Workplace Survey Shows Need for Technology to Power Agile Working

It’s no secret that each generation in the workplace has its preferences. From where they want to work to how they want to work, there are both subtle and major differences. To gain a better understanding of what office environments employees have today and desire to have in the future, as well as how shifting workplace space strategies are creating the need for new technology our team at VergeSense recently commissioned a Workplace Experience & Office Space Employee Survey. Within the survey and findings analysis, we took a deep look into how the workplace is evolving, what employees crave in the workspace, and what that means for the future of PropTech.

Examining Workspace Engagement Across The U.S.

The survey was administered to 500 office workers between the ages of 25- and 64-years-old in the first half of 2019 and was weighted for the U.S. population by gender and region. Respondents were fairly evenly split between small, medium and large organizations. Startups, which we considered to be organizations with 11 to 50 employees, represented 26% of respondents. “Small businesses” with 51 to 100 employees were 12%, midsize, with 101 to 1,000 were 28% and large businesses with 1,001 to 5,000 were another 12%. The rest of the respondants were “extra large businesses with 5,001 to 10,000 and large corporations with more than 10,000 which were 7 and 15% of the responses respectively.

The split between those who work in open office concepts and cubicle/closed office concepts was also pretty evenly split with 54% working in “closed” offices and 46% in open office setups.

Rethinking Open Office Design to Reshape How We Work

Even scientific studies have struggled to decide if open offices are good or bad for workers, and we’ve recently seen a growing amount of research supporting a move away from traditional open office designs.

While that debate continues, survey data indicates we’ve begun to see a bifurcation of open office concepts, with a new, more flexible open-concept arriving in the form of agile or dynamic workplaces, which essentially takes the set desk out of the open office concept. Rather than having a set desk within a wide-open workplace environment, workers have the freedom and flexibility to work in different areas of an office through hot-desking and different shared spaces.

Of the respondents to our survey that say they work in an open office concept, 40% noted that they have no set desk and the freedom to choose where to work. This aligns fairly closely with previous data from JLL, which found that as of 2017, 29% of all offices had moved to agile work environments where workers move interchangeably between desks, and working space can be easily rearranged with lightweight and moveable furniture. 

However, workers aren’t only moving agile or Activity Based Working (ABW) environments, they’re enjoying them more. When we asked office employees what their ideal work area setup would be, those that are currently hot-desking and have the choice where to work were the most likely to say their current setup is their ideal work area (74%).

The results of the survey clearly show a general move toward more open work environments, and employees are embracing the change. However, open workspaces come with their own set of problems especially when it comes to the availability of private and collaborative spaces.