Offering day-to-day choices around work environment yields higher productivity and employee satisfaction. Employees can find the spaces best-suited to their individual and team work needs. Image courtesy of Sasaki.
Physical place-branding has always been important, but at this moment, twenty years into the internet-generated digital age, it matters more than ever. Today, ideas, businesses, and relationships could live solely online, operating in a digital capacity only, but that’s not the direction most companies are headed. We are seeing the swing toward remote work of the first half of the decade boomerang back toward in-person collaboration at many workplaces. Leaders are realizing the irreplicable value of face-to-face collaboration and the resulting boost to their business’s output and success.
Many companies are doubling down on creating environments that invite employees to come together, whether their people work onsite every day or need to connect in-person between jaunts on the road. There are good and bad ways to go about this: light-touch furniture and decorative investments can give an office a much-needed face-lift, but it won’t go so far as to provoke a change in behavior or elicit a transformation in operations and work style; it just makes space pretty. Nothing beats the deeper investment in customizing the organization of program and designing to cater to the specific needs of a given business and workforce population. Move beyond the pretty and get to creating an efficient machine, because to get office-design wrong or right, has far-reaching implications. Good and intentional office design improves business development, recruitment, productivity, and, retention—vital inputs to the success of any company.
Product development and technology firm, Cambridge Consultants, invested in a branded workplace that included a crafted tour sequence creating a memorable impression for first-time visitors and returning employees. Image courtesy of Sasaki.
Businesses, big and small, are increasingly turning to shared co-working spaces for short-term and long-term arrangements to fill a real estate gap. While co-working can be a very good solution for many small and growing companies, it may not be a solution for all. Co-working is, indeed a business.It is not the silver bullet to achieving intense innovation, fostering networking, or supporting progressive thinking. That is where a strong office culture and a well-designed workplace lead supreme.
The co-working movement has gained popularity in part due to buzz around startups like WeWork, Industrious, and Convene to name a few. Though seen as the hip, new trend in corporate real estate, fundamentally these spaces miss the aspect of personal design and corporate identity and instead offer generic environments that sell the brands of shared workplace startups instead of a company’s unique character and personality. By choosing these off-the-shelf environments, companies can lose out on opportunities to reinforce brand, mission, and culture with employees and clients, alike. In the short-term, co-working spaces may be a stopgap to meet temporary real estate pain points, but still greater value lies in a long-term investment in physical environments that amplify company mission, values, and culture while meeting unique operational needs and goals. In other words, design your space to meet your individual needs, and the results will better your bottom line.