The Flexible Workplace: Flexible Spaces

Every employee and every organization needs a flexible workplace – at a time when there is so much changing and so many competing needs, everyone is seeking the ability to adapt to and accommodate change.

 This is the fourth in a series of articles examining the different types of flexibility in the workplace – staffing, structures, processes, and spaces, to name a few. For each, we’ll understand what’s driving the need for flexibility, identify how different organizations are providing it, and examine their results. This month’s topic: flexible spaces.

 What’s driving the need for flexible spaces? Space needs to be flexible for a variety of reasons. The workforce is more mobile, with 43% of U.S. workers working remotely at least some of the week according to Gallup. Change and choice go together and people want choices – Gensler found that employees are 20% more satisfied, 25% more innovative, and 7% more productive when they have choices in when, where, and how they work. People also want to customize and personalize their space – Steelcase concluded that 88% of highly engaged workers have control over their space. Cost is also a driver because a space that can be reconfigured to accommodate different uses throughout the day allows you to do more with less. Finally, accommodating growth in the size of the organization also requires flexibility to accommodate more people in the same amount of space or to change the use of space; for instance from a meeting room to a shared office.

What changes to make a space flexible? Robert Probst’s “Action Office” concept for Herman Miller in the 1960s envisioned a workplace where walls, panels, desks, and people could all move once they were freed from the encumbrance of fixed walls. In the 1970s, Frank Duffy observed that a building was comprised of different layers of that changed at different rates: site (indefinite), shell (50 years), services (15 years), scenery (5-7 years), and setting (daily). This was then popularized by Stewart Brand in the 1990s as “pace layers” in How Building’s Learn.

So, the idea that workplace must accommodate change is not new. But, the ways in which it is changing, the frequency of change, who can change it, and the flexibility required to accommodate these changes has become more complex and multi-dimensional – it’s not just physical things that need to be flexible. It’s also how we rent space, how we use space, the services offered in space, and the technology we use to access and control them. Here are the dimensions of space flexibility you could consider in the workplace:

1. Flexible leasing: In the past, space was owned indefinitely or leased by the year (or decade!). No longer. In the same way iTunes changed the prevailing “unit” of music from the album to the song, first Regus and now WeWork have changed the unit of space from years to months. Breather is taking this further, down to rent by the hour. The increase in this trend seems inevitable; according to Statista, the number of flexible co-working spaces has risen from 75 in 2007 to 13,800 in 2017.
2. Flexible layout:  At some point pretty much every company has asked: “Can we knock down that wall to combine two adjacent rooms?” While the answer used to be “no” or “that’s expensive” or “that will take forever,” now modular designs and movable walls systems are taking off because of their flexibility, environmental sustainability, and financial benefits (estimated by RedThread to save $725 per office wall, per year, and achieve a ~10% more efficient layout)
3. Flexible furniture:  While spaces designed for specific purposes are a must in the workplace, sometimes a multipurpose space whose furniture can be reconfigured is a better bet than multiple specialized spaces that may sit empty a lot of the day. For example, the lobby lounge at the New York City office of Intersection and Sidewalk Labs provide space for individual work and informal collaboration while easily converting to large events space at lunchtime and in the evening
4. Flexible occupants: As discussed in an earlier article, the rise of flexible working means that people have more choice in when, where, and how to work. This means that different occupants may use the same space, hour to hour or day to day. Microsoft’s Schiphol office is a terrific example of a workplace that intentionally mixes employees, clients, and partners within the same spaces. In doing so, they increased employee satisfaction by 60%, achieved a 25% increase in productivity, and reduced real estate costs by 30%
5. Flexible technology: The days are numbered for all technology being provided by the employer and fixed to desks, walls, and ceilings. Organizations are seeking greater flexibility and so Cisco found that 69% of IT decision makers favor employees being able to bring their own devices to work (“BYOD”) and much of audio-visual technology is shifting from fixed and hardwired (i.e., a projector bolted to the ceiling with a screen) to mobile and wireless (i.e., an LCD screen on movable cart and wireless projection software like ClickShare or AirMedia).
6. Flexible systems: Even though systems like heating and air conditioning or lighting might be replaced every 15 years in Frank Duffy’s Site/Shell/Services/Scenery/Setting schema, these can now be adjusted minute-to-minute at the touch of an app. For example, the Comfy mobile app enables people to adjust lighting and temperature (as well as book rooms and provide feedback) and is being used by 125,000 people in 25M square feet of office space. Acoustics can now be controlled as well – whether you’re using Noisli for background sound or pink noise for sound masking. For lighting, Philips uses power over ethernet and an app to wirelessly adjust lighting levels and color temperature.
7. Flexible services: As the workplace learns from retail, hospitality, and co-working spaces, as the flexibility of the space increases, and as organizations recognize that we’re living in an experience economy, services within the workplace become even more important. They also need to be more responsive to change. Services like reception, concierge, dining, fitness, tech support, shipping/receiving, and community events need to be more flexible. This means an operating staff with the right culture and tools. They need real-time feedback to learn and adapt. They need real-time notifications to drive traffic to events or demos or pop-ups. They need real-time communications to connect with a mobile workforce. As a result, organizations with the most flexible spaces – such co-working spaces and consulting companies – generally all have mobile apps to access, manage, evaluate, and update their workplace services.

