Although multiple mysteries remain to be resolved, it seems that the workplace design world is establishing standards for the how, the when, and the why of onsite office use. Employees returning to corporate offices will see workplaces that look different from those they left in March, but generally, the most extreme and draconian measures foreseen early on as necessary to keep workers alive and safe have not needed to be implemented.
The complex process of determining how the offices people will return to will be different from pre-COVID ones prompts the question “What should our offices do?” which is really just a different phrasing of “Why do we have offices?”
We could have a long, metaphysical sort of discussion about why we have offices, or we could get right to the point. Let’s “speak” frankly.
We have offices because they help us make money.
Offices help us make money as they support us in our efforts to add value to our “products” through our organizations.
Some people at organizations add value via tactical tasks that keep current activities purring along without incident. For example, they make sure needed supplies of raw materials are on hand and make sure customer queries are answered,. Many of these tasks can, for days and weeks at a time, happen from any place on the planet where employees can link to the Internet. For the individuals doing these sorts of jobs, periodic visits to “central” are particularly important for maintaining the social bonds with colleagues that are so useful in trying situations.
Other people at organizations add value by doing strategic work, their assignments have some connections to the here and now but many more links to the future. For these people, social ties with colleagues are important, but creatively/innovatively developing a future path for the organization is a much more powerful way for them to add value; and their creative/innovative thinking can add lots and lots of value.
As organizations shift their real estate portfolios, they need to keep this creative/innovative thinking top-of-mind. They need to ensure that there are onsite group spaces and individual ones (a lot of group work is done alone) that support creative/innovative thinking.
Environmental psychology makes it clear that creative/innovative performance gets a boost in spaces that feature shades of green on surfaces, green leafy plants, natural light, moderate visual complexity (a carefully curated set of colors and shapes that are distributed through the space in an ordered way, as in the interior of a residence developed by Frank Lloyd Wright), relatively high ceilings (at least above 10 feet), and nonverbal messaging indicating users and the contributions they make to their organizations are respected.
How to send these messages can vary from place to place so user research is required. Beyond the visual, creative/innovative thinking benefits from quiet nature soundscapes and the smell of cinnamon-vanilla (you have always known that there was a real, true, and important reason to eat Cinnabon).
For offices to “earn their keep” it’s clear they need to support creative/innovative thinking—and we’ll discuss the science of designing for creative/innovative thinking in more detail in future articles.
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009), Designology (Mango, 2019), and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.