Exploring Modular Rooms over Fixed Rooms in the Modern Workplace 

Modular rooms are taking over the world, one workplace at a time.

Traditionally, fixed construction rooms have been an office staple, offering partitioning and privacy to commercial buildings across the globe. But as modern workplaces have evolved, so too has the importance of becoming malleable, sustainable and accommodating of the different ways in which people work. The ability to adapt to ever changing needs, while remaining sustainable in the long term, has seen the emergence of a new era of office design.

Enter the modular room: a future-proofed solution that answers growing demands for sustainability and new ways of working, alongside the ever-present, albeit less glamorous, need for projects to be delivered on time, on budget and according to regulation.

So what exactly is a modular room?

A modular room is a prefabricated room system designed to balance privacy and concentration with collaboration, standardization with adaptability, and quality with value for money. This paper from Schiavello puts modular rooms to the test, examining key benefits when compared to traditionally constructed fixed rooms across seven important areas.

The focus of this research is mid-size modular rooms for group meetings, which is an area the Schiavello Design Studio has expertise in, having spent years researching, engineering, and testing modular rooms of this size.

Let’s jump in.

Schiavello’s Focus Quiet Rooms are intentionally crafted to foster positive outcomes in these respects, modular rooms generally offer a greener alternative to fixed rooms in several ways. Photos courtesy of Schiavello

Sustainability: Our rooms are designed to reconfigure, relocate and re-purpose to maximize their useful life before refurbishing or recycling,” said Schiavello Design Manager Nick Tennant.

Perhaps the fastest growing consideration of the modern-day workplace is its environmental impact. Considered from design, to fit out stage through to reconfigure and relocation, environmental impact encapsulates energy, emissions, durability of materials and the re-use or recycling of products. While Schiavello’s Focus Quiet Rooms are intentionally crafted to foster positive outcomes in these respects, modular rooms generally offer a greener alternative to fixed rooms in several ways:

Using prefabricated modular rooms is less carbon intensive than traditional construction. While the carbon footprint of fixed rooms is rarely, if ever, monitored, a recent Bates Smart study (Modular Pods White Paper, with RLB and Renzo Tonin & Associates) concluded that modular rooms reduce the carbon footprint of a building before it becomes operational, otherwise known as a business’ Embodied Carbon Count. Contributing factors include reduced material deliveries, reduced transport of trades and equipment to site and delivery of finished product being completed in one go.

Integrated technology also delivers environmental benefits, with both the motion sensor and optional NX functionality optimizing energy usage.

As with all general construction, fixed rooms are designed and built to suit a space, not to optimize material usage. Conversely, the prefabricated nature of modular rooms promotes material efficiency by using wall and panel sizes aligned with material sheet sizes. Schiavello’s Focus Quiet Rooms uses this approach, designed and manufactured in a way that produces very little waste.

Where fixed rooms require intensive efforts to renovate or reconfigure, modular rooms are designed to be demounted and reassembled time and time again with minimal waste. Whenever any part of a fixed room is demolished, the materials go to landfill, contributing to further environmental breakdown.

Modular, reusable design facilitates a longer relevant and useful life of the product, which in turn allows materials and energy used in the making of the rooms to be amortized over a longer period of time.

A modular room is a prefabricated room system designed to balance privacy and concentration with collaboration, standardization with adaptability, and quality with value for money.

Hybrid Working: A future-proofed workplace must effectively deliver both privacy and collaboration, with spaces that foster a sense of calm and focus as well as connection.

Hybrid working, a trend accelerated by the pandemic, has shaken up offices worldwide. With more people wanting to work flexibly, both in terms of location and within a workplace, organizations must adapt to accommodate different styles of working. The purposeful workplace brings individuals and teams together in an environment that fosters connections, collaboration and innovation, with multiple spaces that curate experiences based on diverse needs. While fixed rooms can indeed be suitable for hybrid working, there are several benefits to dispersing a range of modular rooms within the typical team workstation zone instead, facilitating ease of access and spontaneous use.

In times of uncertainty where the role of the workplace is rapidly evolving, modular rooms offer a strategic advantage by mitigating risks associated with staffing fluctuations and reduced lease periods. Designed to be demounted and relocated without demolition, modular rooms can be seamlessly moved around a space, between floors or even relocated to future tenancies. In comparison, once a fixed room is built it’s difficult, costly and wasteful to shift due to wrong placement, wrong dimensions or changing business needs.

