Key takeaways

• Millennials and Gen Z will soon make up the majority of the workforce, and they have different values from the generations before them. To attract and retain quality workers, companies have to understand what these employees want from employers.
• Three of the top concerns among the new workforce are sustainability, inclusion, and mental health in the workplace.
• Physical office space is the perfect tool to showcase your company’s ethos and differentiate it from the competition. The office serves as irrefutable evidence that your business “walks the walk” when it comes to the principles that younger generations want to see in the workplace.

Changes to the workforce 

The global workforce is in the midst of a great shift. Boomers are retiring, and the rise of millennials and Gen Z in the workplace is bringing rapid changes to companies’ recruitment and retention methods. 

Nearly 90% of human resources professionals agree that recruitment is increasingly like marketing, and the key to effective marketing is understanding your audience. 

To sell your prospects on the benefits of investing their talent in your company and staying for the long haul, you have to know what they want in an employer. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess what workers are looking for. Millennial and Gen Z employees are vocal about their values and expectations. They want to work for companies with:

• Environmentally responsible practices and sustainability initiatives. Over 80% want to see their employers commit to visible climate actions, such as banning single-use plastics in the office.
• A positive, inclusive company culture. 52% of employees aren’t happy with their company’s progress toward diversity and inclusion, and they plan to leave these jobs within two years.
• A focus on mental health. One of the top reasons millennials and Gen Zs reported leaving a job was “feeling the workplace was detrimental to their mental health.”

In its 2022 survey of millennials and Gen Z, Deloitte found that “those who are satisfied with their employers’ societal and environmental impact, and their efforts to create a diverse and inclusive culture, are more likely to want to stay with their employer for more than five years.” They also noted that two out of five workers had rejected a job because it didn’t align with their values.

If your company wants to continue hiring — and keeping — top talent, it’s essential to adapt quickly to meet the needs of these two up-and-coming generations of workers. 

The office as your secret weapon

When it comes to attracting quality job candidates and improving retention rates, companies with physical office spaces have an edge over their fully remote competitors. It’s much more difficult for a company without an office to create a cohesive, values-first work culture and establish the type of visible climate, inclusion, and well-being actions that resonate with younger workers. 

Companies with physical office spaces have an edge over their fully remote competitors.

Employers that embrace the office as the key to managing recruitment and retention have the perfect canvas on which to market their company’s ethos and create a strong employer brand statement that’s attractive to potential new hires.

The modern office is essentially a product, and it can be an important differentiator that makes your company stand out. “Look at your employees as modern-day consumers,” Mike Palladino, a member of the Strategic Partnerships team at Density, says. “Modern-day consumers expect a personalized experience to consume anything — so make sure that you’re trying to personalize [the office] to them.” 

That means aligning your office design and amenities with the expectations of the new workforce, such as sustainability, inclusion, and well-being. There are countless opportunities to turn your office space into an effective marketing tool to attract new employees and improve your retention strategy. 

How to highlight important values in the office with amenities and design

Below are several ways companies can improve talent acquisition and retention by aligning their workspaces with each of the principles that are most important to the new workforce.

Sustainability

• Office-wide initiatives: Deloitte’s survey revealed that younger generations value “highly visible climate actions…such as banning single-use plastic products.” This type of green challenge allows employees to get personally involved with the company’s efforts to be more sustainable. It creates a shared purpose and shows employees that your company is serious about its environmentally conscious ethos. 
• Automated HVAC and lighting: Typical energy consumption from heating, cooling, and lighting an office comes with a big carbon footprint. Automating your HVAC and lighting ensures you’re only using these services in areas occupied by people. It reduces overall consumption and the greenhouse gases and pollution that comes with it. In addition to earning your company sustainability points with employees, automating these utilities saves money.
• Eco-friendly materials: When replacing furniture and decor or renovating a space, use it as an opportunity to source eco-friendly materials such as bamboo flooring, organic fabrics, and furniture made from recycled materials. Choosing greener materials is kinder to the planet, enhances biophilic design, and reduces the risk of VOCs polluting the air in the office and potentially making people sick. 

Well-being

• Biophilic design: “Biophilia” means “love of life or living things.” Biophilic design celebrates life by incorporating natural elements into office design. Features such as outdoor work areas, indoor plants, plenty of natural light, and natural building materials create a built environment that reduces stress, improves focus, and promotes mental well-being. It creates an office space where workers can be happy, comfortable, and productive.
• Wellness rooms: Work stress is seemingly inescapable, but your company can help ease the impact by providing wellness rooms in the office. A wellness room is a dedicated quiet area where employees can go when they need to decompress from the hustle and bustle of the office. These areas are often designated tech-free, providing workers a haven to take a break from the barrage of notifications and the nonstop hum of electronics.
• Healthier workplace options: Sit-to-stand desks, ergonomic office furniture, healthy snacks and lunch options, and in-office yoga classes are just a few examples of ways to offer employees healthier workplace options. Introducing these amenities show employees that your company is invested in their overall health and well-being.

