Positioning Your Office as a Competitive Edge
Companies have been reevaluating their offices since before the pandemic. If given the choice, many employees were already choosing to work from home, coffee shops, or coworking spaces. Then the pandemic hit, and very quickly, mass amounts of workers were equipped to work from anywhere.
It’s impossible to justify the substantial expense of the office in the same form as the pre-pandemic era. Some are questioning if they should even have it as an expense at all. However, instead of looking at the office as a massive and necessary expense, there is an opportunity to use it as an investment into your company and workers. Reorient the office so workers feel less anchored to it and more buoyed by it.
Surveys done by Herman Miller found that there are three core experiences that are best supported by the office. Capitalizing on these three experiences and creating settings to support these will increase worker productivity, feelings of well-being, and quality of work.
To make your office a more desirable on-demand destination, provide settings that foster these experiences:
Community socialization
Provide areas in your space that encourages people to interact with their extended networks to reestablish the community connections that were largely lost during the pandemic.
Team Collaboration
The new “neighborhooding” model of assigned shared spaces and unassigned individual spaces within those areas creates opportunity for longer-term collaboration and spur-of-the-moment chats that cannot be replicated via videoconferencing.
Individual focus
With homes doubling as offices, schools, gyms, and more, getting focused work done during has become more difficult. For those with children, roommates, or extended families in their space, the office can be a respite for concentrated and focused work.
