The future of offices: human, agile and self-sufficient workplaces

Fact #1 - We spend 90% of our time indoors. People can start to show symptoms of "indoor lag" (similar to jet lag).

Fact #2 – 51% of IT companies transform their organizations, or at least some departments, into an agile style of work, which is completely different from silo mentality.

Fact #3 – Airbnb, Uber and Lyft are collectively worth as much as the entire country of Morocco. This fact illustrates that people think that access is a new form of ownership.

What do these facts have in common? These trends shape the working environment and how people feel about their workplace. Here are three directions in which the workplace needs to be transformed. We at Skanska already have our foot firmly in this door. 

Direction #1: move & share

People expect that the working environment will allow for the sharing of a particular mindset. They value having open working concepts like a flexible office space chain - Business Link - in the same office building as the global company that they work for. They also need the working space that enables mobility. Half of employees (49%) recognize themselves as people that spend most of their time at the desk. We call them Residents. However, based on our observations, only 18% are in actual fact Residents. The other 82% , untethered from their desk, travel around the office, searching for concentration, teamwork space or just for a bit of relaxation. Find out more in this Activity Based Working Report. If the agile style of work continues to gain popularity (and all of the signs point to this happening), we will soon face the challenge of creating even more agile-orientated workplaces for "scrum" (an increasingly popular way of agile software development), team or standup meetings.

Direction #2: everyone strives for wellbeing

Higher wages won’t automatically make employees perform at a higher level. People don’t only work for a paycheck. They want to work with people in a stimulating, healthy and open environment. This is why employers start to look for office space that can provide filtrated drinkable water, canteens that provide fresh and wholesome food, intelligent lighting that doesn’t disrupt your body clock, thermal, acoustic and ergonomic comfort and guarantees no indoor air pollution. This is why all our new office buildings will be WELL certified and qualify as a Building without Barriers, meaning that a project is easily accessible for people with different needs.

Direction #3: in harmony with nature

In the Skanska and infuture institute report "Living Buildings. The future of office buildings until 2050", we predict that future office buildings will be "green" and that they could have multiple solutions based on green infrastructure (green terraces, indoor and outdoor gardens, and plant-covered walls). We also predict that buildings can gradually become energy self-sufficient and, as a result, minimize their carbon footprint. In actual fact, we are starting to see this now. Juvelen, an office project located in Sweden, will use as much energy as its solar panels and wind turbines can produce. Furthermore, we aim to be the first developer worldwide to cover office building's facade with revolutionary solar cells called perovskites. This could be the dawn of a new era in commercial building and it will start here - in CEE region. We believe that buildings in the future will realistically be able to function independently of an outside energy infrastructure.

Let’s create workplaces for people, not employees. Let’s make offices where people can enjoy their office life as much as their life outside office hours . We do it #becausewecare. Do you?