Inclusion

• Quiet areas: A quiet area in the office is where workers can do their focused work without pressure to interact with colleagues. This is an important feature for companies that want to be inclusive of neurodivergent employees. For workers who have trouble concentrating or being surrounded by people, a dedicated quiet area provides a space to do their best work.
• Gender-neutral bathrooms: Choosing the “right” bathroom has become a political issue and creates a lot of stress for trans and nonbinary workers. Gender-inclusive bathrooms remove the pressure of choosing, and it protects employees from uncomfortable reactions from colleagues. 
• Use the LLI model: “Listen, learn, implement” is a model created by Chiara Smith, a racial health equity expert, to help organizations create safe, inclusive spaces for BIPOC workers. “We must listen to the experiences of those most impacted, learn from the mistakes of the past, and implement as suggested by those most impacted,” Chiara explains. Adopting the LLI model can help improve your company’s retention by building a workplace where everyone is comfortable being themselves.

How to make the most of your office to attract and retain talent

Now that you understand what modern workers want from employers and how your office represents your brand, the next step is to recognize how your space is currently performing. This can help you discover valuable opportunities to showcase your company’s ethos in ways that will attract job seekers and inspire long-term commitment to your business. 

Employee feedback and utilization data are two excellent tools for uncovering your office’s full potential. What’s working for your team? What areas do they feel need improvement? How are they naturally using space for informal chats and socializing? Which areas of the office are underutilized? Collecting this type of information gives you an overview of how your space is performing and identifies opportunities for improvement. 

Example of how to use feedback and utilization to optimize the office

Let’s say your employee survey reveals that workers find the office environment noisy, distracting, and stressful. Your workplace team recognizes this as an opportunity to support one of your employees’ top priorities — better mental health in the workplace. 

They want to introduce biophilic design elements such as greenery throughout the office space, and they identify a wellness room as an essential amenity for employee well-being. But how do you find the right space to create a wellness room?

While offices rarely have empty rooms with no dedicated purpose, they often have areas that aren’t performing well. Your building utilization data reveals several rooms in the office that see little action, so your team can select the best one to repurpose into a wellness space. 

Once the new wellness room is in place, you can monitor its success by seeing how often employees use the space and what they have to say about it. Changes like this are all about improving recruitment and retention, and it’s hard to overstate the positive impact that this type of proactive change has on employees.

A prime opportunity 

The landscapes of talent acquisition and employee retention are in a state of flux as new generations transition into the workforce. These workers have different values and priorities that employers must recognize and accommodate to land quality job candidates and reduce expensive turnover. The physical office space offers a prime opportunity to demonstrate to younger workers that your company understands their needs and can adapt to meet them.

Many employees are reluctant to return to the office, at least full-time. A recent survey found that 86% of white-collar workers want to work from home at least two days per week. 

Companies like Twitter, Shopify, Spotify, Salesforce, and many others are allowing their employees to work remotely indefinitely. Many others are embracing a hybrid approach, with more than half of Fortune 500 CEOs saying that two to three days in the office per week is ideal for knowledge workers.   

While working in pajamas may be more comfortable—and even, for some people, more productive—there is much value in coming to the office. But how are companies getting their people back to the workplace?

Below we discuss the challenges of remote working and share five ways companies can ease the return to office by addressing employees’ priorities and wellbeing.

The challenges of working remotely

For all the freedom working remotely offers, it’s not without its headaches and limitations.

Here are some of the challenges of remote work:

• Data from Microsoft shows that remote employees often form insular “clusters” with direct team members while interactions with other colleagues suffer. This results in info silos, groupthink, and low innovation. 
• Google’s 2021 staff survey found that remote work negatively impacts well-being, as employees find it more difficult to detach from work after hours. 
• Many remote workers report that they’ve been more distracted than ever. Reasons include a lack of dedicated workspace, difficulty maintaining a routine, and chores (and children!) competing for attention.
• Collaboration suffers without in-person interactions, which are often less formal and more engaging, giving rise to better ideas.
• Remote work simply doesn’t offer the same social (and networking) element as working in an office. Employees crave face-to-face interactions and many suffer from “Zoom fatigue”.
• Remote workers have less direct access to leadership and may miss out on training and other career development opportunities. Remote workers also may be more likely to be passed up for promotion compared to their on-site colleagues. 

