Dixon highlights that the hybrid model is more affordable, pointing to independent research by Global Workplace Analytics, which shows companies that adopt a hybrid model save an average of $11,000 per employee. “It is certainly not realistic now.”Ĭost-cutting is also an important factor. “This notion of being very sedentary or having one place to go to meet all those demands was not realistic pre-pandemic,” says Beaudoin. It’s a significant sea change as many pre-pandemic office concepts become increasingly viewed as outdated. “Anybody in a competitive workplace is listening to their employees,” says Joanna Frank, CEO of the Center for Active Design, a nonprofit that incorporates public health research into architectural layouts. Google, Meta, and Amazon have opened new offices in more cities at a rapid clip so they can meet talent where they are. But not all companies have taken this approach. In the early months of the pandemic, some companies, like Nationwide, consolidated their presence in preparation for a less office-centric future. Companies are shifting the design of the office to mirror “a very attractive restaurant where you want to go and eat,” he says. The new prevailing office philosophy is “we will bring you together, not to work, but to communicate with others,” Dixon says. The old days of 1:1 desks for employees, however, will no longer be the norm. In fact, open floor designs have long been a point of contention, with employees, now used to working from home with some semblance of quiet and privacy, donning earphones to drown out noise from colleagues or hopping into conference rooms to take calls.īeaudoin points out that some companies are taking notice and creating enclosed individual or small group spaces, such as telephone booths or private office areas that employees can book for a certain time slot. That’s not to say that employees don’t still want, or require, individual workspaces. Dropbox, which announced in October 2020 that it was a virtual-first company, now utilizes “studios” instead of offices, a reflection of the new approach to company space. About 70% of respondents allow employees to work from anywhere, enabling designers to create offices with fewer seats than employees, and allocate more space to meeting areas and other amenities. That ratio has now increased to 1:1 due to an “expectation that hybrid employees will use the office for more in-person meetings to complement more virtual meetings when working remotely,” says Lenny Beaudoin, executive managing director and global head of workplace design at CBRE.Įighty percent of CBRE’s “major clients”-those operating more than 350 million square feet of office space-say they are redesigning collaborative spaces to support new work models as they embrace hybrid or remote-first workplaces. They’ve given way to more conference rooms, greenery, and recreational spaces, all meant to foster collaboration and support employee well-being.ĬBRE’s occupancy management practice tells Fortune that prior to the pandemic, the ratio of conference seats to individual desk seats was. Companies have altered office spaces to reflect the new work experience and meet employee demands, by increasing public areas, using technology to track space usage, and expanding conference rooms and shared spaces.įor many companies, gone are the days of individually assigned desks. Getting people into the office is also much harder today than it’s been for the past hundred years, when in-office presence was required for nearly all employees, he says. Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of IWG, a commercial real estate firm that works with 83% of the Fortune 500, calls the new office transformation one of the “biggest changes since the start of the typewriter,” with design preferences changing now more “than they’ve changed in the last century.”
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