Return to work—Reimagining an office design centered on employee experience

By: Eli Haddow and Amanda Mbuya

In the heart of the French Quarter, strains of local culture emanate from Jackson Square: Brass bands jam, cathedral bells chime, artists paint en plein air, and people strut through in sequins, suits, and light-up shirts. It's a point of connection and a pulsing expression of the city of New Orleans that surrounds it, and, as such, an analogy for the post-pandemic office of the future.

Jackson Square may not sound like the ideal inspiration for an office space, but a little more liveliness and exchange may give our workspaces new vitality. It’s what employees crave, and the new office will need to center their needs to remain relevant.

There are many ways to quantify employees’ workplace requirements, but perhaps the cleanest path is to adapt Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs around them. Structured as a pyramid, Maslow’s hierarchy builds from basic physiological guarantees to culminate in self-actualization. At work, we can consider the foundational requirements to be job security, clear expectations, and fair compensation. Farther up the pyramid we can incorporate employee connection, feelings of contribution and esteem, and culminate in self-actualization. Investments in experience across these rungs will pay off in productivity: McKinsey reports that employees who enjoy a positive work experience are 16 times more engaged than those who don’t.?

Two years removed from COVID-19 lockdowns, once-concentrated teams are still diffused into their living rooms/home offices. Collaborative processes take place on Zoom and in the cloud. We’ve learned to maximize our productivity by working outside of, rather than commuting to, the office, as Americans continue to vote with their feet to take jobs with more flexibility.?

But the physical office isn’t quite dead yet. Last year, MIT keyed in on the top two interactions that employees found most effective in person: “energizing interactions” and “sense of purpose,” were followed distantly by “collaborative work.” Missing these pieces may be hurting the American workplace, as last year, for the first time in a decade, Gallup reported a decline in employee engagement—a trend that has continued into 2022.

We propose a new purpose for physical workspaces—one that focuses on building in-person interactions to earn, rather than compel, employees’ attendance. Here’s our road map to getting started:

CENTERING BELONGING IN A REFRESHED HIERARCHY

According to a Future Forum survey published in October 2020, the only satisfaction metric that decreased among work-from-home employees was their “sense of belonging.” Data from Deloitte tells us that people closely associate belonging with the central tiers of the employee hierarchy of needs. Respondents to their survey highlighted feelings of “contribution” and “connection” when asked what they thought it meant to belong.?

Historically workplaces have been designed for productivity and not around the employee experience. No matter the structures within the office, culture—and by extension a sense of belonging—germinated in the liminal, and often unsanctioned, spaces around them: gossip in lunchrooms, a clandestine March Madness watch party, an early departure for happy hour.?

A refreshed hierarchy shows how an adapted physical office can most influence belonging. With the outer tiers of Survival and Actualization readily achievable from anywhere, managers and employees can focus on providing structures around attributes like socialization, expression, and contribution, in their office spaces.

DECONSTRUCTING THE OFFICE TO REBUILD MORALE AND TRUST?

Office culture can also have a corrosive effect. People of color frequently experience microaggressions and feel compelled to code-switch to fit into the “professional” norms established by the majority—white (and often male) dominant culture. Parents, and women in particular, juggle childcare with work life, with no true balance.?

Employees want to feel they’re involved at a foundational level to contribute to the experience and culture of the workplace. Structural change can be a means to wipe the slate clean and rebuild around the best of the physical workplace. For this to work, new structures must grow around representation, in leadership, in thought, and certainly, in action.

Traditional offices were designed with productivity in mind, a concentrated nerve center that compelled our daily attendance. But going back to the 1970s, we knew that employees who worked just 50 meters apart had little contact, and would have to go out of their way to interact. The silos, cliques, and strict processes of the old office behaved like a highway interchange: lots of paths running in the same space with little meaningful intersection (and occasional collisions).

If we imagine the workspace more like a town square, where gathering is free and organic, we can update or create spaces built around useful structures. By including the voices of many, we could enjoy an unprecedented burst of fresh ideas that adds to our natural interactions, rather than trying to force them. And we can build that crucial need for connection alongside one another.?

THE IMPACT OF EXPERIENCE AND AUTHENTICITY?

Understanding the elements of the existing workplace experience is the first step to reshaping the office. Question the structures within the office. Start simple: Where is the coffee pot situated? Take it a step further: Where do people gather? Get more conceptual: How do we give employees places to catch up and connect?

Then ask the key question: How do these structures drive connection, energy, and sense of purpose? If there isn’t a good answer, then you can start to dream based on the representative input of your people.

Consider the role of Microsoft’s Garage Maker Spaces, which encourage conversations and innovations by giving workers a place to hack projects for work or play. Explore how Spotify rearranged their London offices into neighborhoods, rather than departments, to give employees freedom on where and how they worked. Look up at R/GA’s projection boards to see how a company can highlight employees’ accomplishments to solidify a common sense of purpose. The fixes may not be easy or quick, but when redesigning the workplace, experiences where employees can express themselves could be the difference between retention and exodus.

CHASING CULTURE?

Picture culture not as a set of top-down principles, but as the feelings that bubble up from employees’ repeated workplace experiences. Though workers will have shared interests, beliefs, and even backgrounds, each person brings their own lens through which they process their view of their colleagues and projects. The objective in running the new office is to harness these organic reactions to the workplace experience and channel them into better structures. A failure to do so will entrench the behaviors of the dominant culture and force minority employees to tolerate microaggressions and code-switching, or else face accusations of “unprofessionalism.”

If the new office empowers employees to take ownership toward driving change, the collective reconstruction comes with a need for transparency and open communication. We have stand-ups for client projects every day, but what about the ongoing project of our workplace? Talk about differences and tension points.?

While some employees may dream of an office space as a wide open living room, others will want places to hide away from distraction. While some may want to stop in for a half hour to connect over coffee, others will dwell for hours, valuing the separation of workspace from home life. The office, like the culture that surrounds it, is an ever-changing project. Acknowledging that the workplace is a work in progress will keep employee committees consistently engaged and result in the constant rotation of new voices to keep these conversations dynamic.

SWAP UNCERTAINTY FOR OPPORTUNITY?

This process can be an opportunity for newfound insight and innovation. What shape will the physical office take when it’s free from the constraints of cubicles or rows of desks? Designing around the needs of the employee not only upends traditional office design thinking, it could serve as inspiration for a space that desperately needs it. In a short internal brainstorming session, we thought of a few structures that could alter office experience: open gallery spaces where employees could share and curate; digital boards with current projects, where people from other disciplines could add comments or suggestions to provide live feedback; even spaces set aside for community artists and businesses to integrate with the office to provide crucial interaction.

Flip your view of the office on its head, and you may find yourself in a place with vibrancy, self-determination, and open expression that’s reminiscent of a place like Jackson Square—but maybe without all the trumpets.

This story originally appeared on www.peteramayer.com. Colleagues from PETERMAYER’s Business Development, Creative, Human Resources, Strategy, Public Relations and Account Management teams contributed to the thinking in this story. For more, visit www.peteramayer.com.