Discussing the future of the workplace with Steelcase at their Munich innovation center

Foreword

This November we were lucky enough to accept an invitation from Steelcase to visit their Innovation and learning center in Munich to discuss the future of the workplace. If you’ve been listening to our REWIRED podcast you would know already our obsession with Employee Experience and the future of work.

You may ask how on earth did we end up being invited to a furniture brand’s innovation lab, us a management consultancy. Well, we kind of take our promise of building a hybrid of consultants & makers quite seriously, and when rethinking the employee experience of an organization we get to the end of it; as such we are getting ourselves involved even in workplace design projects, influencing how a team’s working life at the office looks like.

In one of these projects working for Sunlight, we had the chance to design the workplace of Sunlight’s RnD newly launched function with our friends at Urban Soul Project (USP), who have also designed our own workplace. Combining our forces we co-designed a place that teams working on scrum thrive, the workspace is designed for safety and promotes social interaction at the same time and also reflects the purpose and values of the organization.

So, we visited Munich with our partners in crime to learn and discuss what lies ahead for the future of the workplace, and this article is a summary of it all.

According to Steelcase research with 32.000 participants in 10 countries here are some key findings along with some of our own thoughts.

4 Macro shifts that are actually happening right when discussing workplace design.

1. Safety 😷 How do we design safer places in a post-COVID-19 era?

2. Productivity ⚙️ How do we ensure that working from the office remains productive?

3. Inspiration 💡How do we design workplaces that enable collaboration and innovation?

4. Flexibility 💻 How do we design places that are Digital-first and enable hybrid collaboration.

5 key things people need from their place of work.

Safety.

People want to be and feel safe in their place of work. We didn’t have to design workplaces never that had to help mitigate the spread of disease, but people are now pandemic aware. That’s why when getting people back to work, you need to have a concrete plan to respond to the questions of even the most skeptical people.

Belonging.

They need back that sense of belonging after 2 years working from home. The top 2 reasons people want to get back to the office are first and foremost to connect with colleagues, and second to reconnect with the organization and its shared purpose.

At Steelcase, they have a principle internally that is called Attractor where they are leveraging behavioral science to empower non-plant communication. If you think about it, for the past 2 years our communication exchange was only planned. You would meet someone if only you had a call scheduled. When working from home you cannot bump into someone accidentally. So to change that when working at an office they gave us a couple of examples for the opposite:

1. ☕️ While it would be easy to build coffee stations to each floor in a 5-floor building, they chose to keep one central coffee station on the ground floor.
2. 🗑 Work stations do not have their own waste bins. You need to stand up and walk to this one waste bin for each floor.

Productivity.

They believe that working from home is more productive and the office space now needs to meet that standard of productivity. While some experienced “panic productivity” in the early pandemic days with a drop in productivity, almost 2 years down the road, most would agree that they feel more productive when working from home. Going back to the office now, we all need to relearn how to focus and be productive when sharing a space with others.

Comfort.

There’s a new standard of comfort for the workplace. Our home’s comfort. Can a workplace match that and if not how close can we get?

Quoting directly from Steelcase’s report:

“Pre-pandemic, 40%* of people said they needed to change postures frequently because of physical discomfort. During stay-at-home orders many people had to improvise and work from sofas, kitchen tables and even beds. Pain, distractions and stress have caused people to yearn for a broad interpretation of comfort, especially after such a disruptive time. They need the ability to work in a range of postures, change settings and to move throughout their day. They need a quiet, distraction free environment when they need to focus and to feel connected to their coworkers and the organization’s purpose.”

If we deconstruct “comfort” in terms of Wellbeing we have the physical comfort, the cognitive comfort, and the emotional comfort. Here’s how designers are addressing these three angles:

1. Posture palette. Designing a workplace that gives you the ability to work in a wide range of different postures.
2. Privacy. Designing for privacy even in the open space.
3. Connection. Designing workplaces that enable social interaction and unintentional information exchange.

Control.

The workplace should be giving you so many options in how and where to spend your time at the office that puts you as an employee to the control seat. So how to give control? Simply by applying diversity on your design process for a certain space, like a phone booth or a meeting room, that makes them suitable for different use cases, instead of using a cloning approach.

But this sense of control goes way beyond workplace design. By now, you would have already figured that everyone, even the most avid supporters of work from the office, wants to have control and be able to choose whether to work from home or the office.

4 Design Principles when designing a workplace.

Me + We.

Mework and Teamwork. We need to design places that facilitate both. It’s now necessary more than ever.

Open & Enclosed.

We need to rethink how the next iteration of Open Space looks like. At least to me, it’s pretty clear that the traditional idea of the open space is gone forever, but it’s also clear that the idea of tackling the safety challenge with a closed office is also false.

From Fixed to Fluid.

Workplace design will transition from fixed design to fluid design that would enable teams to change their setup based on their needs, and individuals to change their workstation based on their preference.

Digital + Physical.

The design has to consider that hybrid is the working mode, with remote teams constantly collaborating with physical teams or individuals.

For example, based on that principle, the need for large meeting rooms of 8+ seats is not a thing anymore. We need more meeting spaces compared to the pre-covid era, but smaller ones that will accommodate max 3 people.

PS. Special thanks to Eka Hellas, official distributors for Steelcase, for facilitating this visit, and to Klaus Pronath our host at Steelcase for this amazing learning experience.