Note to Readers: This article first appeared in Allwork.Space on July 8, 2021 as well as in WorkDesign Magazine on July 15, 2021.
As many companies bring workers back to the office, even if on a flexible or hybrid schedule, many are rethinking their pre-pandemic floor plans.
The open office, for example, may be a design of the past. As a trend already criticized before the COVID pandemic for things like negative impacts on productivity, open office plans now have the added stigma of being potentially dangerous for workers in light of virus transmission.
As businesses struggle with the decision to bring workers back to the office, the office buildings they might come back to need a reevaluation in order to support a post-pandemic workplace. Using Activity-Based Workplace Design can serve as a useful model for this reevaluation.
Floor plans can have a dramatic effect on the productivity of the people that occupy the spaces.
If it’s too open or too private, too quiet or too noisy, it’s possible that the effect is actually detrimental. Including a wide variety of options, from spaces to focus to places to socialize, can help workers be more productive no matter what type of work they are doing.
When designing a space, it is important to consider not only how people will use individual spaces, but how they move between them and throughout their space.
Providing flexibility in how and where people work within a space is a key concept in Activity-Based Workspace (ABW) design, and it can make or break your workplace experience.
Buildings may be static, but people are dynamic, so physical design must account for the motion of people through the static space. Very few people are able to be productive sitting in one position for hours on end.
On any given day, an employee may work from half a dozen spaces within the office.
They might:
Having all of these spaces easily accessible throughout the day means workers are encouraged to take advantage of them and can be more productive as a result.
Other considerations — there should be plenty of options for people to sit down at a desk, stand up, or otherwise change their position throughout the day, and each of these options needs to be available for all types of work. Think sit/stand desks, counter height tables, clusters of comfy chairs, etc.
There is no definitive rule of thumb for how many or what types of spaces you need for an ideal office environment. So, how can your office implement activity-based workplace design?
Track everything. Tracking how often your meeting spaces are being used, which ones, and also how often there are none available, is critical to understanding how to optimize the use of your space.
Also important is tracking the type of work that needs to be done — is most of your demand for private offices, and if so, is that only because the office is not offering enough flexible workspaces to meet their needs without having dedicated private space? Will most of your workers be in office part time? Is your large conference room sitting empty, or worse, is there often one person in there squatting because they can’t focus in the open plan desk space?
These are all data points that can be used to adjust the physical space to meet the dynamic needs of your workers, and provide a much better experience for them as a result.
Whether you are in the early stages of designing a new office space, or looking to improve your workplace experience by re-designing the space you have, activity-based workplace design should be on your radar as a way to ensure you are meeting the needs of your workforce.
Image Credit: https://officesnapshots.com/2011/04/27/belkins-new-headquarters/