Companies are creating new offices to accommodate hybrid work

The following are some of the most effective ways to get in touch with each otherWhen many companies tried to reduce their office space in order to save money, NBBJ did the opposite.

It took over the former offices of the clothing company Eileen Fisher in the Flatiron district of New York City and started ripping out walls and creating a 28,000 square foot “living lab”—a space where the company could test what type of design and layout works best for hybrid work. The idea wasn’t to force NBBJ employees into the office five days a week, but instead to create a place for hybrid work where people would actually want to come, despite the long commutes typical in the New York area. NBBJ would then be able to use what worked as a basis for designing offices that their clients, who are also interested in the hybrid future, could adopt.

“We’re in the early stages of a deep recognition that the workplace needs to be different,” says Steve McConnell, NBBJ’s managing partner and board chair, who spearheaded the redesign.

The Flatiron Space, which opened in Novembre, is a mix of an office and social club. Conference rooms have a living room feel, with their bookshelves, couches, and green carpets. A lab allows employees to look at miniature models of the buildings that the company designs. It’s nearly twice as big as the company’s former office space, and with its natural light and dark green tones, seems to communicate more “cool Airbnb” than “office.”

Kastle Systems tracks the unique card swipes of office buildings and says the commercial real-estate market is still in decline. In the 10 biggest U.S. cities office occupancy has dropped to around 50% from pre-pandemic level. Amazon, Walt Disney Company, and other companies are currently battling with workers to determine if returning to the office is mandatory and for how many days. New York Times. But now that the Biden Administration has declared the pandemic officially over, some companies are ready to declare hybrid work the new reality and are redesigning their offices accordingly—taking advantage of low prices and desperate landlords and creating spaces in which employees might actually want to work.

“We’re never going to force people back into the office, but we feel a sense of responsibility to build an office space that is delightful,” says Holly Barbacovi, the head of human resources at the video game maker Bungie, which is nearly finished building its new office space in Bellevue, Wash. During the pandemic, Bungie decided to allow for fully remote work; today, the company is expanding its square footage from 80,000 to 200,000.

These hybrid offices seem to be the future for corporate offices. Though 42% of companies had a full-time in-office policy in the second quarter of 2023, that’s down from 49% in the first quarter of the year, according to the Flex Index, a database of surveys and publicly available information that tracks the return-to-office policies of more than 4,000 companies. The report also found that around 30% of companies allow hybrid work. This is up from just 20% in the first three months.

“I think a lot of employers are reenvisioning their offices to be better shared offices, less places you go into to do heads-down work,” says Robert Sadow, the CEO and co-founder of Scoop Technologies, which puts out the Flex Index. This is happening more in certain companies than others, of course—around 63% of companies with fewer than 500 employees are fully flexible, according to the Flex Index, compared to just 13% of companies with more than 50,000 employees.

Prithwiraj Chhoudhury, a Harvard Business School Professor who has studied remote working for years, says that some companies are rethinking their idea of a permanent workplace. Some startups are deciding that the purpose of an office is really to socialize, and they’re allowing employees to work from anywhere, and then picking a place for people to meet occasionally throughout the year to get to know each other.

Zapier, as an example, organizes retreats to allow employees to meet in person. They pay for all flights, lodging, and food and help people from different departments get to know one another. Gitlab, which Choudhury says is one of the world’s largest remote companies, with 1,300 employees, allows employees to be fully remote but has at least one offsite meetup around the world each year.

New companies are forming to meet the needs of businesses looking for alternative workplaces; for example, there’s Radious, an Airbnb-type app which allows people to rent out extra space in their homes to remote workers, and Project Pair, which helps Bay Area companies share hybrid office space.

“There’s a whole new generation of companies that are organizing work in a very different way,” Choudhury says.

How to Repair Work

Before the pandemic hit, many companies already acknowledged that the office had become a mess. The open-plan office that was so popular a few decades ago has become a noisy place where employees have trouble focusing. Gloria Mark is an informatics professor from the University of California Irvine. Her research shows that in 2019, people spend on average 47 seconds before switching screens. This is down significantly from 2.5 minutes spent in 2004. Some companies have even switched to four-day working weeks to allow employees to spend more time focusing.

Read More: The COVID-19 Pandemic has upended the office. It’s Time to Radically Rethink How We Work

Before 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. 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. Dewane now works with Geniant a design agency to help businesses determine what type of office space is best for their employees.

“The old workplace is performative, what we are trying to get to now is places where your space is enabling you to do your jobs at a higher level,” he says.

NBBJ believes that the new offices should be places where people can socialize, gather and be inspired. They don’t want to be seated under fluorescent lights and wishing they were at home. 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.

“If you’re coming back to the office, you’re not coming back to sit at a desk—you’re coming back to collaborate. 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. 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. “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. “Space matters.”

Zach Russell, Bungie’s senior director of employee experience, says he wants to make the office a place “where people want to come versus where they have to come.” Bungie hopes its new offices will help people have the type of accidental “collisions” that help companies be more innovative and also lead to more workplace satisfaction. The work stations are located outside the office. When people need to go to the restroom or get a coffee, they must move into the middle of the building, where they may run into others. There are also some wide-open spaces with couches and seating areas where people can hold Zoom calls or play video games—and throughout, there are life-sized figures from some of the company’s most popular games.

Barbacovi explains that after the company hosted an event at their new office, it was so well-received, some remote workers expressed the desire to relocate to be closer to its heartbeat. Bungie’s new policy allows workers to receive a relocation allowance if they decide to move to Bellevue in the near future or now.

The most important aspect of flexibility

Of course, many companies haven’t changed their offices at all. They’re still deciding exactly what their working arrangements will look like and if they can get people to come back into the office. Some companies are also hesitant to invest in new offices because of the risk of a possible recession.

The pandemic has altered the way that office design will be done in the future. “With the complete disruption to society and significance of the pandemic—it’s well understood that these kinds of cataclysmic events accelerate change,” says McConnell, with NBBJ.

Before the pandemic, for example, NBBJ didn’t spend too much time talking about whether companies were hybrid when they were designing their offices. The firm now asks companies about their real estate strategies, if they plan to build a physical office in the future and their workforce strategy, as well as whether or not people are hybrid.

Read more: Return to office policies can be problematic for working moms

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.

The shoe company Brooks started looking for commercial office space in 2020—Tom Ross, the firm’s vice president of finance, jokes that he was the only person in Seattle looking for office space at the time. The company decided it didn’t want to just have people come in now and again, but that it wanted an office where people could collaborate frequently in person. Brooks has learned that the unexpected can happen again. So, the company is working closely with NBBJ on making the office as flexible. Ross says that furniture and walls can be easily moved if they are designed properly. “We designed it in a way that we can make relatively quick and inexpensive changes if we need to so that we’re not bound to a specific design,” he says.

NBBJ’s new offices—the living lab—are flexible too. The walls can be moved, and the furniture disassembled so that a room can easily become a gathering area or a seating space. Vitra Comma is a system of flexible furniture that was designed for companies in 2022. The desks, chairs and shelves can be easily assembled and disassembled like scaffolding. The art installations are constantly changing, while the company’s projects are laid out openly, so that colleagues can give feedback. “We want this to be hackable, flexible, if people come back in two months it will look different,” says John Gunn, corporate practice lead with NBBJ.

There’s one thing that companies like NBBJ can’t change when they redesign new offices: housing prices, the factor that has driven so many workers to live far away and not want to weather long commutes to the office. Gunn and NBBJ hope to design offices that make people want come in even if their commutes are long. Gunn, who lives in Beacon is two hours away from the new office. He’s in just about every day.

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