How to Design an Office Environment Your Team Actually Wants to Come Back To

Here’s a confounding set of stats for you: 80 percent of workers don’t want to go back to the office full-time, and 39 percent of people are considering quitting if their bosses aren’t going to be flexible about work-from-home options … and yet co-working spaces are thriving, with a 158 percent increase in openings the past year.

What’s going on? Sure, part of the co-working surge is simple necessity — with offices shut down, people are seeking secondary spaces outside the home to work. But I’d argue there’s something else in play. On track to grow to a $13.03 billion industry by 2025, co-working spaces are clearly doing something right — something that traditional corporate offices are missing the mark on. But what exactly is it??

After 18-plus months of pandemic-enforced work-from-home, where we’ve all-but proved a physical location isn’t somewhere most of us need to be to get our jobs done, it’s more critical than ever that companies make the office a place they want to be.?

As my company is hammering out our hybrid plan going forward, I know we’ll be trying to make the in-office portion the best it can be — and I’m sure many companies are trying to do the same. One big source of inspiration may be right in front of our eyes.?

What makes co-working spaces so appealing?

It’s not just the mid-century-modern furniture, fancy coffee machines or quirky neon signs that are drawing people back to co-working spaces after such an extended time of closures.

Surveys show that members of co-working spaces are happy to shell out a monthly fee because of the access to community and flexibility, and for the sense of professionalism that working from home can sometimes lack.

Behind those factors lies something simpler and deeper, I think: freedom. According to the World Happiness Report, autonomy is one of the main drivers in job satisfaction (and happens to be correlated with significant health benefits, too); in fact, 97 percent of workers believe flexibility in their work would have a positive impact on their quality of life.?

Co-working spaces typically offer the chance to come and go as you please, and work the hours you want, with the flexibility to choose a space that has a convenient or appealing commute. There’s the opportunity to buckle down and focus, or to socialize when you need a break.

Then there’s the powerful community element. While formal workplaces offer collaboration opportunities, too, co-working is conducive to true cross-pollination as members interact with peers in different companies and industries. Though this Harvard study is a few years old, the findings remain true: that sweet spot of autonomy and community that co-working spaces offer boosts productivity and gives workers a rich sense of meaning.?

In the early days of my business, I spent plenty of time in these sorts of co-working spaces, and can attest to their value. Thinkific was born at a desk at Launch Academy, where I was surrounded by dozens of other aspiring entrepreneurs, all building very different companies. I found the mix of office-like environment and camaraderie far more inspiring than my dining room table, or my law office, where I worked before committing fully to entrepreneurship. Could I have launched the company without my time there? Probably. But it certainly wouldn’t have been as enjoyable of a growth period.?

Of course, co-working isn’t perfect. You might have little control over your desk (ergonomics are huge to me) or find yourself struggling to focus on work because a surprise Christmas party is in full swing in the kitchen. And if you’ve got more than a few members on your team, it’s not always ideal. But that said, I think there is something to learn from the appealing flexibility of these sorts of offices.

Recreating co-working magic in the office context?

Before Covid, my team was primarily office-based, with just over 100 people and a handful of distributed team members. But we learned a lot about remote work during the pandemic, and we’re on track to have quadrupled our team size by the end of 2021, so we’re going to need to be equipped to offer both in-person and virtual working options. We’ll be testing and learning as we go with Office 2.0, but at its heart, our goal is to make time spent in-office feel positive and appealing — not like a chore.?

The good news is, there’s no real barrier for offices to replicate co-working spaces’ virtues. At the end of the day, this is much more a cultural shift than a spatial one.

To me, this centers around the idea that for co-working spaces, members are customers, not employees. And spaces are specifically designed to give these customers exactly what they want. If you’re looking to design an environment that your team will be excited to come to, it’s really as simple as asking them: what do you want??

For our team, the answers come down to many of the things that co-working spaces do so well.?

• Freedom of time: I’ve long believed that there’s no such thing as "company time" or "your time." In my mind, all time is your time — you choose how to spend it. What we really care about is deliverables, not which hours you work or how much time you spend at your desk. Embracing flexible hours, flexible schedules and flexible vacations will formalize this philosophy.
• Freedom of space: Controlling your surroundings contributes to a feeling of autonomy and flexibility. Choosing to come into the office or work at home — even if that’s in another city or another country — is part of that. But so is choosing where to work once you’re there. For that matter, I think cultivating different zones in the office to accommodate different working styles can be attractive, too. Here’s where heads-down, focused deep work can happen, and here’s where more social interactions can thrive, and here are a few closed door rooms for team brainstorming or private meetings. (I love the private booths at co-working spaces, too, provided they’re done right with good ventilation.)
• Freedom to connect: I think you can also replicate co-working spaces’ cross-pollination with this kind of zoned approach. Proximity has been proven to build collaboration and relationships, so people from different teams may find themselves interacting or connecting in new ways when they aren’t stuck in their assigned section. We’ve been using Donut on Slack — a tool that randomly pairs colleagues for chats — during this work-from-home time to encourage inter-team socializing. I’d love to see this same spirit inform our physical office.
• Freedom of spirit: Okay, maybe that’s a little corny. But there’s a tangible value in ditching the classic, butts-in-seats mentality where employees are monitored and measured on inputs, and instead embracing a much older "craftwork" mentality where teams are trusted to deliver results, and not hand-held every step of the way. It all boils down to putting an emphasis on outputs rather than inputs. When management cares about what gets done, not how it gets done (or how long it took to do it!), there’s a huge perception shift for everyone. Less performative work, more meaningful work. And for most leaders, I’d guess that’s what really matters.

At the end of the day, this really isn’t just a plan for optimizing in-person work — it applies for most any context, whether remote, co-working or in-office. The right blend of autonomy, resources and community lies at the heart of an empowered and happy team — one that wants to come to work, wherever that happens to be.??

A version of this article was originally featured in?Forbes. Keep up with my latest posts by following me here or on?Twitter.