Hybrid work is happening, there’s no question about it.

But what remains a factor of uncertainty for many businesses is what a hybrid work model really looks like, and what the best approaches are for transition into one. Adding further complication, there’s no definitive consensus regarding what hybrid practices are most successful.

Not all hybrid work models looks the same

According to PwC, when executives were asked how much time employees should spend in the office to maintain company culture, some said as many as 5 days per week, while others as few as 1 to 3 a month. In that same study, when asked to look back at the transition to remote work during the pandemic, over 83% of employers felt it was very successful, while only 71% of employees agreed.

There are disparities between what people envision and understand hybrid work to be. And it makes sense. For the most part hybrid work is new, and it requires reimagining long-standing protocols that are difficult to change. Moreover, what makes hybrid work desirable and effective is its ability to reflect the individual needs of each organization, the kind of work they do, and what their employees prefer.

Meaning that the right model of hybrid work will look different from one business to the next.

At the same time, much of the data that will eventually detail the successes and tribulations of the hybrid movement is still being created. That means the data we do have has incredible value.

See how other workplace leaders manage ‘hybrid’

In order for you to determine and design their own vision of a hybrid model (and make plans for a frictionless transition into it), they need to know what is already being tried. Because this mass-scale, global transition to hybrid work is an unprecedented shift, there are many variables and details surrounding it that remain unknown. But what we do have is a common goal, and by learning from others, you can create a framework to understand what hybrid work will be like for you.  

With that idea in mind, we’re surveying workplace leaders to better understand how different people are approaching hybrid work — and to help you see how your hybrid strategy compares to others.

Among the questions in our quiz are:

1. What tools for communication and collaboration are most useful
2. How unassigned seating works in your offices
3. To what extent did you enlist the input of your employees in your hybrid strategy

To see how others answered these questions, and to learn what might make hybrid work most effective in your office, take the quiz here.

At Density, we’re focused on measuring three things in workplaces: buildings, spaces, and employee experience.

Since its launch this year, our Open Area sensor has created a novel dataset about the built world. It has inspired us to re-imagine what’s possible. Today, we’d like to introduce one of our newest features, Heatmaps.

San Francisco — Bryant St

We recently moved into a new office in San Francisco. The space has a beautiful view of the bay. Naturally, its layout is a mix of conference rooms, workstations, phone booths, and common space. We have a hybrid model where all of our spaces are unassigned.

Density’s newest feature, Heatmaps, is unearthing the story behind our space — how we vote with our feet and where we linger, collide, wander, and focus.

On October 14th, 2021, a product team had a full day offsite. Most of their day was in a large, central conference room.

Unintentional Behavior

Let’s zoom in and scan back and forth over the lunch period. We’re using Heatmaps’ native timeline function. It’s obvious this room was used for more than just meeting. From the data below, we can infer that they worked through lunch. Likely eating at the conference room table. How a team uses a space can’t be incorrect but it may be unintentional. What could have been done to improve their experience?

The Northwest Wall

Before jumping to a solution, let’s look at the rest of the day. Open Area and Heatmaps are anonymous at source. We’ve made it impossible to determine who a person is. However, Density generates remarkably precise data about movement.

In our team’s offsite story, they keep lingering near the northwest wall. Why? Well, they’re using a whiteboard. Is there anything else we can learn before we conclude?

Ripple Effects

It’s useful to think about physical space as an organism. Everything as interconnected. Behavior in one part of a floor affects behavior elsewhere. Now, we can measure the ripple effects. When our offsite team booked the large conference room for the day, the rest of the floor migrated to the remaining available spaces for work.

The small conference room (top-left) was used for 5 hours and the only desk occupied for a meaningful part of the day was Desk 6 (bottom-right). It was used for 6 hours. Kitchen, phone booths, and common areas has sporadic use. Meetings were the primary function of the day.

Zooming Out

If we look at aggregate utilization over the week, it’s clear the offsite was held over two days, most individual spaces were used less than an hour per day, and dedicated collaboration space (conference rooms) were in high demand.

