’s those quick catch ups, unexpected encounters and human interactions that the home office simply cant replicate, how can we engineer more of those? The answer will be different in every project.
Attendance at the office can vary greatly between different organisations. Some find that Mondays are the busiest, and for some, it can be the quietest. We commonly find that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays seem to have the highest occupancy rates, which can be a challenge for those who are looking to downsize their spaces.
I always encourage people to remember that everyone is different. And while there will be a cohort of people who will prefer to visit the office on busier days, there is probably another group of people who will choose to go into the office on a Friday precisely because there is nobody there.
When we provide spaces that excel in comparison to the home office, people naturally gravitate to spend more time there across the week as a whole. We can also support this by arranging activities across the week such as a coffee morning, lunchtime walk group or more in-person meetings.
The workplace has undergone significant changes in recent years, impacting organisations in various ways. Gone are the days of signing a 10-year lease and updating the office once a decade for a major overhaul.
Instead, there is a need now to continuously refine, evolve, refresh, and refine the space. This can mean testing out new technology, revisiting changes after 90 days to see how they are working for teams, trying out new furniture without waiting for an entire workplace transformation or integrating flexible fixtures and fittings so the office can adapt as the business changes and grows.
This new approach goes hand in hand with a sustainability lens, when we’re introducing a new design, it’s crucial to think about how the different components can evolve, be repurposed or take on a new lease of life in future years.
Our workplace strategy experts have helped some of the UK's leading organisations create productive and thriving offices. Get in touch here to see how we can help you do the same.