Companies all over the world are trying to get their employees back into the office but are facing resistance from workers who have become comfortable with the work-from-home set-up. With many employees choosing to come into work three days a week, company managements are facing a new challenge of deserted workplaces on at least two days of the week.

“How do we design for this new era of hybrid working?” asks Dr Daniel Davis, the New York-based senior research lead at international design and architecture studio Hassell.

As companies try to ease their employees back by offering hybrid working options, trends reveal that attendance usually peaks in the middle of the week, with Mondays and Fridays seeing partially filled offices. These uneven occupancy numbers lead to cost inefficiencies because companies are still paying for rent, utilities and maintenance regardless of the number of people in the office. Additionally, a sparsely-filled office with minimal activity isn’t an attractive proposition for employees to return.

Worse, existing offices are not designed to handle fluctuating occupancy numbers, which means all resources and systems are still in use no matter how many employees come in to work.

So if you were going to start over, how do you design an office that is basically used only three days a week, feels vibrant on low occupancy days, doesn’t feel overcrowded on peak attendance days, and won’t waste resources?

Brief: An office that grows and shrinks

Hassell was approached a year ago by an Australian government entity (‘The Organisation’) to redesign their new headquarters. With their staff reluctant to return to the 5-day-a-week-in-office routine, they had already made some significant changes including downsizing from two buildings to one; and mothballing a few floors by turning off air conditioning, lighting, and power to make the office more operationally efficient against the low occupancy.

The Organisation sought to start over at their new headquarters by designing an office that suited their new, flexible way of working based on a similar strategy. The brief called for floors to be dynamically turned on or off to suit daily attendance numbers – essentially an office that would ‘grow and shrink’ flexibly.

Floors that open and close – with an algorithm

The new headquarters had nine floors, which meant that the floors that would be periodically opened and closed couldn’t house anything critical to the building’s functions.

Hassell’s design and strategy teams consolidated all the special facilities on the three floors of the podium. Housing the cafe, training rooms, kitchen, wellness spaces, IT facilities, client spaces, large conference rooms, and other unique functions, these floors would always be open.

The remaining six floors would accommodate the workstations, collaborative furniture settings, and meeting rooms, allowing these floors to be flexibly opened or closed based on daily attendance. However, given that the office would have enough desks only for half the workforce, and employees are encouraged to use the office only as a resource, the building managers would need to know – in advance – how many people will be there on a given day so that only the required number of floors is opened.

This is enabled by an algorithm that determines the number of floors to be opened based on advance inputs from employees about coming in to work. Each floor is divided into smaller neighbourhoods – essentially a cluster of workstations, meeting rooms, and lounges.

On arrival, the employee is directed to a ‘neighbourhood’ in the building where their team is located for the day; similar to activity-based working, there are no fixed desks, with people moving to different workstations each day.

“One day their team might be in a larger neighbourhood, the next they might be in a slightly smaller area, and on quieter days, their team might be consolidated onto a different floor. At the end of each day, they pack up their belongings and take them down to lockers in the podium,” explains Dr Davis.

Busy days would mean employees are placed in the same neighbourhood as their teammates. On slower days, the algorithm would group people with others from their larger functional or organisational team. Building occupancy levels are, therefore, not so obvious since access to each floor is controlled by an elevator and employees are seamlessly directed to the floor where they and the rest of the staff will be working for the day.

Ultimately, The Organisation will benefit from the optimised use of building spaces by saving on electricity and maintenance costs, and the outcomes are aligned with their sustainability goals. Employees would still continue to work in a lively and stimulating environment, regardless of the actual attendance.

Bold changes to the workplace might become the new reality, says Dr Davis. “Clearly, the pandemic has completely upended how most people and organisations work. At the moment, many of us are still grappling with what this means for the workplace. There’s been a lot of incremental workplace changes – more Zoom rooms, more comforts from home – but there’s also a need for more experimentation from the workplace industry.”

Hassell’s process

Over a period of nine months, The Organisation worked with Hassell’s design and strategy teams, through workshops, data analysis, and lots of discussion and testing of how the new workplace might operate. Hassell created physical prototypes of the space and ran a pilot where people tested the new workplace before everyone committed to the strategy.

Construction of The Organisation’s new headquarters is expected to be completed in early 2024.

Based on ‘The three-day-a-week office: A strategy for the new era of hybrid working’ by Dr Daniel Davis, senior researcher, Hassell

Photo credit: Earl Carter

Branko Miletic

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