How companies can get employees back to the office

Make their lives easier

A recent employee retention report found that work-life balance is the top factor influencing whether employees remain in their current job. 

Anything you can do to make it easier for employees to manage the pressures of day-to-day life will make it a bit easier for them to return to office life.

Here are a few ideas:

• Offering childcare solutions, whether it’s on-site daycare or a childcare subsidy. An estimated 50 million workers (a third of the U.S. workforce) have a child under the age of 14 in their household, and a shortage of affordable daycare is a growing barrier, particularly for women. 
• 79% of employees say the lack of a daily commute is the best part of remote work. Finding ways to improve the commute, like offering free parking, subsidizing gas and/or public transit costs, organizing company carpools or shuttles, or giving employees podcast or audiobook subscriptions.   
• Introducing more flexible and inclusive leave policies that make provision for childcare, family emergencies, mental health, medical needs, and other personal priorities.
• Providing in-office perks like catered meals and snacks, on-site gym facilities, laundry and dry-cleaning services, and other ways to help employees check items off their to-do lists. Playstation saw a 140% increase in office attendance when they brought hot food back to the office.
• Installing on-site package delivery lockers that mean employees don’t need to worry about package theft if they’re not home to receive them. 

Create appealing work environments

Find ways to make the office a more appealing place in which to work and socialize.

Some tips:

• Create thoughtfully-designed workspaces that prioritize collaboration, socialization, and professional growth, as well as quiet spaces that allow employees to do “deep work” (aka “me” and “we” spaces)
• Introducing spaces that allow employees to refuel (nap, meditate, do yoga, work out, or whatever they did to recharge at home) can also help to make the office more appealing.
• Providing private spaces for nursing mothers to pump can significantly ease their return to the office.
• If possible, create outdoor workspaces. Working outdoors offers numerous benefits including increased creativity and morale, plus it allows covid-wary employees to feel safer when collaborating face-to-face. Once a champion of open-plan offices, Google is reportedly planning to introduce outdoor tents, “robotic balloon walls”, and team pods to facilitate safer workspaces
• Consider improving your office space’s ventilation and introducing air filters to your air conditioning/HVAC system. If you don’t have air conditioning already, get it. As summers get hotter, this in itself can be a way to entice employees into the office. 

Provide social opportunities

One of the crucial aspects of the physical workspace is the opportunity for social interaction it provides. Virtual “watercoolers” are no match for spontaneous in-person conversations, and many employees have missed these opportunities for connection and cultivating social capital. 

Some ways you could promote socialization include:

• Offer ways for employees to connect with others, such as shared meals, games and contests, birthday celebrations, in-person happy hours, and company milestone celebrations. 
• Host networking events like Meetups or workshops for people in your industry. You could invite experts to lead discussions on topics that your employees are interested in. 
• Consider launching a volunteering program or project for a cause your employees feel passionate about and setting aside several paid hours per month to allow them to participate. 
• Start a book club to encourage learning and discussion, letting employees take turns selecting the book. 

Emphasize professional development opportunities

Two-thirds of millennial women aged 25–40 believe that not returning to the office could cost them career growth opportunities. It stands to reason that out-of-sight employees can easily be “out-of-mind” employees. Giving employees opportunities to advance their professional growth and make a favorable impression on management can be a compelling way to lure them into the office.

Here are a few ideas:

• Develop training and professional development opportunities that emphasize in-person participation. 93% of employees say they’d be likely to stay longer at a company that invests in their career. 
• Launch an internal mentorship program that encourages regular face-to-face meetings.
• Give employees opportunities to spend time with management over coffee or lunch in small groups or one-on-one.
• Encourage employees to present talks about topics they’re learning about or deliver pitches about ideas they have that could help the company grow. This is a great way to get employees to feel engaged and excited about the work and help driven employees get noticed. 

Make work outcomes-based 

9 out of 10 employees want flexibility in terms of location and work hours. If they had to choose, 54% would prefer setting their own hours and 40% would choose flexibility in location. 

One way to offer employees greater flexibility is by adopting an outcomes-based model which places emphasis on the results instead of the number of hours employees spent sitting at their desks. 

• Set clear goals and metrics and hard deadlines but allow employees to determine how (and when) they’ll deliver the outcomes. 
• Set specific core hours and days for meetings and in-person collaboration and give employees the flexibility to independently choose how, when, and where to get the work done.
• Provide employees with the tools they need to work as efficiently as possible, so they don’t need to spend more time than absolutely necessary on manual admin. Workflow automation tools can be a game-changer. 

