As HR teams everywhere know, the fight to recruit and retain top talent is on. In the wake of COVID-19, how we work has seen a permanent shift, particularly among millennial and Gen Z employees who are not only demanding flexible work environments, but an increased focus on health and wellbeing, too.  

So you’re looking to design a productive space. But where to begin? 

Adapting the design of a space to suit your needs isn’t a one-time, all-or-nothing task. As needs change, your workplace design can evolve. Clearly, renovating a space is expensive – and yet, it’s imperative to put employees first in order to enhance productivity. 

Before you invest in major structural changes, invest in small, cost-effective, and necessary shifts that support your hybrid model and reinforce new office norms around unassigned seating or accommodating remote workers.

One prominent example is removing 1:1 desk ratios that eat up a lot of real estate. If 70 percent of your staff aren’t coming back more than 3 days a week, that arrangement is no longer a sensible one.

There is an art and a science to design, and it must be informed by quantitative research in order to be optimal.

You need a baseline idea of what kind of people are working for the company, what their workstyles tend to be, and what they need to complete their work to gauge the overall working culture. Different business units, after all, will have different tendencies. Some may need collaborative space when a project begins, but then quiet areas to work and actually see that project through. The more you know about these specific habits and work cycles, the more meaningful you can make that team’s neighbourhood in the office. 

To that end, perform interviews, hold individual and panel discussions, and engage with all teams to understand preferences and pain points with the office. Rushing through the preliminary stages without truly understanding how different groups prefer to work makes it virtually impossible to root any design strategy in reality.

Peel back to the big picture and consider what the office should become – and, thus, how the workplace redesign can best support that vision.

The office is no longer a space where people come to work each day, 9-5. It now must be viewed as a space designed for specific, thoughtful purposes that foster socialization and collaboration. Importantly, you can turn your space into a service rather than an arbitrary place to visit. 

You want to drive productivity? Ensure the office offers frictionless access to technology and resources, meeting and work spaces. Have it so that staff will easily find and book the resources they need, when they need them, to support their specific tasks. 

And of course, put collaboration front and centre – because working together is now a big reason why employees will prefer the office environment over working remotely. Instead of the old dense environments packed with individual work stations, open up to become a hub for social connection and culture. Think hotelling, plenty of touch down areas, and maximum versatility. 

Collaboration is good for people and a positive environment can influence everything from creativity and teamwork to burnout and absenteeism. Collaborative spaces encourage stronger bonds between co-workers  – so it’s not hard to see how productivity will flow as a result. 

Tech-enabled office experiences existed pre-pandemic, but in order to support productivity now, they are absolutely imperative. It’s time to invest in the technology your business needs and your employees may soon come to expect. 

Booking systems allow employees to schedule their time in the office so they can be assured of both safety and productivity in space just for them on a given day. Concierge-like services can help employees find answers to common concerns quickly with automated support. Virtual administration can organize both time and projects. Digital twins can run virtual simulations of processes, products or services to prevent problems, eliminate downtime, and more. Collaborative hardware and software systems have all evolved dramatically in a very short time.

An underrecognized area of innovation is spatial intelligence solutions like InnerSpace’s platform that is highly valuable in an office redesign. Such tech can reveal actual and ongoing patterns of movement across the workspace – from which you can glean employee behaviors and which zones are most occupied. By seeing these trends, you can determine how best to open up rooms, change traffic flow, and conceive longer-term design strategies that will reflect what employees truly want. 

Far more in-depth than seat sensors or room reservation systems (which can be subject to human error if people don’t use them), spatial intelligence solutions can also break down how often people visit the office, who they are, if they are new or returning users, how long they stay, how they interact with different teams, where they seek private space, where they go for collaboration, and what their unique working needs may be. 

This tech can empower employees as well, which bolsters productivity. Take our popular times metric, where staff can see how busy the office is expected to be at any particular day and time – and so decide when they want to visit the office, where to set up shop when they get there, and choose what rooms to book based on their needs. The same way someone could consult Google to determine the best time to visit the supermarket, so too can they now tailor their office visits to their personal preferences.