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Presented By

 * Business
 * Management
 * Companies Are Finally Designing Offices for the New Work Reality


COMPANIES ARE FINALLY DESIGNING OFFICES FOR THE NEW WORK REALITY

A gathering and working space at NBBJ's new Flatiron offices.
Sean Airhart/ NBBJ
By Alana Semuels
May 22, 2023 9:20 AM EDT

When many companies were trying to get rid of their office space to save money
during the pandemic, the architecture and design firm NBBJ was doing the
opposite.

It took over the former offices of the clothing company Eileen Fisher in the
Flatiron district of New York City and started ripping out walls and creating a
28,000 square foot “living lab”—a space where the company could test what type
of design and layout works best for hybrid work. The idea wasn’t to force NBBJ
employees into the office five days a week, but instead to create a place for
hybrid work where people would actually want to come, despite the long commutes
typical in the New York area. NBBJ could then take what worked and use that as
the basis for designing offices for their clients also looking towards the
hybrid future.

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“We’re in the early stages of a deep recognition that the workplace needs to be
different,” says Steve McConnell, NBBJ’s managing partner and board chair, who
spearheaded the redesign.

The Flatiron space, which opened in November, feels like a mix between an office
and a social club, with conference rooms giving off living room vibes, thanks to
their homey bookshelves and couches; a lab where employees can look at tiny
models of buildings the company is designing; green carpets throughout that feel
like forest meadows; and rotating art projects on screens stretching towards the
high ceilings. It’s nearly twice as big as the company’s former office space,
and with its natural light and dark green tones, seems to communicate more “cool
Airbnb” than “office.”

NBBJ's new office have a variety of seating arrangements.
Sean Airhart / NBBJ

The commercial real estate market is still in the dumps, with office occupancy
at around 50% of pre-pandemic levels in the 10 largest U.S. cities, according to
Kastle Systems, which tracks unique card swipes in office buildings. Many
companies are now battling workers over whether return to office will be a
requirement and how many days will be mandatory, including Amazon, the Walt
Disney Company, and the New York Times. But now that the Biden Administration
has declared the pandemic officially over, some companies are ready to declare
hybrid work the new reality and are redesigning their offices accordingly—taking
advantage of low prices and desperate landlords and creating spaces in which
employees might actually want to work.



“We’re never going to force people back into the office, but we feel a sense of
responsibility to build an office space that is delightful,” says Holly
Barbacovi, the head of human resources at the video game maker Bungie, which is
nearly finished building its new office space in Bellevue, Wash. During the
pandemic, Bungie decided to allow for fully remote work; today, the company is
expanding its square footage from 80,000 to 200,000.

Such hybrid workplaces appear to be the future of corporate offices. Though 42%
of companies had a full-time in-office policy in the second quarter of 2023,
that’s down from 49% in the first quarter of the year, according to the Flex
Index, a database of surveys and publicly available information that tracks the
return-to-office policies of more than 4,000 companies. Further, around 30% of
companies now allow for hybrid work, up from 20% in the first quarter, the
report finds.

Rotating art exhibits pop up in NBBJ's new offices.
Sean Airhart / NBBJ

“I think a lot of employers are reenvisioning their offices to be better shared
offices, less places you go into to do heads-down work,” says Robert Sadow, the
CEO and co-founder of Scoop Technologies, which puts out the Flex Index. This is
happening more in certain companies than others, of course—around 63% of
companies with fewer than 500 employees are fully flexible, according to the
Flex Index, compared to just 13% of companies with more than 50,000 employees.



Some companies are completely rethinking the idea of a permanent office, says
Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School who has been
studying remote work for years. Some startups are deciding that the purpose of
an office is really to socialize, and they’re allowing employees to work from
anywhere, and then picking a place for people to meet occasionally throughout
the year to get to know each other.

A company called Zapier, for example, has company retreats where it invites all
workers to spend a few days in-person with their colleagues; the company pays
for flights, accommodation, and food, and organizes ways for people in different
departments to get to know each other. Gitlab, which Choudhury says is one of
the world’s largest remote companies, with 1,300 employees, allows employees to
be fully remote but has at least one offsite meetup around the world each year.

Women gather at a remote workspace in a rented home
Amina Moreau—Radious.pro.

New companies are forming to meet the needs of businesses looking for
alternative workplaces; for example, there’s Radious, an Airbnb-type app which
allows people to rent out extra space in their homes to remote workers, and
Project Pair, which helps Bay Area companies share hybrid office space.



“There’s a whole new generation of companies that are organizing work in a very
different way,” Choudhury says.


HOW TO FIX WORK

Even before the pandemic, many companies accepted that the office was broken.
The open floor-plan offices that seemed like such a good idea a few years ago
had become noisy places where workers were having trouble focusing. In 2019,
people spent an average of 47 seconds on a given screen before switching to
another, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004, according to research from Gloria Mark,
an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. Some companies
were even moving to four-day work weeks to try and give employees more focus
time.