Preparing for the future of work

Getting employees back into the office is sure to be a challenge, but challenges don’t have to be impossibilities. Hear how the Workplace team at PagerDuty is redefining the workplace for its people — and the planet. 

The workplace has been in a state of flux since 2020. As companies try to find a new equilibrium for the office, many are struggling with how to forecast space requirements and optimize workspaces around new modes of working. Updating the office for this new era of work is made even more challenging by costly employee turnover and increased competition for talent. 

Occupancy planning is the indispensable tool you need to encourage productivity, engagement, and retention among employees while reducing costs and staying adaptable to future needs. It gives you a deep understanding of your assets, utilization data, employee sentiment, and expenses. Armed with this information, you can begin making data-backed decisions and testing their effectiveness until you develop a thriving modern work environment. 

What is occupancy planning?

Occupancy planning is the practice of analyzing how your space is being used and making adjustments to maximize current and future utilization. It’s an effective strategy to improve any space, from a single office to an entire corporate real estate portfolio.

Specific occupancy planning tactics will vary depending on your company’s unique needs. However, it often includes reconfiguring office floor plans for improved efficiency, updating the ratio of workspaces to employees to account for hybrid work, providing amenities and incentives to draw workers back to the office, monitoring maintenance needs, and projecting future space requirements. 

The 5 main principles of occupancy planning

While occupancy planning is a robust system for space optimization, it can be broken down into five core principles.

1. Understanding expenses and assets

To make good decisions as an occupancy planner, you have to know what you’re working with. A comprehensive audit of your office assets and expenses will establish this. You’ll want to identify things like:

• What are the overhead costs for the building? 
• How many employees do you have? Are they all full-time, in-office employees, or are some hybrid?
• What’s the total amount of usable square footage? 
• How many conference rooms and dedicated desks do you have? 
• At what stage of the life cycle are assets such as laptops, printers, and furniture? When will they need to be replaced?

These details will help you identify benchmarks for your occupancy planning, anticipate upcoming maintenance and replacement costs, and project how much square footage is needed for future hires.

2. Using real-time and historical data 

Real-time data gives you a current headcount and tells you where people are in the building right now, and historical data shows utilization trends over time. The combination of these two data sets is invaluable for smart space planning. 

Real-time data is important for making immediate changes, such as ensuring a room doesn’t exceed its maximum capacity. It’s also essential if you plan to use software for wayfinding or workspace reservations. 

Historical data is key for future planning. For example, do you need to add square footage to accommodate new hires, or does your average peak utilization rate leave enough room to integrate new employees without expanding? Looking at your past trends can clarify these questions. 

3. Soliciting feedback from employees

Space management doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It directly impacts the people using the environment, and it’s essential to understand their opinions. If you optimize your space with only cost-cutting and efficiency in mind, you risk creating a work environment that employees don’t want to be in and that doesn’t allow them to do their best work. 

You can collect employee feedback easily through workplace experience surveys. Surveying employees before you begin any occupancy planning strategies will provide a baseline you can use to measure whether future changes have had a positive or negative impact. These surveys can also identify the areas of the workplace that need the most attention. 

4. Optimizing space utilization 

This principle of occupancy planning focuses on the actions you take to improve the performance of the work environment. Space planning revolves around change and measurement. Whether you introduce a catered Taco Tuesday to boost low utilization rates or add office pods to help employees do their focused work, the steps you take to improve the work environment are a critical aspect of occupancy planning.

Reducing costs (reducing capital investments and ensuring space isn’t wasted)

Capital investments are one of the top expenses for most businesses, so it’s important to get good value from your physical office space. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. 

“In the US, there are 10.9 billion square feet of leased or owned corporate office space, and 41% of that is vacant but paid for, meaning about a trillion dollars worth of space is essentially sitting there with nobody in it,” says Andrew Farah, co-founder and CEO of Density.

Not only is this underutilized space paid for, in terms of leases, but companies also waste money on utilities. Approximately $3.36 billion is spent annually on electricity to power, heat, and cool spaces that aren’t used. 

Occupancy planning helps companies reduce these unnecessary costs by increasing the utilization of these spaces or determining where they can safely downsize their capital investments without impacting day-to-day operations. 

Why does your office need occupancy planning? 

