What does the post-pandemic “new normal” look like? There has been a surfeit of-return-to-the-office stories, but they have been told, for the most part, by commercial real estate giants who provide an overall, 30,000-foot view based on their leasing data. Here, however, is a Ground Zero case study told from a “boots-on-the-ground” granular perspective of how the new office is configured.
POI, with seven Ontario locations (Barrie, Kitchener, London, Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, Vaughan, Windsor) and 170 staff, is Canada’s largest Steelcase dealer and indeed largest interior solutions and services provider, with flooring, audio-visual, architectural walls, project management, and relocation and decommissioning services as well as contract furniture divisions. The firm reps over 200 manufacturers.
In September 2021, POI closed its former 30,000-square-foot Toronto-area showroom and office and built LivingLAB, only half the size of their previous digs thanks to their hybridized workforce. Not a showroom in the traditional sense, with a full range of furniture and textile samples on display, LivingLAB aims instead to showcase POI’s thought leadership.
“We’re a thought leader in hybrid work and the integration of technology, furniture and architecture,” said POI CEO Jonas Scholl, the third generation to head the family firm founded in 1958. “Yes, we sell furniture, but we’re not a commodity business, we’re about solving problems. We solve for all different types of collaborative and focused work as opposed to leading with furniture.”
First-time visitors are struck by the LivingLAB’s Fifties retro Scandinavian lightness. It looks more like a lounge, upscale food court or private club than a typical office environment; it’s “uncorporate corporate.” The guest lockers at the front, where visitors can securely park their belongings for the day, reinforce that initial club impression.
A walkthrough conveys several ideological messages, starting with wellness (plenty of natural light and open space, sound masking throughout for quiet serenity, and surgically purified air), flexibility (no drywall partitions other than the building’s pre-existing demising walls) and business casual (many curving, biomorphic shapes that spur relaxation).
As their website states, “At POI, we’ve been taking the hybrid road for some time and have gained valuable insights on what employees want in the workplace. Our state-of-the-art LivingLAB is an experiment that we engineered to assess how spaces are being used and what resonates with our employees when they choose to work in the office. “
Two years in the making, LivingLAB was not a response to events such as COVID and the return to work because, “This too shall pass.” Rather, LivingLAB is a research-based model of the workplace of the future, one that empowers staff by embracing democratization (the experience of remote workers closely approximates that of workers in the office, resimercial (the relaxed atmosphere and homey feel of residential furniture in a commercial or corporate environment) and free address.
LivingLAB is 99-percent free address, where people can sit anywhere. The only folks boasting residency are the concierge and the IT squad. There are closed, quiet spaces as well as lively spaces for those who like to do focus work à la Starbucks while drawing energy from the noise and bustle around them. Giving people the autonomy to make choices is key in shaping a successful free-address environment. LivingLAB has an equal balance of closed to open collaborative spaces.
Once past the concierge, the first neighborhood one sees is the Front Porch, the most flexible and client-facing neighborhood, where all furnishings are on casters, enabling client teams to experiment with varied configurations. However, there are no expectations that clients will be enchanted by a setting and order a dozen.
Next come team rooms of different sizes and seating, all with wireless casting from laptops to the room’s TV. (Spaces connected by a spine or panel are bookable; freestanding spaces are non-bookable.) “Clients with standard conference rooms and breakout rooms like of the variety of collaborative settings. No two spaces are alike,” Scholl said. “This inspires them to think about their space in more variety.”
There’s a tactile, rather than digital, sample library for specifiers to touch and feel, and the requisite work café, but no foosball table—POI’s not trying to be Apple. Near the café stands the Story Wall. Sectors of the big, mesmerizing screen display rotating company bios, photos of legacy locations, bits of old marketing material, project case studies with renderings and shots of the finished work, software that tracks POIs fleet of delivery trucks, and coming soon, a wormhole into the Steelcase Worklife Showroom downtown as well as POI’s other offices.
Living up to the “laboratory” aspect of its name, LivingLAB features an automated data-collection process to survey users’ reactions. Every setting has a QR code that users can scan on their cellphone to give feedback quickly and easily, enabling POI brass to spot trends and tweak the workplace.
“The changes we made are micro changes that you probably wouldn’t notice,” Scholl noted, “such as putting more cloaking film on glass walls in rooms that people were hesitant to use if they were going to project confidential information onto the screen.”
Another tweak was to a space called the Work-Tent where people can, in POI parlance, rejuvenate. Initially furnished with a lounge seat, the Tent was underused. After the seating was replaced with a height-adjustable desk , occupancy increased, an ideal blend of form and function.
POI management side-stepped the fraught post-pandemic issue of ordering staff to return to the office. “Our hybrid policy is: We don’t mandate a certain number of days. Our thinking is that if you create a great hybrid space, one that inspires, people will gradually come back without being mandated,” Scholl said. “People are comfortable in the category they’re in. If they’re coming in three days a week, they’re not moving to four. If they’re coming in two days, they’re not moving to three.”
Scholl explained that he remains optimistic, even amid lingering concerns in the industry. “We had a very good year last year. After a dip of 40% during COVID, we were back to within 5% of our pre-pandemic revenue levels; 80 percent of our business was our core furniture business and 20 percent came from what we call Connected Solutions. Our mission in 2023 is to create spaces people want to go to.”
Still, he’s mindful that, according to CBRE, Toronto’s downtown office vacancy rate reached 15.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the highest level Canada’s largest office market has had since 1995. “Because of that, we’re focused on diversifying from large corporates and focusing on education, healthcare, and mid-market projects.”
No doubt, POI will soon highlight their thought leadership in those markets as well.
David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com.