What modern workers consider “the office” is sharply different from just a few years ago according to the most important finding of Staples’ recent Workplace Survey.
Employees are spending less and less time in traditional offices and are instead now opting to customize their workspaces to their needs. In increasingly competitive markets, employers need to pay attention to the rapidly shifting desires of employees to attract and retain the talent they need to succeed.
Give employees flexibility
Only 32 percent of respondents to the survey say they spend all their time working in an office. Generational differences further underscore this issue – millennials say they only spend 67 percent of their time in an office. It’s clear that the younger generation doesn’t want to be tied to one location. Employers need to recognize this and ensure they’re supplying them, and all of their employees, with the tools to do their jobs from anywhere.
However, there are still tangible efficiencies and intangible benefits to people working in physical proximity and millennials especially still care about how their workplace looks and flows. In comparison to Baby Boomers, the younger generation is more willing to take a pay cut if it means working in a nicer office, or consider quitting if their workplace design is too outdated and inefficient.
Companies need to find ways to incorporate flexibility into the workplace – both in terms of workflow and physical space.
Image courtesy of Staples
The most obvious way to provide flexibility is the ability to work remotely. Long seen as an occasional perk for certain kind of jobs, the ability to work away from the office is increasingly becoming an expectation.
Forty-three percent of employees see the ability to work remotely as a must-have, according to the survey. This is particularly prevalent in finance and technology, where 51 and 57 percent of workers respectively consider it a necessity for their jobs.
Working remotely mostly means working from home, but a growing trend is co-working spaces. Places such as WorkBar provide membership-based working spaces that tend to be a combination of freelancers, remote workers and small companies. Approximately 14.6 million US employees are working from such spaces, and that number is likely to grow. Twenty-five percent of millennials say they’re doing so at least occasionally. According to Harvard Business Review, people in co-working spaces tend to rate their workplaces more favorably than those in traditional offices, citing benefits like more job control and a feeling of community.
Image courtesy of Staples
Flexibility can also mean not having a permanent or assigned workspace, even if someone spends most of his or her time in a physical office. Nearly a third of employees work in a setting that offers “agility seating” or “hotdesking,” where workers can sit in a different space every day resulting in increased communication and better relationships with colleagues. This trend is especially prevalent in healthcare, finance and technology companies. And it can pay off in surprising ways – 71 percent of survey respondents say it deepens their connection to their employer.
Put employees’ well-being first
The expectations employees have for their employers aren’t limited to workspaces, however. As workplace flexibility and design increasingly blurs the line between personal and professional, more workers expect the company that employs them to take their well-being into account.
