Town Greens offer a relaxed, informal, and flexible community setting that encourages employees to collaborate and more frequently communicate.
Singular events such as pandemics challenge everything: established social norms, assumptions about how we should do the most commonplace tasks like shop and work, beliefs about what is truly important to everyday life. Because of their rarity, immediacy and severity, cataclysmic events such as the onset of COVID-19 also tend to shine a spotlight on social changes that may already have been in progress – but will now accelerate at warp speed.
Think about virtual work and the role of “place.” The past few months have prompted everybody – and we don’t mean just everybody in the real estate and workplace design industries – to think about the very nature of work, how and where it is done, and the relative importance of physical and psychological safety, connectedness, and socialization.
As more of us work remotely, which almost all of us will certainly do to some degree moving forward, the importance of place and creating communities of work will be more critical than ever. Ninety-nine percent of respondents in recent studies say they value the flexibility and security of working remotely. How can companies balance that understandable desire with the need to foster connectedness and a sense of corporate identity? What technological tools can help bridge the gap? How should physical space evolve to stimulate innovation, collaboration and engagement?
Community design, which has its roots in urban planning and focuses on enabling social connections and a sense of shared purpose by putting people at the center of the design process, has much to teach us about these questions. The essential insight of community design is that place can propel the relationships which lead to commitment and a shared mission for a group or organization.
Here are some thoughts for how to improve the sense of community and cohesion in the office – wherever it is – from workplace design innovators at Fidelity Investments, one of America’s largest asset managers and financial services companies, and Fifth Third Bancorp, a diversified financial service company and one of the largest banks and money managers in the country.