Heatmaps can help us look for patterns. In the near future, Density will begin proactively drawing connections between similar spaces to make this type of discovery turnkey.

Conclusions

The offsite team would probably be more productive in a larger, multi-purpose space. One that supports the type of work they’re trying to do. One that supports long duration seating, a separate area for food and drink throughout the day, and a central place for whiteboarding, presentations, and debate.

The best part is that we’d get to see how this changed behavior.

Feature Availability

Heatmaps is available now for all Density customers who have deployed Open Area. Learn more about heatmaps here. You can schedule a live demo here.

Personal note

Turns out I like to pace when I take calls.

— Andrew Farah, Density CEO

Space has taken on a new meaning in the corporate world. Time is increasingly flexible. Reality once revolved around cubicle swamps, assigned seating, and an apparent aversion to remote working.

Not so anymore.

“The way people work and the way we design our spaces is going to change. It had already started,” says Larry Charlip, Vice President of Facilities Management and Corporate Real Estate for Take-Two Interactive. “For the last five years, Take-Two has been developing our space more from a hospitality standpoint than a traditional office standpoint. And I think you’re going to continue to see that.”

Business owners are increasingly seeking out architects in the hospitality sphere to design their working environments. Creating different types of space is now emphasized over cramming as many workstations as possible into the square footage.

We were left wondering about the practicalities involved in a hospitality-driven approach to company culture and workspaces.

To fill us in on the perspectives of a hospitality architect, we caught up with David Shove-Brown at //3877.

What is hospitality design?

From his hatred for the term ‘cubicle’ to his scorn for the tendency to stack workers against each other and encourage a heads-down approach to business, David is immediately a breath of fresh air where discussions of architecture are concerned.

“Hospitality is such a blend of different things,” he tells us. The term has come to encompass many areas; from retail to restaurants and even residential areas, different spaces are coming together in a melting pot of modern perception.

“As a term, hospitality has become this idea of comfortable design, flexible design, multipurpose design. What this means within the office space is the creation of spaces that have the flexibility for employees to enjoy a range of comfort levels.”

Giving your team comfortable seating, flexible working areas, and the ability to get up and move around is key.

A desk is no longer the circumference of a person’s workday. Relaxing on a sofa to chat with a colleague or welcome a client into a cozily arranged snug is becoming the norm. “After the last year or so, people working from home and having the comfort of making a cup of coffee, or a sandwich, or not wear pants,” David jokes, “has driven employers to ask how they can offer — pants aside — some of those factors now workers are returning to the office.”

Hot trends in office design

It’s no longer just ‘Here’s some shoddy white laminate desks, go work harder.’

With hospitality as a focus for workplaces, new trends are emerging. “We’re seeing comfortable spaces and spaces that can evolve,” David explains. “One moment it could be a lunch area, the next it could be a meeting space or a breakout space for having a quiet conversation. We’re seeing greater use of comfortable seating groups. A couple of comfortable chairs, even sofas, and lounge or coffee tables.”

More companies are embracing hygge and other comfort-driven concepts as part of their evolving cultures. But it’s not just about being comfortable. It’s about feeling alive.

“We’re seeing it in biophilic designs — plants and living things being brought into the space to infuse it with some life and to give that feeling of bringing the outside in. It’s no longer just ‘Here’s some shoddy white laminate desks, go work harder.’ We’re seeing it in comfortable materials, like warmer woods.”

Creating flexible working spaces

You can’t force flexible space on a company that doesn’t have the culture to encourage the use of such space.

While the concept of flexible space is a simple concept to grasp, its reality can be a little trickier to navigate. The culture of an organization needs to be ready for the shift. The practical needs of the business also need to be considered.

Privileged and private conversations about finance, legal issues, and human resources will not happen in a comfortable lounge shared in the lobby. For that, you need privacy. But for many other conversations, privacy isn’t an issue, formality isn’t a necessity, and comfort is an asset.

“Once you’ve established a cultural fit, it’s about what’s taking place in those spaces,” David tells us. “We recently did a financial planning office that’s a massive open communal space. It’s their kitchen and a lounge space flanked by two conference rooms. We made that open communal area the focal point because that’s where most of their activity happens.

