How can the workspace accommodate employees’ desire for control?

We talk a lot about the destination office – the idea that workplaces must offer the facilities, amenities and experiences that lone working at home simply cannot. Much of this idea centres on supporting collaboration, but it’s also about enabling sociability, creating shared experiences, promoting learning and exercising choice.

Choice should be at the heart of the modern workplace experience and ironically it is the enforced home working experience of the last two years that really made this apparent. During this period, employees had ultimate control of their surroundings and behaviours, so much so that the workplace now requires a reinvention in order to be both relevant and appealing.

For the workplace to assume this new and exciting role in the post Covid era, we must first recognise how homeworking gave us increased control and over what – namely:

• The safety and hygiene of our environment (very relevant in a pandemic)
• Heat, light and noise
• Time (No commute means more time for other endeavour such as family, hobbies etc)
• Finances (Money saved on the commute, lunches, childcare, dog walkers etc – all very relevant considering the rising cost of living)
• How work and home life mesh together (putting the washer on at lunch, picking children up from school, caring for a relatives)

Through clever office interior design, greater use of workplace technologies and positive affirming workplace cultures, these same elements of choice and control can be offered to employees within the shared office environment.  Some of the most effective ways this can be achieved include offering:

• A wide variety of spaces – these might be centred on supporting different work tasks (quiet work, team collaboration) but also about personal needs (i.e. quiet areas for neurodivergent employees) or preferences (wanting to be in a livelier collaborative space, or an area that’s warmer or better lit)
• The ability to book facilities as and when they’re needed – this might be a parking space, a meeting room or a tech-led collaboration space.
• Intuitive plug and play technology throughout the office so that agility is possible and access to power and printing is seamless.
• Quick and easy ways to see which colleagues are in the office and where they are located – this is about being able to plan to collaborate and socialise with the people that matter.
• Clear behavioural guidelines so that people know how they can use spaces and what’s expected of them, i.e. leaving spaces clean and tidy etc
• Subsidised meals and great on-site catering – a good coffee with colleagues can make the office enticing
• Outdoor spaces – roof terraces and office gardens are common requests in office interior design. Not all employees have these space at home so access to them at work has real appeal.
• On-site health facilities – gyms and spaces for mindfulness so that people can incorporate health and wellbeing into their day with ease.

Choice is a hot news topic too. Recently, London law firm Stephenson Harwood announced that employees could choose to work from home permanently, but with a 20% drop in salary.  Some may argue this is not really a choice at all but rather a veiled way of forcing people to return to the office, especially considering the rising cost of living. But what it highlights is the challenges these new behaviours present, and that many businesses are still trying to marry them with what is right for the business.   As the global talent crisis worsens however, employers must adapt without delay.

Research commissioned by McKinsey[1] in 2021 revealed the pandemic prompted almost two thirds of employees to reflect on their purpose in life and almost half said they were reconsidering the kind of work they do. Significantly it was Millennials – the largest segment of the global working population – who were three times more likely than any other generation to say they were rethinking their work.  In other words, their priorities have shifted, and they’re not afraid to act. In a global talent crisis this could spell bad news as employees’ whose needs are not met could well be lost to other employers or even professions. Effective talent management, retention and recruitment relies on meeting these needs.

We live in a choice-led world – there are hundreds of ways to have your coffee and countless on-demand ways to be entertained. We can control our heating from afar and manage investments on our phones. We can also work from anywhere at any time – something that much of the global population now expects as the norm.

People-orientated and FutureFlexible businesses already recognise the importance of choice and control, and they are building it into their workplace experiences, organisational cultures and office interior designs.  It is these businesses that will appeal to the best talent and therefore, have the best chance of keeping employees engaged, motivated and retained. Those that deny employees choice and offer outdated working behaviours and workplaces, will almost certainly lose out.

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[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave