Creating a workplace worth the commute
One of the principles of transforming towards new ways of working I laid out earlier is to “Entice over Enforce.”
What if, instead of forcing and threatening people to make them come back to the office, you made it so attractive that they simply couldn’t resist?
The most common reasons I hear for bringing people back to the office revolve around creating a community, a sense of belonging, a spirit, and culture of collaboration.
Let’s be honest, how good is your office really at fostering these?
I‘ve been repeating that the “office is the new offsite”, which means that, just like an offsite, the experience of coming to the office needs to be designed.
Pain points need to be removed.
And if you’d like to have your employees back to the office because you’d like them to collaborate and create that sense of community and belonging, you need to facilitate that to make it happen.
It’s an illusion that it will just happen by default because people are in the office.
I came across Steelcase‘s idea of „The Office as the New Neighborhood“ the other day, which I like even better!
Here are a couple of Steelcase’s ideas (You’ll find the link to full articles in the comments below)
Despite employers’ best efforts to entice everyone back to the office with free snacks and fun events, people are dragging their feet. Their reluctance isn’t about COVID: If you look at the data, far more people have been to a restaurant, movie theater, or traveled on an airplane than who’ve gone to the office.
People’s resistance doesn’t seem to be about flexible work either. Hybrid work has been embraced by 71% of global leaders, giving people the option to work two-to-three days from home or other locations.
In offices around the world, organizations have adopted hybrid work policies but haven’t changed their offices to support the new realities of hybrid work.
The new era of hybrid work means people will have choices about where to work, and, in many ways, the office has to work even harder to attract people and keep them coming back. Offices will need to earn people’s commute by meeting a new set of needs: support hybrid work, establish connections, create a sense of belonging, and promote wellbeing
“A better vision for a workplace is a community — a place where people bond around shared values, feel valued as human beings, and have a voice in decisions that affect them,” — Adam Grant
Types of spaces needed:
- Individual spaces assigned to one person or shared amongst the team
- Collaboration spaces for in-person and virtual interactions that support the different ways people need to come together
- Places with appropriate privacy for individual heads down work or finding solitude and rejuvenation
- Areas to gather, socialize and learn with teammates
Four key design principles for your office as a neighborhood:
- Me + We: Support both individual and teamwork, and different types of work throughout the day
- Fixed-to-fluid: Modular to embrace change
- Open + Enclosed: Private and public spaces
- Digital + Physical: Enable digital collaboration between people in the office and those remote. Think hybrid collaboration spaces.
„…the workplace should draw inspiration from a new source that is less about efficiency and more about humanity…“
Three key concepts for better hybrid collaboration:
- Equity: Strive for equity and inclusion despite location.
- Engagement: Design experiences across a range of settings that are human and engaging.
- Ease: Design a variety of intuitive virtual and physical experiences that are easy to navigate.
As a leader, ask yourself:
- What’s my motivation for bringing people back to the office?
- What kind of behavior and mindset would I like to foster?
- How does our current office environment foster or inhibit that behavior?
„Offices will need to earn people’s commute by meeting a new set of needs: support hybrid work, establish connections, create a sense of belonging and promote wellbeing…“ — Steelcase
If you’d like help to design your own hybrid ways of working, check out our new program.