“They all come into this kitchenette area and get around a massive table, and they have conversations. They do lunch presentations, and things like that because they want to keep it a little less formal. Yes, they have conference rooms for more private conversations or formal meetings. But for them, it’s all about what happens in these spaces. They have little breakout areas that have a sofa and a couple of chairs, for when they’re away from the larger group setting and they’re talking and collaborating between two or three people.”

Removing barriers to creative flow

“This automatically starts telling the brain, ‘Hey, we’re working together.'”

There’s a great deal to be said for team dynamics. This is hardly news. Yet, the extent to which interactions between individuals are affected by the space they’re in is often overlooked. It shouldn’t be.

We seldom consider how many barriers the traditional office environment places between people as they try to interact. Part of the hospitality-driven workspace mentality is the removal of those barriers and the placement of interactions in spaces that are more open and inviting.

David explains this concept in action: “You and I would be sitting in two comfortable chairs right now, sitting across a coffee table, drinking our tea. It’s about engagement. There wouldn’t be a desk between us. There wouldn’t be a barrier.

“When you sit across the desk from somebody, there’s automatically a barrier between you. So you sit in a corner with somebody, at the end of a table. You feel a little bit closer, but there’s probably a table leg there, and it’s a little awkward. If you switch to a couple of comfortable chairs, you can rotate and angle them the way that you want. You can have a conversation without a barrier between you.

“This automatically starts telling the brain, ‘Hey, we’re working together.’ We’re in the space together. It’s not you across the desk from me, which sends the message that we are opposed.”

The challenges of limited space

While the thought of being more open and collaborative with each other is incredibly appealing, space is still at a premium. There is often the feeling — particularly in the corporate world — that there simply ‘isn’t room’ to have open plan areas and comfortable seating.

So how do you create hospitable spaces when you have limited office space?

“You don’t have to carve out a huge space; you can carve out little niches,” David explains. “Do you simply take away an enclosed office and make that a flexible communal space? Does sacrificing that office work with the culture at work in the space? Can the community benefit more from that space than one person sitting by themselves in an 8-by-12 office all day on their own?

“It’s about the ROI you get on your space,” David tells us. “Sometimes, you have leftover spaces. You have weird little corners. In the past, somebody would stick a plant or a bookcase there. Something that just takes up space. Now we get more creative. We’ve been able to take some of those little niches and say, ‘Okay, we can fit a couple of chairs in there and maybe a little two-top table.’ It doesn’t have to be anything bigger than a couple of feet.”

Psychology — Jedi mind tricks

Having a company that is open to the hospitality mindset is essential for this type of shift.

“There’s quite a lot of psychology involved if you are looking at ways in which the brain reacts to the presence or absence of barriers or personal effects versus neutral space. I use a lot of Jedi mind tricks.”

Jedi mind tricks aside, David had some very practical insights into the way psychology and design meld.

“You have to look at what’s happening in the office and be able to say, ‘Okay, what kind of work are we doing here?’ You can get into the psychology of color; you can get into materials. You can get into, quite frankly, sound. You can get into texture and things like that, and being able to say, “How do we select materials, select finishes, select pieces that make people feel comfortable?”

The switch from cubicle swamp to hospitality-driven office

“The first step is to question, why?” David tells us. “Are you looking to switch because the staff is complaining about the atmosphere and culture because they’re pushing for change? Are you ready for that change? Or do you need to find a middle ground that still meets the practical needs of the business?”

Understanding how you utilize your space can tell you a lot about the practical needs you have. This will help you create the perfect plan for a more hospitable environment.

About David Shove-Brown

David Shove-Brown, AIA, NCARB is Partner at //3877, an Architectural, Design, Interiors + Graphics firm with offices in Washington, DC specializing in residential, commercial, restaurant and healthcare architecture + design. //3877 has completed projects throughout the United States and Europe.

As a Partner at //3877, David has expertise in residential, restaurant, and healthcare design. He loves coffee (don’t talk to him before at least 2 espresso shots in the morning), bacon cheeseburgers, good beer, but most of all, being a dad.