
Though companies have different ideas about what a hybrid workspace looks like, there’s one thing that ties many of these spaces together: they are flexible, changeable, and may look different in a year or two. Read More: Why Return to Office Policies Spell Trouble for Working Moms “If you work with leaders in a conference room and then do a wrap up in the living room, the intimacy and quality of sharing and openness shifts,” she says.
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Carlson’s preferred space: the Living Room, which has a dark green carpet, a comfy gray couch with blankets, a coffee table, and a big TV for Zoom calls. So we worked out these areas and zones where people could really come in and collectively work together,” says Suzanne Carlson, senior corporate market director at NBBJ. “If you’re coming back to the office, you’re not coming back to sit at a desk-you’re coming back to collaborate. Despite the NBBJ office’s large size, there still aren’t enough individual desks for every employee designers assume that people will want to also sit at long tables where they can spread out papers, or at couches or comfy chairs. Not a place where they come to sit under fluorescent lights in conference rooms and long for home. What NBBJ has found so far is that the new office needs to be a place where people can gather, socialize, and be inspired. Today, Dewane is working with a design firm called Geniant to help companies figure out the best office space for their mix of workers. His design had a gallery where workers would see material that would inspire them and remind them of the purpose of their work a salon where they could socialize and have conversations, a library where they could do research an office where they could do expenses and “light work ” and then an isolated room for deep work where they could focus. It’s Time to Radically Rethink How We Workīefore the pandemic, one architect, David Dewane, came up with the idea for a utopian office where employees had room to socialize but also do the kind of deep work needed for many knowledge jobs-he called it the Eudaimonia machine, for the Greek word that denotes a state of flourishing and prosperity. Read more: The COVID-19 Pandemic Upended the Office. Some companies were even moving to four-day work weeks to try and give employees more focus time. In 2019, people spent an average of 47 seconds on a given screen before switching to another, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004, according to research from Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. The open floor-plan offices that seemed like such a good idea a few years ago had become noisy places where workers were having trouble focusing.
How to Fix WorkĮven before the pandemic, many companies accepted that the office was broken. “There’s a whole new generation of companies that are organizing work in a very different way,” Choudhury says.
