The Longer Experiment
Just two years after where and how we work was upended, some assume that the "great work experiment" is over. As anxious as many are for immediate answers, the simple reality is this: the future is unknown and therefore the workplace will have to continue to evolve. Here, we offer ideas for embracing "work" as a constant foundation for sustaining change in an ever-morphing environment—such as focusing on how the workplace makes employees feel at the end of the day and reducing waste as we design to accommodate new ways of working.
A version of this article was originally published in Business Insider.
The classic canard among scientists states it takes an average of 17 years for research evidence to be put into practice. But just two years after the workplace was radically upended and an estimated 22 million professional service employees started working from home, many organizations and their employees assume the “great work experiment” is over and it’s time to come out the other side. The only issue is that there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on what exactly “the other side” means.
Some companies and executives feel that the work-from-home era proved that the 5-days-a-week in the office ritual is optimal. Others feel that the best place to work is anywhere but an office building. Many leaders fall somewhere in the middle, believing some time in the office and some at home is best. Regardless of where company leaders fall on this spectrum, they all must address the fact that employees increasingly expect conditions that make their job healthier, more intriguing, and more satisfying.
Part of this evolution will come from our physical surroundings at work. Being forced to work from our makeshift home offices made us collectively reevaluate our professional experiences. Whether we missed the spark of spontaneous interaction that an office can bring or realized how much privacy and comfort we were giving up by going in, either way it became clear that offices must adapt to a postpandemic world. That’s not to say everything from our prepandemic office environments needs to be thrown out, but there is broad alignment—and excitement—around the opportunity to design better experiences.
As a design firm tasked with rethinking the future of work, we appreciate that companies can’t pause for two decades to collect information on how best to address post-Covid learnings. The fluid nature of work alone wouldn’t allow for that timeframe. As anxious as we all are for immediate answers, the simple reality is this: the future of the ideal workplace is largely unknown.
When redesigning a work space, it can be intimidating to take leaps, big or small. Most of us find it tempting to observe current conditions and respond, making incremental tweaks along the way in reaction to what came before. But this mindset poses a massive challenge in our nebular landscape: how do minor adjustments address a worldwide, society-shifting event? The blank slate of what is next leaves many wondering where to begin. Fortunately, this isn’t completely new territory for the office environment, a setting that has been changing for 300 years. Here, we offer ideas for embracing the fluidity of “work”—not as a pendulum swing but as a constant foundation for sustaining change in an ever-morphing environment. Successfully navigating the next years will rely on us not starting from scratch, but rather from starting at an ideal end.
End of the Day
Over the last 800 days, many have written about how we, as social animals, need to work in groups and collaborate to do our best work. During those same two years, much has also been said about our ability to work productively alone—away from colleagues. While those two ideas may seem in conflict, they point to a critical acknowledgment that must be made in designing the postpandemic office. The first and most important consideration for design isn’t the layout of the space, but rather how employees’ experiences bring benefit to both their lives and their work. Do your employees want to feel energized, motivated, or fulfilled? Do they need a refuge from urban living or an escape from the distractions at home? Identifying these needs—and how they intersect with your desired organization culture—is the first step to designing the right workplace. Stumbling into this stage without answering these critical questions will only result in unintended—and unwanted—outcomes.
In developing a workplace strategy for a leading technology company, the initial months of conversation did not once mention office space. Instead, the dialog centered on how an employee should feel at the end of each day, both personally and professionally. Before any questions about “where” were asked, ways to encourage mentorship, presence, camaraderie and well-being were posited. A series of behavioral protocols followed; this evolving framework aligned expectations around in-person, hybrid and remote interactions to ensure the company’s vision for inclusivity was achieved. Guidelines on when to meet, how to use space and where to connect with others removed the obstacle of merging thousands of individualized workdays. Building on this platform, we began rapidly prototyping in existing office spaces across multiple geographies. Numerous configurations enabled varying work styles, with the intent to measure the effectiveness of hybrid and in-person interactions on effectiveness and morale throughout the day. Visibility to others, the ability to focus and the capacity to seamlessly connect to anyone anywhere are being evaluated to quickly inform how a series of experiences make or break one’s workday.
