How to make the office a place people want to be

Anecdotally, it might look like the ‘return to the office’ has begun in earnest. Walk past buildings that have lain empty for almost two years and see occupied desks, notice the busier morning buses and trains, join a lunchtime coffee shop queue and it’s easy to conclude that we’re heading ‘back to normal’. The reality is not quite so simple. Yes, more people are back in their workplaces than in the horror-movie style scenes of deserted city centres that we witnessed during the first lockdowns. But the universal ‘return to work’ predicted by bosses and anticipated by many workers just hasn’t happened.

According to a January 2022 BBC report :

“the idea that we’ll all return to the office together again seems highly unrealistic.”

That’s not just a UK-centric view; according to Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, “the return-to-office date has died”, having been repeatedly, and now permanently, deferred by fresh waves of infections, new variants, unresolved anxieties on the part of the clinically vulnerable and, not least, by many workers having adapted to operating effectively from a range of locations and situations. In the UK, the credibility of government proclamations that the pandemic is over have been undermined by the prime minister and his cabinet’s own questionable pandemic workplace practices.

The reality is that the workplace is still in flux. According to Steelcase research, ‘People who went back said they couldn’t wait because they missed the energy of being with others. But when they got back, they said it felt “sad.”’ The cause of these downbeat responses lies in the set-up of the office itself: it was seen as regimented, with movements, routes etc. being rigidly defined; half-empty, due to distancing measures and the fact that only some employees were in at any given time; and unsympathetic compared to the control over their working environment that people had become used to when confined to home.

Reactions like this have triggered a further round of company soul-searching - not so much about whether to return to the workplace, but about what people are there for. As the New Yorker says, ‘It turns out that work, which is what the office was supposed to be for, is possible to do from somewhere else.’ Whilst that statement sounds eminently reasonable, it also has the potential impact of a ticking time-bomb. Another report concludes that ‘It certainly feels as if this is a watershed moment for the traditional office model and that its purpose is being scrutinised in a way in which it has never been before.’

Now that we’re being told that the pandemic is ‘over’ and a return to the workplace is in motion, familiar tropes of the return-to-the-workplace debate, like the importance of collaboration or the need for creative sociability remain live issues. But the focus has shifted. There is a widespread sense that the need for a profound change in the purpose of the workplace has been brewing for a long time. The pandemic has been a trigger for - rather than the source of - a set of radical new requirements for the workspace, necessary changes that are not direct responses to the pandemic, lockdowns, working from home or remote work, but which reflect a longer felt impetus for change that has been ‘released’ by the experiences of the past two years.

Tapping into people’s desire to work differently demands fresh thinking about how the workplace should be conceived and designed. It needs to be remade to allow freer movement within and around it, including for those present virtually on screens. It should facilitate seamless shifting between large group, small group, and individual work, again in both physical and digital environments, which means creating multifunctional spaces in which just about everything is moveable. It needs to bring hospitality and furniture together in discreet ‘social hubs’. Given the persistence of ‘hybrid’ working – which kicks in as soon as just one employee joins a meeting remotely – video call functionality and an enabling environment need to be available throughout the workplace. As one commentator puts it :

“we need to think like a director — lights, camera, action!” It’s about actively staging the work, rather than simply constructing the stage, and leaving the direction to someone else."Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Drawing broader conclusions about the state of the workplace as we enter our third COVID year, it is clear that work itself needs to be ‘socialised’; after all, how much difference is there, in the end, between collaboration and sociality, especially for younger employees? If you want to be ‘purely’ social, you can go to the pub or bar with your teammates after hours; in the office, as youthful workers themselves report, weaving personal connections into the flow of work comes naturally and helps facilitate better, more creative results.

It’s about moving on from building office ‘culture’ on top of, or adjacent to, work. Instead of creating spaces and events - games rooms, retreats, away days, play areas, after-work activities and so on - as additional to the workplace, build them in. Don’t add separate places for ‘time out’. Working at home, without the spatial separation of commuting, gave many people a seamless daily experience of task working, short breaks, meetings, skipping to the local coffee shop, connecting with colleagues and friends (albeit virtually), grabbing lunch, and interacting with family or housemates. Whatever the many drawbacks of this way of working, it is the easy integration of activities that people enjoyed; it felt more natural, more human. They would like it to continue in some form.

This situation presents significant challenges to how we conceive of the office and the way we design the workplace. Not only should we be aiming to meet employees’ desire for sociability as an integral part of daily work or their need for a comfortable and safe environment, but we also must incorporate hospitality, variety, movement, and multiple opportunities to connect, both within and outside of the organisation, into the fabric of the workplace. Spatially, that means not ‘adding’ those elements by hiving off separate spaces for them to happen in, but incorporating them on a micro scale.

Jackdaw Studio believes that the task of workplace design is to actually build work culture, to physically embody the practices that will make the office somewhere people want to be. The habits and satisfactions of being able to work where you want to will not be forgotten quickly or easily. Our job is to bring them back to the workplace.