• Cost savings: Occupancy planning can show you how to repurpose underutilized space and improve resource allocation to ensure you’re getting value for your money and avoid unnecessary new expenses. Once you’ve evaluated your assets, expenses, and occupancy data, you may find that you can downsize to a smaller office space without sacrificing comfort or productivity. 
• Improved employee experience: A better workplace strategy means happier employees and better retention. Considering the high costs associated with recruitment and onboarding, it’s wise to maintain a positive workplace experience so employees feel comfortable and supported.
• Sustainability: Sustainability is not just a buzzword; it’s a top concern among millennial and Gen Z workers. These two generations will soon make up the majority of the workforce, and 65% of workplace leaders report they’re already feeling pressure from employees to adopt more sustainable initiatives. Occupancy planning can improve your carbon footprint by identifying when you can downsize or repurpose square footage and ensuring utilities aren’t wasted on unused spaces. 

How to improve your occupancy planning in 4 steps

Optimization is one of the primary goals of occupancy planning, but it’s important to apply that to your facilities management process, too. Below are four ways you can enhance your occupancy planning for better results.

1. Invest in a system to track space utilization 

Occupancy planning is built on utilization data. If you don’t know how people are using your space, you can’t make informed decisions about how to improve it. 

Most modern offices use technology such as occupancy sensors to track utilization. There are many clear benefits of choosing utilization technology over traditional, observation-based tracking:

• Provides real-time data for the entire office or building
• Tracks trends over time
• Can monitor offices across a portfolio
• More accurate than manual methods
• Automates the process
• Collects unbiased data
• Provides visual data that’s easy to understand at a glance

The tracking method you choose to deploy will depend on your budget and space planning goals. A manual option can work for organizations with tight budgets and small office spaces. For larger operations and those that want to stay competitive in today’s world of work, utilization technology is a must.

Read our buyer's guide for workplace analytics tech here. 

2. Identify your target metrics and KPIs

Metrics and KPIs are important tools to check the overall state of your occupancy planning and track progress toward specific goals. Common metrics for space planning include:

• Peak occupancy identifies when your space is busiest. You can break this down by building, floor, or room. 
• Average utilization shows the typical usage of your office. High average utilization translates to more value from that space.
• High-traffic areas are those that see the most action throughout the day. Pinpointing these enables you to predict inventory and cleaning needs.
• Meeting room utilization shows how frequently employees use meeting areas and for how long. This data shows whether the number of meeting spaces is sufficient to meet demand.

Unlike metrics, KPIs aren’t universal. These are specific to your organization’s utilization and workplace experience goals. For example, if your meeting room utilization is only 30%, you can set a KPI to increase it by 10% within three months. Your team will review utilization data and employee feedback to determine the necessary changes to reach this goal.

Using a combination of metrics and KPIs will keep you informed about workplace performance and provide clear areas to measure and improve. 

3. Take a human-centric approach

While reducing costs is always a goal of occupancy planning, it’s also critical to take a step back from the numbers and consider the people who use the space. 

How can you optimize occupancy planning while providing a good experience?

Simply keeping the human aspect in mind will go a long way toward ensuring your utilization strategies are employee-friendly. It’s tempting to want to maximize your space utilization by squeezing as much occupancy as you can out of each square foot, but in practice that translates to employees who are cramped, less productive, and likely looking for a new job.

You can take the human-centric approach a step further by always balancing the data provided by utilization technology with the feedback you get from employees. Data provides an unbiased look at the utilization of your space, and feedback gives context to the numbers. Both are needed to create a positive, efficient workplace.

4. Workflow automation for repetitive tasks

There’s an enormous number of tasks involved with operating an office, but thankfully, many of these tasks can be automated. To make the most of occupancy planning, look for any repetitive tasks that can be done with technology. 

Here are just a few examples of automations that can benefit your space management services:

• Provide software for employees to make their own room or desk reservations.
• Use sensors to automatically turn off lights in unoccupied rooms.
• Schedule recurring appointments for routine maintenance of equipment or building needs such as pest control.
• Use software to assign tasks to your team, track work orders, and store important documents such as vendor contracts.
• Install programmable thermostats to automatically adjust temperatures as needed throughout the day.

The more tasks you can automate, the more time you and your team can spend on higher-priority work such as reviewing employee feedback and brainstorming new ways to improve workplace utilization and experience.

Make occupancy planning a priority

Office space is expensive. Beyond the upfront cost of the lease, there are numerous operating costs including utilities, maintenance, and supplies. Optimizing office utilization is critical to reducing expenses and ensuring your organization is getting value from this investment. 

The office can also be a strategic advantage for successful recruitment, higher retention, and better employee performance. Occupancy planning can help you cut costs while creating a positive, productive work environment that can give your organization an edge over the competition.

Workplace leaders are recognizing the value of putting employees first and prioritizing a healthy work environment.

Creating an office space that is both practically functional and physically inviting makes the workplace a positive space to be in. The result is an improved employee experience that supports improved job satisfaction, retention, team morale, and productivity. 

