The addition of five focus spaces resulted in a 14% increase in employees’ perceptions of their ability to do heads-down work.
What makes shared spaces appealing beyond their vibe? What features cause some to be more desirable, more effective and a smarter use of space than others? Can these spaces really change how people work for the better – and improve how they feel about their work and their organization?
It’s questions like these that Little, a leading international architecture and design firm, wanted to explore when they had the opportunity to expand and reconfigure their Washington, D.C., office. Like so many organizations today, their workplace is mostly open plan. Meeting spaces were large, formal conference rooms. Access to smaller meeting rooms, focus spaces or informal spaces for impromptu conversations was extremely limited. Although employees reported that it was easy to collaborate spontaneously in the open plan, they also expressed that a lack of privacy and noise were a problem. In addition to needing additional space to hire more people, company leaders saw the expansion as an opportunity to create different kinds of spaces that would give employees more choices – particularly for team and individual focus work – and address some wellbeing benefits, like the ability to alter postures in their workspaces.
Little’s goals dovetailed perfectly with Steelcase’s ongoing research around the importance of providing a variety of settings as office work rapidly shifts toward more robust collaboration and creative problem-solving. “We were studying the effectiveness of a variety of spaces and how to design shared spaces that really performed for their users – specifically, to understand the spatial attributes that drive occupancy and use,” explains Kristin Boer, a Steelcase applications marketing manager. “As we understood what Little wanted to accomplish, we realized this was an ideal opportunity to further our research and learn more together.”
Little’s decision to partner with Steelcase resulted in eight new spaces – five enclosed focus rooms and three collaboration spaces. Once completed, 40 days of camera ethnography meticulously documented how frequently these new spaces were used and for what kinds of work. Adding to this visual documentation, pre- and post-occupancy surveys provided rich qualitative data about employees’ perceptions and preferences.
Anh Tran, a senior associate at Little, describes the joint research project as “a living lab approach,” purposely designed to benefit Little employees and also deliver proven value to corporate clients who might be considering taking a similar approach to their workplace. “Being able to test concepts using a research-based approach is very important to us,” she explains. “We look for ways to verify our design intuition to prove that the hypothesis to work in certain ways really does work. We’re constantly trying to do better, generate more insight and more proof, more fine-tuning. Because clients today want more specificity about what kinds of environments can create the advantages they’re after — to know which furnishings in which settings seem to be more appropriate for certain types of behaviors and types of work.”
“The biggest challenge for most organizations is around balancing collaboration and focus — supporting both the interactions of “we” and the privacy of “me” — spaces that are purposely designed to provide desirable and appropriate choices for different people and different modes of work throughout the day,” says Boer.
Fully enclosed, Little’s five new focus rooms support intervals of concentration and privacy. Two are high-performance spaces with height-adjustable desks and seating. Another supports focused heads-down work in a more relaxed posture. The remaining two are informal lounge settings. Research questions for these spaces included:
Which focus rooms will be chosen first?
Which focus room has the highest/lowest “churn” throughout the day?
Which focus setting(s) will also support collaborative behaviors?
Which spaces will be chosen when audio privacy is needed?
How often will users reconfigure the focus rooms?
The three work-lounge settings were designed to support collaboration and socializing away from the workstation. One was furnished with a large high-top table and stools, another with booths and the third was a living-room-like setting. Research questions for these spaces included:
Which collaboration setting(s) will be chosen first?
Which collaboration setting(s) host longer meetings? Which host more?
Which collaboration setting(s) will also support focus behaviors?
What is the dominant work mode supported by each setting?
The Steelcase/Little team started out with some hypotheses about answers to these questions. Some of their assumptions were confirmed by the data — but not all. In fact, several findings were disruptive and transformational, what Tran describes as “those moments of insight where we’re totally surprised by an outcome.”
For example, she says, “one of the things that surprised us was that spaces we had anticipated to be more social spaces were also used for intense focus.” In particular, the collaborative space with a high-top table and stools, designed to foster impromptu connection and collaboration, was instead used about 60% of the time for focused individual work. “So there’s this design intent versus user preference,” she continues. “We were surprised to see people happily doing focus work in an area we coded as a social area.” The high-top space was also more preferred for collaboration than the other two work-lounge settings, though researchers had predicted that the cozy living-room-like setting would be preferred. Tran’s personal analysis of why the high-top setting is so popular: People just seem to like standing up. “There’s this flattening of hierarchy that standing offers. It makes for a more pleasant social relationship that’s definitely worth investigating more deeply.” Also, while two of these collaboration areas included a large monitor for projection and videoconferencing, it was closer to users in the high-top setting, allowing them to see on-screen detail more easily.