End of an Era
For the past three centuries, workplaces have been “adapting” to meet the shifting requirements of jobs. Driven by a desire for higher productivity, businesses and designers have moved through a series of different workplace concepts: from Taylorism, which applied science to office design with workers seated in rows of long desks with managers ringing the interior to ensure productivity; to Open Offices, with their vast seas of desks and lack of hierarchy to encourage collaboration; to Action Offices, which placed dividers around workstations to offer employees privacy at their desks while encouraging communication in other parts of the office. Cycles of workplace evolution resulted in planning iterations that were both linear—new configurations reacted to previous layouts—and general—wholesale changes were made and imposed on workers without their input.
While the success of these eras is questionable, these transitions also introduced an unforeseen stress. As critical as adaptation is to human survival, most of us detest being quickly forced into unfamiliar or new situations. Jumping from closed offices to an entirely open plan floor with no assigned desks, for example, can leave many workers in the lurch, crashing productivity as employees attempt to make the new configuration comfortable. However, if leaders treat the workplace as a living experiment that continuously pursues input from employees to deliver ideal experiences, it can soften the shock of change. At LinkedIn’s headquarters, we created conference rooms that shape-shift on command; others nix the formality of a traditional long table and chairs to encourage a relaxed creative dialog. And some eschew altogether the traditional notion of a room, creating high-tech meeting spaces that are entirely outdoors. Instead of imposing the next big idea on workers, these environments let workers shape the place around to support the way they work best.
End of the Line
Redesigning an office can produce a lot of waste. Approximately 540 million tons of demolition material was generated in the United States in 2018, and over 10 million tons of furniture ends up in landfills annually in Canada and the US. While changing our interior environments periodically is necessary, the 342% increase in construction and demolition waste over the past 20 years also highlights the severe cost of getting it wrong or being less strategic with these changes. This process poses a particular challenge given the need to be dynamic and responsive to workers’ needs.
Clearly contrasting what is permanent with what will always be fluid can provide initial cues for material use and product longevity. For a project in Portland, we proposed prefabricated “infrastructure walls” to provide power, air, acoustics, and structure; the strategic location of these anchoring elements ensured a supportive workplace that was interchangeable but not wasteful. NBBJ is currently collaborating with general contractor DPR to target an office "kit-of-parts" for common settings such as pantries or typical conference room modules. The objective is to improve quality and speed while minimizing construction waste and, through, reconfigurability and portability, future demolition waste. By projecting perpetual environmental footprints, lifecycles can be reconsidered not as seven-to-10-year increments but rather as decisions around immediate then repurposed or lasting and never changed.
In a world of speed and instant gratification, very few have the luxury of spending 17 years to imagine, test, learn, and apply. Given the dramatic shifts in how employees will do their work over that time frame, we’d most likely be testing dated hypotheses anyway. However, that does not mean we should stop exploring. Failure is an essential and inescapable part of research, and this mindset applied to the post-Covid workplace can alleviate the pressure to “get it right” immediately. Ironically, a successful outcome in the workplace usually requires a process dedicated not to landing on “perfect”—a fallible construct given the diverse needs of both our work force and work focus—but rather one that acknowledges missteps will ensure transformation. Workplace design by nature is an exploration, but when it ceases to seek valuable change or provocation, it shifts from being a creative endeavor to one that is rote. It is then that design stops being design and perhaps aligns more with manufacturing, and unsurprisingly, our workplaces begin to feel more like factories than laboratories.
We have entered a future where potential is jointly defined by employer and employee. The true design of a workplace should no longer be a passive exercise that limits change, but rather a continuously active engagement that encourages it. Our experiment may be continuing, but we know where we collectively want to land. Let’s start there.