Hybrid schedules have created new requirements for what people need from their workspaces. For some, the office is a place that can facilitate collaboration, while others need privacy and space for focused individual work. To create the best employee experience, offices need to have spaces that can accommodate each of those unique needs. But finding the right mix can be challenging.

When you consider hybrid schedules may change what is needed on a daily basis, that balance becomes even harder to perfect. So how much of each is ideal, and what kinds of office designs can strike the right combination of “me” and “we” space?

Employee needs define their workplace experience 

In a general sense, employee experience in the office is exactly what it sounds like: a process of gauging how a work environment affects the satisfaction and productivity of those working in it. More specifically, it means understanding the individual requirements of each team and employee so the workspace can be optimized around current needs.

While the specifics of those needs will be unique for each person, they can be broadly thought of in terms of how an employee interacts with coworkers, technology, and space. The experience someone has is shaped by the combination of these elements. A seamless integration boosts mental health, work relationships, and employee satisfaction. The goal for a facility manager should be designing workspaces that are ripe for creating positivity in these interactions.

This is often done by gathering space utilization data from occupancy sensors that show what types of spaces are being frequently used (and which are not). Detailed use metrics let employees vote with their feet, revealing exactly what kind of space they need, what technology they use, and when they need to use it.

Technology

If data for a floor with collaborative work areas reveals one conference room is often at capacity while the rest are underutilized, a lot can be learned about what employees need to collaborate. Maybe the high-occupancy room has interactive whiteboards or larger monitors. Maybe it has more wireless and communication tech. Knowing what makes a space valuable to employees teaches you how to improve their office experience. This information can also be applied to underutilized areas, making more spaces that meet the specific needs of employees while optimizing space management, floor plans, and corporate real estate.

Space

Workplace utilization data can also determine what types of spaces are most conducive to the work employees need to accomplish—a critical component for designing the right blend of “me” and “we” areas. 

For example, if a floor with phone booths is often underutilized while a floor with conference rooms is always full, the need for more coworking space is clear.

Consider the above example in an office with a single open floor plan. Using real-time data of the existing space will show which days and times see more collaborative work and which are being used for individual heads-down concentration at any given time. Seeing how that data changes over a period of time shows utilization rate trends. From there, adjusting neighborhood square footage and allocation is simple, or adopting flexible designs (like desks with moveable dividers that can quickly convert from solitary to collaborative spaces on a given day) becomes a data-backed decision.

The importance of having the right space for the right job 

Knowing that both shared spaces and solitary work areas are necessary, and even understanding how much of each a specific team requires, is not enough to maximize your employee experience strategy. 

That’s because not all spaces function the same. As workplace leaders consider how to make a better workplace environment, they must understand the value that specific designs offer and how they can work together to create a comprehensive experience.  

The power of collaborative space 

People collaborate in a variety of ways, and spaces need to reflect that. Additionally, the switch to hybrid work has created a new need for face-to-face workplace interactions. 

Conference rooms are a great place to start. For many teams, working from home has diminished the opportunity for meetings, and they are eager to come back to offices that support productive teamwork. Revamping and refining conference rooms is an excellent way to improve the office experience for employees who seek collaboration. That can mean updating furniture, room size, decor, and tech, so that every meeting room delivers a functional and inspirational space to work in. 

But not all coworking takes place in conference rooms, and beneficial employee interactions are often informal and spontaneous. This is one of the reasons why so many Big Tech companies invest in making their campuses inviting—when people spend more time together in the office, there are more opportunities for innovation. 

Apple is a perfect example of a company that believes inspirational spaces lead to ingenuity, and a core design of their Apple Park is integration and interaction. But you don’t have to be a tech giant to design meeting spaces that promote engagement. Realizing that collaboration can happen anywhere, office designs that feature breakout spaces, nooks with soft seating, and even well-stocked and comfortable break rooms, encourage the kind of employee interaction that might just lead to the next company breakthrough. 

A place to concentrate 

There will always be a need for individual work space where people can make sales calls, crunch data, or write a report. And these focus-oriented tasks require a quiet place without distraction.

The kinds of space people need for uninterrupted work also varies, all of which come down to privacy. For example, some employees need visual privacy (where they can focus without being seen or seeing others), while others will prefer audio privacy (quiet areas where they will be able to focus in silence). Having a strategic mix of closed work options will satisfy the diverse privacy needs different employees have. That can mean cubicles for people with visual preferences and soundproof pods for those that are audio inclined (or disinclined). 

In addition to private spaces where heads-down work can be accomplished, “me” areas are also an important way for people to step away from the demands of a busy office. Research shows that taking small microbreaks during the day increases concentration, reduces stress, and improves productivity. Providing comfortable and separate areas where employees can clear their heads, stretch, and refocus, can be an important factor in workplace experience. 