Read more: The COVID-19 Pandemic Upended the Office. It’s Time to Radically
Rethink How We Work

Before the pandemic, one architect, David Dewane, came up with the idea for a
utopian office where employees had room to socialize but also do the kind of
deep work needed for many knowledge jobs—he called it the Eudaimonia machine,
for the Greek word that denotes a state of flourishing and prosperity. His
design had a gallery where workers would see material that would inspire them
and remind them of the purpose of their work; a salon where they could socialize
and have conversations, a library where they could do research; an office where
they could do expenses and “light work;” and then an isolated room for deep work
where they could focus. Today, Dewane is working with a design firm called
Geniant to help companies figure out the best office space for their mix of
workers.

Workers collaborate at a rented workspace in a home
Amina Moreau—Radious.pro.

“The old workplace is performative, what we are trying to get to now is places
where your space is enabling you to do your jobs at a higher level,” he says.



What NBBJ has found so far is that the new office needs to be a place where
people can gather, socialize, and be inspired. Not a place where they come to
sit under fluorescent lights in conference rooms and long for home. Despite the
NBBJ office’s large size, there still aren’t enough individual desks for every
employee; designers assume that people will want to also sit at long tables
where they can spread out papers, or at couches or comfy chairs.

“If you’re coming back to the office, you’re not coming back to sit at a
desk—you’re coming back to collaborate. So we worked out these areas and zones
where people could really come in and collectively work together,” says Suzanne
Carlson, senior corporate market director at NBBJ. Carlson’s preferred space:
the Living Room, which has a dark green carpet, a comfy gray couch with
blankets, a coffee table, and a big TV for Zoom calls. “If you work with leaders
in a conference room and then do a wrap up in the living room, the intimacy and
quality of sharing and openness shifts,” she says. “Space matters.”

LinkedIn headquarters.
NBBJ
LinkedIn headquarters.
NBBJ

Zach Russell, Bungie’s senior director of employee experience, says he wants to
make the office a place “where people want to come versus where they have to
come.” Bungie hopes its new offices will help people have the type of accidental
“collisions” that help companies be more innovative and also lead to more
workplace satisfaction. Work stations are on the outside of the office, and when
people get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom, they have to move to the
center of the office, where they run into other people. There are also some
wide-open spaces with couches and seating areas where people can hold Zoom calls
or play video games—and throughout, there are life-sized figures from some of
the company’s most popular games.



The company recently held an event at its new office space, and it proved so
popular that some remote workers mentioned the idea of relocating to be closer
to the beating heartbeat of the company, says Barbacovi. Now, Bungie has
launched a new policy allowing workers a relocation budget should they want to
relocate to Bellevue now or in the future.


FLEXIBILITY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE

Of course, many companies haven’t changed their offices at all. They’re still
deciding exactly what their working arrangements will look like and if they can
get people to come back into the office. The risk of a recession is also making
some companies hesitant to spend money on new digs.

But the pandemic has changed the way office design will happen, when it does
happen, going forward. “With the complete disruption to society and significance
of the pandemic—it’s well understood that these kinds of cataclysmic events
accelerate change,” says McConnell, with NBBJ.

Mitsubishi's office.
Sean Airhart—NBBJ
Mitsubishi's office.
Joshua Harding—NBBJ

Before the pandemic, for example, NBBJ didn’t spend too much time talking about
whether companies were hybrid when they were designing their offices. Now, the
firm always starts by asking companies what their real estate strategy is and if
they want to have a physical space in the future, and what their workforce
strategy is and whether people will be hybrid.



Read More: Why Return to Office Policies Spell Trouble for Working Moms

Though companies have different ideas about what a hybrid workspace looks like,
there’s one thing that ties many of these spaces together: they are flexible,
changeable, and may look different in a year or two.

The shoe company Brooks started looking for commercial office space in 2020—Tom
Ross, the firm’s vice president of finance, jokes that he was the only person in
Seattle looking for office space at the time. The company decided it didn’t want
to just have people come in now and again, but that it wanted an office where
people could collaborate frequently in person. But Brooks learned from the
pandemic that things could unexpectedly change again, so the company is working
with NBBJ to make the office as flexible as possible. And indeed, furniture, if
designed correctly, can be moved easily, as can walls, says Ross. “We designed
it in a way that we can make relatively quick and inexpensive changes if we need
to so that we’re not bound to a specific design,” he says.

The Living Room at NBBJ's new offices is a favorite among employees.
Sean Airhart / NBBJ

NBBJ’s new offices—the living lab—are flexible too. Walls can be moved and
furniture taken apart so a room becomes a gathering space or a seating area
easily. The desks and chairs are the first New York office iteration of the
Vitra Comma flexible furniture system, designed in 2022 to allow companies to
easily assemble and disassemble desks and shelves like scaffolding. There are
art installations that change over time, and projects that the company is
working on are laid out in the open, in a way that welcomes feedback from
colleagues. “We want this to be hackable, flexible, if people come back in two
months it will look different,” says John Gunn, corporate practice lead with
NBBJ.



There’s one thing that companies like NBBJ can’t change when they redesign new
offices: housing prices, the factor that has driven so many workers to live far
away and not want to weather long commutes to the office. But Gunn and NBBJ say
they hope that they can design offices that will make people want to come in,
even if they have long commutes. Gunn, for example, lives in Beacon, which is a
two-hour commute, one way, from the new offices. He’s in just about every day.

More Must-Reads From TIME

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Contact us at letters@time.com.


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