What should you do about it? Once you understand why and how your space needs to be flexible, what should you do? Prioritize based on what matters to people, achieve flexibility through diversity, and plan for smaller and smaller increments of change that give greater and greater control to end-users. Let’s take these one by one.

Prioritize: Faced with presumably limitless demands and a limited budget, you’ll need to decide what’s fixed and what’s flexible. This is especially important since some flexibility pays for itself but others come at a cost – and some costs are indirect; for instance, you may save space with a multipurpose space, but it will cost more to operate it.  One way to prioritize is to use data on what people care about. Ideally this is from your people, but if not available you can use data from large global workplace surveys from organizations like Steelcase, Gensler, and Leesman. The Leesman index includes over 250,000 respondents from 2,000 workplaces and includes the percentage responding that specific workplace features are “important to create an effective workplace.” So, you could focus on temperature (80%), acoustics (75%), lighting (65%), computing technology (59%), personalization (56%), and AV technology (38%), perhaps in that order.

Diversify: We’ve all probably seen the high school “cafetorium” that doesn’t work particularly well at being a cafeteria or an auditorium. So, while we can make more and more things flexible, we shouldn’t make everything flexible. Some spaces should do one thing well and be fit for purpose. And these spaces should be different to create variety as a hedge against a future in which behaviors, needs, and priorities change. A diverse portfolio of space is analogous to a diverse financial portfolio; it’s a great way to manage risk. This can even be a way of organizing spaces. While not an office, Seattle’s main public library by OMA rightly observed that some parts of libraries were relatively fixed while others were undergoing rapid change. The fixed areas like meeting and conference spaces were grouped in alternating floors that created flexible spaces between theme like the “mixing chamber” where people could work and get help from library staff.

Atomize: From all this, one trend is clear: technology enables changing aspects of the workplace in smaller and small increments, and as a result, control of these aspects will become more and more distributed now that it can be digitally coordinated. Leases have gone from year-by-year to hour-by-hour rental. Air conditioning has gone from floor-by-floor to zone-by-zone, to desk by desk control. Lighting has gone from room-by-room to fixture-by-fixture to bulb-by-blub control. So, to use the iTunes analogy, stop planning by the album and start planning by the song – or even the clip! Plan ahead and look for opportunities to break down coarse increments into more granular ones so that you can be more responsive to change.

Putting it all together: Choice and change go together. It may be that you’re providing people more choice and control in when, where, and how they work, or it may be that your business is changing to respond to shifts in the market. Or your workplace may need to change for other reasons. Regardless, your space will need to be flexible and enable its lease, layout, furniture, people, technology, building systems, and services to change. Understanding these dimensions of change is a start. Then you have to find the right amount of flexibility for you, and plan ahead for a future in which more and more can be changed, more often, by more people. Saddle up!

(This article originally appeared in the April issue of Workplaces Magazine. Check it out! https://bellow.press/LatestWP)