The impact of balance 

To truly create the best workplace strategy for optimum employee experience, it’s critical to remember that the right mix in space planning is often not a hard divide, but a flexible blend. 

As projects develop, the way employees work on them will change. And when it comes to being creative and productive, people need to be able to both collaborate and work alone. They might meet to build ideas, and then choose to develop them while doing solitary work. 

Having spaces where employees can choose what kind of work they want to do both facilitates fluctuating needs and builds a working environment of trust that develops a positive office culture. Moreover, studies show that when employees feel empowered and trusted to complete their work as they see fit, overall productivity and employee happiness increases. 

It’s also possible that future offices will not only have both collaborative and solitary areas, but will find ways of allowing real-time and frictionless changes between them. This type of on-demand balance highlights the trend in sensitivity toward multiple types of work, while recognizing the benefit of providing fine-tuned spaces that can change with the varying needs of employees. 

Ultimately, the right blend of meeting spaces and closed work areas will be based on team-specific requirements that are understood through comprehensive space utilization metrics. While the ideal mix will vary from office to office, employee to employee, and even throughout a single day, what it will always have in common is positive workplace experience. 

The workplace has seen more evolution since 2020 than it has for decades. 

The demand for flexible work environments is higher than ever before, and people no longer come into the office because they have to. They come for a specific purpose — and that purpose can vary from day to day and person to person.

Employees want offices that support the type of work they need to do, whether that’s agile, collaborative, or focused. 

“[An employee’s] agenda is fluctuating during the day. I can have a need for focused time in the morning, then I want to be social, then I want to go to a training, and all of this can be at hand in an office that has a proper function in different areas,” Nellie Hayat, Workplace Innovation Lead at Density, says.

Redesigning your office to accommodate multiple work styles may seem overwhelming — perhaps even impossible — but that’s not the case. You just need to know how your space is used. 

A modern office redesign that focuses on dynamic functionality and comfort rewards you with increased productivity and better employee engagement, not to mention the potential for money-saving discoveries about how much square footage you actually need. 

What are the most common work styles?

Three of the most common work styles are agile or activity-based, collaborative, and focused. Each type of work comes with its own office design needs.

Agile/activity-based work

An agile workplace is an environment designed around flexibility. Unlike a traditional office — with assigned desks and stations — an agile workplace is based around activity. It encourages people to move freely through the workplace, making use of the spaces that best fit their needs for the type of work they are doing. 

Collaborative work

Collaborative work is about people working together. It brings a group of people together — regardless of their corporate hierarchy — to work on a project that helps achieve the team’s goals. It’s a productive way to bring people together to accomplish something and feel included. Collaborative workplaces tend to be more effective, have higher retention, and are often more profitable.

Focused work

Focused work involves dedicated head-down time to complete a specific task. It is performed solo, typically focused on a specific need, and is free from distraction. Focused work is when deep work is often completed. Cal Newport coined the term deep work to mean distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. 

Workplace designs

Each type of work requires a different design to be effective. Here are ideas on how to design workspaces that complement the most common work styles. 

Agile work requires dynamic office designs

Agile work focuses on a project’s end result rather than the method used to get there. This empowers employees or teams to determine where, when, and how they’ll complete their work. Teams that take an agile approach need a variety of workspace options, so reconfigurable furniture and floor plans are essential. 

Twilio has taken this approach with its offices.

“We’re reallocating those spaces as hackable spaces, scrum spaces. We’re calling them dynamic spaces, where furniture is reconfigurable. It’s no longer one-size-fits-all. It allows more variety to meet people where they are, to work how they work,” says Devorah Rosner, Senior Manager of Global Workplace Operations.

By default, an agile office will include spaces for the two other common types of work — collaborative and focused. The critical difference for agile design is that there are no hard rules about how workers use an area. Employees should feel comfortable making dynamic changes to any available office areas to make them suit their needs at the moment. 

Dynamic office furniture, such as standing desk converters and easy-to-move pieces, are great options for an agile office design.

2. Collaborative work benefits from a mix of formal and informal meeting areas

Collaborative work can be formal (presentations and detailed project planning) or informal (brainstorming sessions and casual collisions). For informal collaboration workspaces, think soft seating in casual groupings. An open area that doesn’t see much through-traffic is a great spot to set up an informal meeting space. 

Formal collaborations are best held in an enclosed space to ensure there aren’t any distractions. They also benefit from technology-enabled assets such as smart whiteboards and video conferencing software. A structured meeting room with the right technologies helps employees improve focus and productivity.

