Observations: Early adopters of modern workspace design understand the need to create spaces built around human behaviours, health and cognition. However, successful workspace design leaders also consider environmental factors when designing transformative workspaces. IBRS identified the following environmental considerations:

Include organisation branding in the environmental design: To create collaborative work environments, consider how well an organisation’s ‘workplace personality’ (how a workspace is configured and decorated) should match and amplify an organisation’s core values and culture. The successful design leaders identified in the IBRS study planned their physical spaces around amplifying corporate core values and culture – they view new workspaces as an opportunity to reinforce the organisational brand. To help design leaders build a next-generation workspace, organisations must work with board executives, human resources and marketing to answer the following questions:

• What ‘makes us’ as a company?
• What is our culture?
• What makes us unique?
• Who are our customers?
• How can we physically reflect that in the work environment?

Create activity zones and hackable spaces: The emphasis of next-generation spaces is on accessibility and the flexibility of the office environment, breaking down workplace silos and creating adaptable spaces.

A common trait of next-generation workspaces is the existence of activity zones that allow for concentration, private isolated spaces, breakout spaces, teamwork areas or large group collaboration spaces. Such zones address the fact that quiet spaces are just as important as collaborative areas. Simply adopting open plan offices in the hope it will enable activity-based working often fails due to problems around disruptive activities, acoustics and lack of privacy. Instead, the designed workspaces allow workers to move between different activity zones, each of which meet different needs for concentration, privacy and interaction with others.

However, activity zones should also be based around an ‘office neighbourhood’ concept. In this concept, functional groups (departmental teams) are located in such a way to support cross-functional interaction: the teams that interact the most are located closer to each other, with shared activity zones situated between them. Such a design allows teams to be surrounded by the same core group of people – which is known to enhance productivity – while also encouraging cross-functional collaboration. This design also supports cross-functional working groups that can form instantly and disband just as quickly.

In some workspaces, the activity zones between the neighbourhoods are ‘hackable’ spaces that can be easily re-configured to support cross-functional teams – effectively becoming ‘temporary neighbourhoods’ to support incident resolution, problem solving and agile projects. Workplace design leaders tend to create areas that are flexible and buildable.

Design around cognition: Ensuring the workspace is designed around physical and mental considerations is also important. Dr. Christhina Candido, a leading researcher into workplace design with the University of Sydney, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, who was interviewed extensively for the IBRS report, states that offices that purposely allocate spaces to support a variety of work-related tasks and implement biophilic design principles¹ achieved high results for perceived productivity, health and overall comfort of the work area.

A common workplace environment challenge is where to create collaboration spaces. When collaboration spaces are placed too far away from focused work areas, collaboration breaks down. However, when collaboration spaces are placed directly with focused work areas, staff satisfaction declines sharply due to constant interruptions. According to Dr. Gisela Backlander, the ability for teams to adopt self-leadership and autonomy over goal-setting, both of which happen during casual collaboration, are two of the most significant factors that impact employee performance in activity-based working environments². Thus, the solution is for design leaders to build informal meeting spaces where collaboration and innovative ideas can be fostered.

Make the district as an extension of the workplace: Workspace design leaders carefully consider the location of the workplace and the area that extends beyond the confines of the office. The surrounding district is just as important as its interior design. The existing amenities of the surrounding public spaces expand the usable network for staff and encourage a high productivity mindset. However, expanding the network comes with security risks so security education is an important part of designing next-generation workspaces.

Communications technologies: Just as important as location planning is the adoption of collaboration tools and technologies that are appropriate for specific workspaces. The appropriate unified communications technologies are used for the appropriate spaces and also the adjacent spaces. Flexible workspaces rely heavily on mobility. Therefore, ensure that a secure and reliable network is everywhere and invisible: a software-managed wi-fi infrastructure.

The more progressive next-generation workspaces extend wireless data into areas not normally considered by technology architecture groups. For example, it may be possible to extend the network to outdoor areas or the surrounding district’s cafes, and so on.

Focus on the small details: Workspace design leaders focus on small details without having to spend big. For example, some of the office designs with high worker satisfaction saved money by avoiding high-end video conferencing rooms and chose “hotel-quality screens and standardised plug-and-play video coms solutions”. The focus was on a commoditised user experience and the ability for staff to quickly configure the equipment with the concept of hackable spaces.

Next Steps: Organisations looking to transition successfully into a next-generation workspace must consider the following:

1. The environmental layout concurrent with human-centric considerations.
2. Opt for more accessible and hackable workspaces that focus on small yet practical details and not on big spend. Make sure these areas are flexible and buildable.
3. Plan for transformative workspaces that support collaboration and the formation of cross-functional teams but also have activity zones that allow for quiet spaces and casual meeting spaces.
4. Secure documents and information on mobile devices and invest in security education. Train the organisation in strong password management, spam awareness, being vigilant for unusual activity and even situational awareness.

Footnotes:

1. “The Rise of Office Design in High-Performance, Open-Plan Environments”, 2019, Buildings, The University of Sydney and University of Technology
2. “Navigating the Activity-Based Working Environment – Relationships of Self-Leadership, Autonomy and Information Richness with Cognitive Stress and Performance,” 2019, Bäcklander, G., et al., Organizational Psychology