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May
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Best practice office design

Best office design – or how a modern office is designed

The best practice of office design and layouts is always undergoing changes and adaptions and reflects the requirements of the actual job and the tendencies in the society. The preference and acceptance of different work settings for office workers vary between cubicle, open-office, team-office, multi functional work-landscapes, shared desks, private micro pods, and many more.

The requirement of an office can be reduce basically to two main aspects: How to attract and keep the best possible employees and how to let them work as productive as possible.

These days, salary or financial compensation alone isn’t the only factor driving employees to a workplace. Today’s best employees demand a workplace that stimulates creativity, collaboration, and communication while also reducing stress and anxiety. Beside the physical aspect of this, the lived company culture and social bonds within the company are drivers for the happiness of employees.

The employee’s productivity directly affects your organization’s bottom line and success. Ideally you want a workplace that allows people to focus and concentrate whenever needed, and to collaborate and communicate whenever needed. You also want a workplace that is physically and mentally comfortable so that people can perform and function at their best.

Modern office design is striving to achieve the maximum of these two main aspects, attractiveness as an employer and productivity.

Framework of five work modes

To break down the individual aspects of a workplace, regroup architecture is using a framework of five work modes:

  • Focus – productive capital
  • Collaborate – innovative capital
  • Learn – intellectual capital
  • Socialize – social capital
  • Relax – wellbeing capital

An efficient and productive work environment needs to cover all of these modes, but the allocation of each mode depends on the company culture and type of work.

For each client, regroup architecture tries to develop an individual office landscape suits the clients needs today, but also is adaptable, multifunctional, and flexible enough for possible future changes. We start the design process based on these functions and combine them with the physical context of the office space and a design style resulting of the intended corporate identity.

Focus:

Each person has a different capability to concentrate and deeply focus within an office space. In generally it’s recommended to offer an isolated quite zone in an office landscape to reduce the distractions from co-workers. This type of workplace can range from an isolated armchair to an undisturbed niche to a tiny room that is soundproof.

Also the possibility for employees to partially work at home or in external room can help to increase the productivity.

Collaborate

Open office areas can enable intended or unintended collaborations between co-workers. The trend from specialised mono-functional teams to more diverse organised teams within an department also requires some sort of team office.

The more planned collaborations or project collaborations need some specific rooms. For example multimedia workshop areas equipped with screens, whiteboards, and pin boards for different group sizes. These areas need to be acoustically separated from the quieter workspaces, but should be visually exposed to the office to allow social spontaneous interactions.

On the other side, virtual collaborations with video systems need sound and light optimized rooms with adequate video conference equipment. Small soundproof rooms for phone or video calls enable privacy and reduce the noise level from the open office.

Learn

This aspect is not so much influenced by layout and space, but more on the actual company culture. Some of our clients are promoting further learning through external partners, workshops and lectures in their own town hall areas or large meeting rooms. Town hall areas are multipurpose open areas to gather a larger amount of people. Beside internal use for weekly and monthly heads-up company meetings, they are also suitable for events and workshops open to external visitors. Beside the “learn” aspect, socializing and shaping the external appearance of the company culture and style are the main benefit of these areas.

Socialize

A large hangout area with a kitchen will help increase social exchange. Casual chats often result in new ideas, solutions, and a tighter social network within the company.

A lounge area with sofas, armchairs, beanbags and coffee tables can be used as a break zone from the daily routine work or also be place for informal and spontaneous meetings. Eating lunch together with your co-workers in a canteen or café can be the time for casual brainstorming new ideas, discuss the latest projects, exchange chit chat, or run into your old colleagues and find out what they are currently up to. The strong social mesh between the co-workers will make the work environment more enjoyable and will also positively influence the employee turnover.

Relax

Employee well-being has a direct effect on their productivity. Offering relax-areas where employees can rest and take a power nap is still not yet widespread, but we could already realize some in office projects in Bangkok. Cosy armchairs, hammocks, sleeping pods, massage chairs are some of the possibilities to generate a relax zone. Privacy feeling without to be hidden is key to not loose the overall connection to the work environment.

Covid-19 Addendum

The COVID pandemic has forced us to make short-term adjustments in our lives like “work from home” strategies during lockdown, travel restrictions, and hygienic precautions. Some of these experiences have and will influenced and changed the way we navigate our professional work life. From our standpoint as architects, we like to map out a possible future of the workspace.

Short-term adaptations and changes made in response to the pandemic can be implemented in almost any office situation and layout. More distance between work desks, hand sanitizer stations, more regular cleanings of surfaces, contactless door opener and sensor light switches, just to name some of the elements.

What’s more interesting is the mid and long-term impact: how will we work in the future? What kind of office landscape will best support us in the way we work and collaborate?

COVID-19 saw our lives change nearly overnight. Many organisations quickly adapted to support a remote workforce. Digital transformations that would normally take months, if not years, were managed in weeks. While working remotely isn’t new, COVID-19 made it a sudden priority. We have built new skills in working virtually and found new ways to connect with our colleagues, clients, and friends.

Some surveys showed that most people want to return to the workplace fulltime or are looking for a balance between working remotely and in the office. We have proven that we can easily and efficiently work from home. This might be surprising to some, but focus work requiring deep concentration is reported to be exceptionally efficient at home while virtual collaboration also saw an increase in effectiveness. Nevertheless, we can’t effectively do all work activities from home. The workplace not only still matters, but it may be more important than ever.

Employees remain attached to coming into the office because of humans’ natural need for interpersonal connection. They miss the learning, coaching, and mentoring experiences that are more effective and meaningful when being together in the same space.

We believe that the future of our office life will be a hybrid of several physical and virtual offices. The company office will be a place for interaction, a place to develop and maintain the company culture. The home office or external co-work spaces will be complementary and virtual tools for video meetings will increase the efficiency of collaborations.