Back in the Pleistocene when I was a Knoll sales rep I was in a meeting with designers who were specifying our products and the vice chairman of a largish financial institution who was in charge of the project. I was pitching the idea that the beauty and functionality of our Stephens System would make people happy to work there, leading to talent retention and greater productivity.
I was just getting started when the client rather rudely interrupted saying, “I don’t give a damn whether they like it or not; they’ve got a job and a place to do that job. If they don’t like it they can go somewhere else.” As I said, that was a long time ago. It was around the time Bob Dylan wrote “The times they are a-changin’.” And fortunately for many office workers, smart companies realize the truth in the concept that happy, healthy, engaged workers help build successful companies.
Even in the Pleistocene we had a hunch that if an office functioned well and also looked good and felt good, people would be more productive and hang around longer – the problem was we didn’t have any proof. For a long time design firms have been doing post occupancy surveys. These studies may have been primarily motivated by the desire to learn what worked and what didn’t and as a means of improving the effectiveness of their own designs going forward. And at first the data gathered by each firm was considered proprietary and not shared, but that is no longer the case. For several years now, Gensler, HOK, Perkins + Will, and Studio O+A among many others have been actively sharing knowledge of what workers want as well as the effects workplace design has on the attitudes of workers.
As business leaders more enlightened than my vice chairman above began to think about how to keep employees and more importantly how to keep them engaged and productive, they began doing surveys of their employees to gauge the impact of various types of benefits on talent recruitment, retention and engagement. But again, these findings were largely considered company specific or proprietary or both, and not shared. That too is changing. Now one can frequently read articles about the effects of workplace design in the popular press such as Fast Company, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
This past week Capital One released the results its survey of, “2,500 full-time office professionals [who were asked] to share their preferences and priorities when it comes to their workplace design, environment, and benefits.” Interestingly, these were specifically not Capital One employees.
When I spoke with Erin Mical, Senior Director, Workplace Solutions at Capital One about the survey, I asked her why Capital One would undertake a big study of other peoples’ employees. She said, “Capital One is a data driven organization and we have wonderful data on our Capital One Associates. But in order take the pulse of the industry, to benchmark and understand what our neighbors are doing and get lessons learned and inform our future design, we thought it important to invest in understanding what’s going on outside our company to help inform what we do inside.
In the end, one of the things that really stuck out for me was that what external people are looking for in the workplace is exactly what Capital One associates are looking for. Having concrete evidence of that, reinforced that we have been thinking about it the right way and gave us a lot of confidence as we design future spaces.”
In its press preview of the survey the company stated, “The Capital One Work Environment Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com). We surveyed 500 office professionals, all employed full-time, in each of the following DMAs (Designated Market Area): Chicago, Dallas, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The survey was conducted between May 24, 2017 and June 7, 2017, using an email invitation and an online survey. Quotas have been set to ensure reliable and accurate representation of the employed population in each DMA.”
The results of the survey reinforces what I regard as some of the pillars of current trends in workplace design. For example, given the ability to choose “all responses that apply” from a list of attributes, 62% of respondents chose access to natural light as being important to them. Note: this question doesn’t rank the importance of one attribute vs. the others but it indicates that natural light is important to the most people. Dare I say it was the “most popular” attribute?
Perhaps it’s a bit surprising that more people chose the presence of “artwork and creative imagery” than “easily configurable furniture and spaces” but at 44% and 43% respectively, there isn’t a statistically significant difference between the two or probably even those two and the presence of “collaborative spaces.” But clearly, access to natural lighting, easily configurable furniture and spaces and the presence of collaborative spaces all fall within the scope of my pillars of current trends concept.
Not surprisingly, 85% of respondents believe flexible workplace design is important and 82% reported having their best ideas when they are able to use “flexible” workplace options, where that refers to having options to choose how and where they work. 62% reported having such choices at their current workplace – better than I would have imagined.
Interestingly, 82% of respondents believe that “companies cannot encourage innovation unless their workplace design and environment is innovative.” That one would be very hard to prove. It would be interesting to be able to see the workplace design of Edison’s offices or Bell Labs or even the more recent offices at Xerox PARC – some of our history’s most innovative “offices” – to better gauge the veracity of that belief. But at 82% it is believed by a larger percentage of respondents than the percent of Americans who believe climate change is influenced by human activity.
A finding that can’t really be challenged is encouraging for our industry but sad on its face. 60% of respondents agreed with the statement, “My company’s current workplace design and environment does not encourage me to be innovative.” Encouraging because it means there’s still plenty of crusading to be done out there in the world of commercial office design…sad because…well that’s obvious.
When asked to choose from a group of on-site benefits their companies currently provide, “relaxation/social areas” topped the choices at 44% followed by “on-site healthy food and beverage choices” at 41%. When asked what benefits they most wanted those two choices again topped the list, but the order was reversed.
This is just a sampling of the findings. My purpose here is to let officeinsight readers know the study exists and that it provides significant insight into office workers’ preferences in office design and furnishing. It is great to see that Capital One is willing to both invest in such a study and share the results with our industry and the world at large. To get more specific detail, please refer to the Capital One press release, here.