It’s important to have multiple spaces that support both types of collaboration to reduce or eliminate instances where a team is left with an inappropriate space because the others are in use. When the collaborative space doesn’t match the type of work employees need to do, it can negatively affect the team’s performance. 

If you have only one informal meeting area and it’s occupied, a small team of three will be stuck having what should be an intimate meeting in a space that doesn’t encourage relaxed discussions or brainstorming. Or, they’ll have to postpone their meeting and find another time when everyone can meet, disrupting the rest of the day’s schedule and creating unnecessary frustration.

The final section of the article covers how to determine the number of each type of space you need.

3. Focused work calls for quiet areas and reservable workstations

Pre-pandemic offices were largely designed around focused work. Employees had dedicated desks where they spent most of the workday. Since the return to work, there’s been a shift in the industry mindset, and the office is now primarily a place for collaboration and socialization. 

Because employees were productive while working from home during mandatory lockdowns, many workplace leaders assume that employees will continue to do their focused work from home. But for some employees, working from home was not ideal, and while they made it work when they had to, it’s not a sustainable option for them.   

“There are individuals out there that want to do their best work but don’t have the luxury of working from home. So, that’s just like table stakes; you have to have some sort of optionality for employees to feel like they can do their best work in an office setting…where they can do their focused work,” says Mike Palladino, a strategic partnerships expert at Density.

Sameer Pangrekar, director of global workplace strategy at Twitter, agrees. “I think a lot of people talk about the office just being for collaboration and socialization, and I think that’s missing a big part of the picture if you inadvertently just assume that home is best for focused [work]. I think there’s a landscape of what people need,” he says.

Whether employees can’t work from home or prefer not to, they should have a space in the office available when they need it. If your office is more focused on collaboration and has limited space for independent work, consider providing employees with coworking passes to access a private workstation from a third-party site. 

If you have the space, you can help employees by carving out private or semi-private rooms where they can put their heads down and get to work without distractions. These can be office pods, phone booths, or reservable workstations placed in a quiet area of the office.

How much of each space type do you need in your workplace?

The major challenge with designing offices that support these three common work styles is knowing how many of each type of space you need. It’s tempting to want to jump right in with an office redesign, but this can lead to expensive mistakes and multiple disruptive iterations that prevent employees from settling into the office environment. 

You have a much better chance of getting these changes right on the first try if you collect information about how employees currently use the space. There are two main ways to do this:

1. Compile the necessary data about traffic patterns, office hot spots, and occupancy rates through manual observation or
2. By using automated technology such as occupancy sensors  

Manual observations can get you an educated guess about how many workstations you need or what day has the highest occupancy rate, but it opens the door for errors. There’s the inherent human bias to account for as well as other limitations, such as only being able to monitor a few areas at a time. 

The data collected from human observation is a guesstimate. It can get you started in the right direction, but you’ll likely need a time-consuming (and potentially expensive) trial-and-error process to reach the perfect design balance.

With sensor technology, you can monitor every area of your building in real-time. The data is unbiased and shows exactly how people vote with their feet for the spaces they prefer. Utilization data can uncover a wealth of details about your office that can inform how you redesign the space. 

Let’s say your sensor data shows that employees vastly prefer the soft seating areas to the ones with traditional office chairs. This provides an opportunity to add more soft seating throughout the space to improve employees’ comfort levels. 

Sensor data can also help you answer questions like these:

• Which days have the lowest occupancy rates? You can help increase employee presence on those days by offering a perk such as a catered “Taco Tuesday” lunch. 
• How many workstations does your office really need? You may be able to get rid of several desks to open up the space for a more agile design.
• How many people are typically in a conference room at one time? You may find you can repurpose a few conference rooms, or alternately, that you need to expand conference room capacity to accommodate everyone more comfortably. 
• Did someone reserve a conference room or desk station and then not use it? You can check this in real-time and release the hold to allow other employees access.
• Are the changes you made having an impact on utilization? What new trends are emerging? After you start making changes to the office, occupancy data can help you A/B test the space to find out which changes give the best results.

Data-backed office design decisions reduce the chances of making costly misjudgments. At the same time, you also increase employees’ productivity, engagement, and morale, improving the ROI of your human capital. 

Devorah of Twilio explains an effective approach to data-backed office redesigns: “We’re going to beta [office design changes] in a few of the larger offices to model it, to test it, to measure it, to see how our spaces are actually being used, not how we think they’re going to be used.” 

With accurate utilization data and A/B testing, you can facilitate a cost-effective office design that supports a range of employee needs. And, even more importantly, it provides the information you need to stay flexible and respond wisely to the next evolution of the office.