A short story about office design.
For the past 60 years or more the traditional approach to design an office was to have rows of desks or cubicles like in the illustration below. This concept was originally based on the manufacturing industry's approach to work-flows on the factory floor.
These rows of workers were often supervised by managers in offices, or worse still on raised platforms. Here's a recent existing layout for a client that we were asked to review, that illustrates the regimented approach.
The reason for the very high ratio of individual workspaces to collaboration /meeting spaces in a traditional office design was based on the principle of paper and computer working consuming most of workers' daily activities. This meant workers came to the office five days a week to be productive, as that was where the paper/computer was located. The design is therefore aligned to focus work and traditional paper/desk-based activities.
With the introduction of cloud computing and the internet in the mid 1990’s, along with machine learning, automated software, video conferencing, and now most recently AI, the types of work activities undertaken in the office have radically changed.
Yet the design of the office often lags years behind the progress that technology has made, and the way it changes how we work.
Activity Based Office Design
The previous paper and desktop computer work activities have over the past 10 years largely been replaced with person-to-person interactions. Being with other people is now the main reason employees need to come to the office, rather than person to paper, or person to computer activities.
This radical change requires a rethink in the way offices are designed – now linking the design to the wider range of in-person activities. The broader range of furniture worksettings as seen in the image above, are aligned to this modern way of in-office working – enabling opportunities for greater and improved person-to-person collaboration and recognizing the need for less focus work.
In the images below we can compare the different activity zones between the old traditional approach and the modern activity based working (ABW) approach to creating flexible workplaces that enable better employee productivity.
Reviewing the images above you can see how the broader range of furniture worksettings are distributed around the office floor, based on team needs yet providing overall flexibility for the occupying teams.
If you study the before and after illustrations, you’ll note that for your existing open office arrangements, making the change does not necessarily mean having to carry out major construction works.
In many use cases we have minimized that cost as most of the work settings can be created using modular or systems furniture. This means that the transformation of the space can be very cost effective, and in some cases even redeploying some of the existing furniture items.
The overall advantages of modernising your office using the ABW approach is that it better enables employees to work, it provides a much more vibrant, and interactive workplace experience and, where arrangements such as hybrid working are adopted, it can significantly reduce the amount of office space needed.
We have created a simple assessment tool, which is free to use, to assess the suitability of your current offices, the link is below. Alternatively, do reach out for a chat to discuss your next project.
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