![]() ![]() What would this new model entail? How could it improve city life? And how would those changes help organizations? As a corporate CEO told us in a recent workshop, “You can’t change a culture over Zoom.” How Can We Design a Better Office Typology?Īs researchers and designers, we engaged in a design study exercise to imagine what a typical corporate organization would look like if a conventional headquarters was redistributed to a networked series of nodes throughout a city or geographic region at different scales. If we wish to change or adapt any of those factors in the future, it will be difficult without some degree of physical presence. While ubiquitous virtual work is working - for now - many of us are still functioning from cultures, norms, relationships, and practices that were in place prior to the pandemic. The design of physical places helps us express our professional identities. Both people and organizations use work settings as a means of expressing their values and aspirations. Collectively, these findings suggest that, if we want sustain our work relationships, and perform at our best, we need to revisit the scale and structure of our offices to better balance the levels of connectivity and distance among ourselves and our colleagues.īeyond relationship building, offices matter for a host of other reasons. Other research argues that we can only sustain 100 to 200 stable relationships before their quality begins to diminish. But as much as we need private places to go to when we seek separation, we also need public places to bring us together. More than 40 years ago, in his studies of the nature of public life in cities and spaces, the sociologist Richard Sennett found that people in work settings need the freedom to distance themselves in order to maintain the quality of their social relationships. The size, scale, and openness of the modern office can be detrimental to the quality of those relationships. People will still need places where they can come together, connect, build relationships, and develop their careers. The office is not going to disappear, but it will require a fresh, new approach. We are optimistic about even more long-term benefits that can be realized if new planning and design principles are adopted. Organizations are giving workers the flexibility they have long been seeking. People don’t have to waste time commuting. Instead of thriving in work environments optimized for job performance, many people are now juggling working, caring for family members, and for some, home schooling from the same domestic space.īut despite the challenges associated with our “new normal,” individuals, organizations, and communities have also experienced benefits that will be difficult to turn back from. Of course, thriving is also situational, and recent months, regardless of where one has been working, have introduced stressors that have undoubtedly made it more difficult for people to perform their best. Well-designed meeting spaces can contribute to a culture of learning and knowledge sharing, while amenities, access to natural light, and other aesthetic features promote feelings of vitality. Thriving is defined as the joint experience of vitality and learning, and it is linked to better job performance, creativity, well-being, and more positive interactions among colleagues. Over the last several years, we have specifically looked at how office environments help people thrive at work. A more distributed model throughout cities and geographic regions, we believe, would better support employee performance and organizational resiliency while contributing to the improvement of the urban landscape and local communities. With many organizations maintaining work-from-home policies for the foreseeable future, we argue that now is an optimal time to plan for a post-pandemic workplace strategy by revisiting the conventional wisdom behind the centralized office. The Covid-19 pandemic has abruptly challenged a decade of corporate real estate and workplace design decisions by calling into question the purpose of large centralized office locations. ![]()
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