“We’re no longer tethered to a desk through cords and cables,” said Kylie Roth, Knoll’s Senior Director of Workplace Research at the NeoCon commercial design event.

Increased flexibility on where work is done has led to the rise of working from home. Among non-self-employed workers, work-at-home has grown by 140% since 2005. 43% of employed Americans occasionally work remotely. 37% of knowledge workers come into the office fewer than five days a week.

This trend has led some companies to ask, “why have an office when employees can work at home?”

The employee is now the consumer

Employees have the power to choose

The workplace is a strategic asset for attracting and retaining top talent. In a 2017 UK study of 2,800 knowledge workers, 67% of participants attributed the reason for leaving their last role to a workplace not being optimized for their needs. CapitalOne’s 2017 Work Environment Survey found that roughly 65% of US workers believe that workplace design is equally or more important than location when considering a new job.

The option to work from home reflects the importance of providing workers with more choices.

70% of highly satisfied workers are able to choose a variety of spaces at work.

The emphasis on choice and variety means that design elements at workplaces and homes are converging. Roth calls this new trend, “homing from work.”

“It’s a shift on what the office is… At home, you use your bedroom, you use your living room, you have access to the entire environment…That’s how people see the office environment today. You use the entire space like you use your entire house.” (Watch the full interview at the beginning of the article.)

Effective workplaces encourage employees to use different spaces for different needs. The goal of workplace strategy is to balance a mix of focus spaces, sharing spaces, social spaces, and team spaces that meet employee needs. Like home design, this mix heavily favors communal spaces.

More than 50% of work today is group-based, and 39% of time is spent on informal group activities. 

Honey, I shrunk the office

Workplaces provide more services in less space 

Companies are responding by shrinking personal space and investing in more collaborative areas. Workplaces typically allot 150 square feet per person, 33 less than 225 square feet in 2010. Some workplaces are shrinking to as little 60 square feet per employee by eliminating assigned desks and designated personal space. “Hoteling” and “hot desking” policies grant employees access to space on an as-needed basis. Much like an apartment studio, open offices blur boundaries between public and personal space to maximize square feet.

In exchange for less space, employees no longer exclusively choose between the cubical or conference room. Employers are investing in amenities and services for activities that employees would normally to do at home or elsewhere.

64% of CBRE clients are focusing on amenities and services, including on-site cafeterias, fitness areas, and dry-cleaning/laundry. 

Companies plan to provide even more amenities in the next five years including childcare, meditation areas, game rooms, and outdoor recreation areas.

Residential design is now commercial

Design elements at home and at work are indistinguishable

From an interior design perspective, workplaces are outfitted like a home. Office furniture today incorporates comforts of a home — lounge chairs and couches, warm natural lighting, stylish fabrics, and plants for decor.

It’s no coincidence that modern workplace furniture looks like it was made for the home. Office furniture companies are entering the home furnishing market and vice versa. Knoll recently acquired Muuto, a Scandinavian “resimercial” brand for the workplace and home. West Elm, a company known for residential furniture, recently launched an office furniture line. Staples and Ikea sell the same furniture to businesses and individuals alike.

Home away from home

The rise of living at work

The interior design of workplaces are clearly adopting design elements from home. This trend seems to apply to the buildings themselves.

WeWork recently expanded into co-living with WeLive apartments, dorm-like facilities that offer communal daily activities. Like WeWork members, WeLive residents forego the size of personal space for perks. Facebook’s new campus will include 1,500 apartments and a grocery store. Google plans to build as much as 10,000 homes on its Mountain View property, which will include retail stores and entertainment. Multi-use buildings are on the rise as developers expand into live-work-play projects.

With the growing trend of “homing” from work, the question is no longer, “why have an office when you can work at home?” A new question is being asked, which challenges assumptions on the role of corporations in public life. “Why have a home when you can live at work?”

While sociologists are exploring the complex implications of living at work, the answer some employers seem to be giving is simple: “If you lived here, you’d be home already.”

This article was originally published in Work Design.

We’ve all been there: The last-minute meeting with a crucial client. The team huddle ahead of a product launch. The frantic search for a space to convene. The passive-aggressive request, “Are you done with this room?”

In many workplaces, meeting rooms are reserved days or even weeks in advance, yet even with forward planning and complex booking systems, employees waste up to 27 hours a year looking for a place to meet—and 45% don’t have access to the space they need when they need it.

More meetings, less space

Since the start of the new millennium, time spent in meetings has been rising 10%, and the trend looks set to continue. As the digital transformation develops, agile, group-based work is replacing old corporate structures. And with tech-enabled mobility ushering in distributed work, people increasingly go to the office to collaborate.

At the same time, ballooning real estate costs mean space comes at an unprecedented premium. Companies know they need to adapt to contemporary work patterns, but few are equipped with the insight and information to do so efficiently.

The empty office conundrum

While workers across the world scramble for meeting space, 40% percent of global corporate real estate sits empty. This underutilization is due in part to the rapidly changing way we work in offices. It’s also a result of inefficient and inexact approaches to workplace strategy.  

There is no universal standard when it comes to figuring out how space is used, and how offices should be designed. Approaches vary vastly across industries, with each employing different metrics and responding to trends. Calculating office space use is typically not an exact science—it involves a multidisciplinary team, and a lot of guesswork.

Then there’s the human factor. “If there’s a shortage of food, people want to hoard it. Conference rooms are the same way,” Mark Schliemann, vice president of technical operations at Moz told the Wall Street Journal. “If people see conference space as valuable and they need it, they do whatever it takes to get it.”

Focusing on employee behavior change, however, is not necessarily the solution. “In the workplace, we sometimes think we need a change management program so we can make employees use our building the way the architect designed,” said JLL’s Global Practice Lead, Darlene Pope, speaking at RealComm IBcon conference.  “What we really need is change management for decision-makers to design space that fits with how employees are actually using it.”

What we really need is change management for decision-makers to design space that fits with how employees are actually using it.

– JLL’s Global Practice Lead, Darlene Pope

Better than your best guess

Knowing how space is actually used is key to developing an effective workplace strategy. Instead of relying on calculations based on estimates, businesses today can harness the power of new technology to revolutionize their approach to office design.

Armed with historical and real-time data, workplace strategists can accurately analyze how much—and importantly, what kind of—space their workforce needs. Plus, employees can see how busy a meeting room or lunch area is at any given moment, without leaving their desk.

As a result, companies are able to extract optimal value from their real estate, and increased productivity from their staff. Catering to the real and changing needs of office users also enhances employee experience, an important factor in attracting and retaining talent.   

As real estate firms morph into tech companies and businesses find a way to control property costs without dampening productivity, workers everywhere can finally relax, safe in the knowledge there’s a suitable space available whenever they need it.

Andrew Farah, CEO of Density, hosted a panel at WorkTech SF 2018. The discussion revolved around corporate real estate trends, how utilization data informs the physical office, and what the panelists hope to see in the future of the workplace.

Andrew was joined by Omar Ramirez, Senior Program Manager, Workplace R&D and Projects North America at Atlassian, Cristal Ortiz, Data & Engineering Program Manager at LinkedIn, and Tracy Wymer, VP Strategy Planning and Media at Knoll.

Hear from industry leaders on the role of data in shaping the future of work.