The surge in hybrid working, where on any given day teams may be dispersed across cities or even countries, emphasizes the need for easily accessible quiet spaces. Catering to phone calls and video meetings within a workplace involves specialized knowledge in acoustic performance, lighting and technology.

While fixed rooms can indeed be suitable for hybrid working, there are several benefits to dispersing a range of modular rooms within the typical team workstation zone instead, facilitating ease of access and spontaneous use.

Acoustics: In the age of open plan workplaces, workers are often faced with the costly problem of intrusive noise and poor concentration.

Speech clarity is more critical than ever with online meetings and the privacy requirements in open plan design,” said Tim Murray, senior engineer at Octave Acoustics.

Workplace acoustics play a significant role in employee wellbeing, with noise distraction and insufficient privacy contributing to impaired cognitive performance. Offering comfortable spaces where employees can concentrate without interruptions can enhance productivity and consequently benefit an organization’s bottom line. When it comes to acoustic performance, modular rooms promise a number of benefits that their fixed counterparts cannot.

Fixed rooms provide an unknown level of acoustic performance. Due to the involvement of multiple trades, there is no guarantee of achieving the acoustics specified and the verification process alone would involve additional costs. The advantage of modular rooms comes in their standardization.

As self-contained units, modular rooms avoid the acoustic challenges of in-ceiling service clashes. For a fixed room to be acoustically rated, it generally requires multiple layers of plaster that penetrate through the ceiling into a cavity containing power, data, air conditioning and pipes. Working around these services can be a complicated and costly endeavor, necessitating additional coordination and human-power on-site, with no guarantee of achieving acoustics specified. Murray said, Attention to detail is critical for noise and speech clarity issues. Modular rooms have been designed and tested to address these problems.”

Given the construction of fixed rooms happens for the first time on-site and they are not built as a manufactured system, final acoustic results may differ from prior laboratory testing.

Integrated Services: Focus Quiet Rooms offers fit-for-purpose lighting and ventilation solutions, with the ability to tailor those solutions to suit customers project specific needs,” said Tennant.

Ensuring comfort, productivity and safety in the modern workplace requires the seamless integration of services. These include essential services such as lighting, ventilation, sprinklers, power, and data, as well as more client-specific needs such as audio speakers. Modular rooms excel by offering pre-configured services solutions to deliver seamless integration into both new and existing builds.

Construction Timelines: Modular rooms arrive on-site as finished furniture, so they don’t face the same timeline risks as fixed construction.

An important component of any fit out, the construction timeline can vary significantly depending on the scope of a project. While this is the case for both fixed rooms and modular rooms, the latter has the potential to reduce time frames across the entire project timeline.

The construction of a fixed room involves the coordination of multiple trades working over multiple weeks — carpenters, plasterers, glaziers, painters, electricians, floorers and more. With numerous trades to coordinate in the one space, delays are inevitable. Modular rooms, however, arrive on site as finished furniture, alleviating the risk of trades delaying one another.

When building fixed rooms, trades will generally start on-site around a quarter of the way into the project and work right through until completion. In comparison, modular rooms can be dropped in place in the final 10% of a project’s timeline, at the same time furniture is installed. This allows preceding trades to complete their scope of work more efficiently, without walls and rooms obstructing them.

Modular rooms arrive on-site as finished furniture, so they don’t face the same timeline risks as fixed construction.

Cost and budget: Perhaps the biggest, yet least considered benefit is the fact you can relocate the room.

Commercial decisions often come down to a single factor: cost. Budget blowouts can swiftly derail an otherwise successful project, causing headaches for all involved. The key to staying within budget is understanding deliverables and associated costs from the outset, minimizing the likelihood of additional spending on defects and unforeseen challenges. There are several ways modular rooms can improve cost effectiveness where fixed rooms cannot.

In partnership with RLB, Bates Smart found that modular rooms for one to four people offer substantial cost savings over fixed rooms which have been upgraded to achieve the higher acoustic performance of a modular room. According to their cost review, mid-range modular systems are up to 44% cheaper than traditionally constructed rooms, with the percentage of savings declining as the rooms grow in size. In reality, it’s likely the savings made on modular rooms would be even greater given the review didn’t consider costs associated with the installation of HVAC systems, additional ceiling cavity works for acoustics and mechanical, and unforeseen challenges arising from heritage overlays or other existing issues.

Unlike fixed rooms where the possibilities are effectively endless, modular rooms offer a streamlined approach to the tailoring of walls, floor, lights, joinery, furniture, framing and glazing.

Workplace fit outs are rarely 100% perfect the first time. Usually the result of live testing, rather than any design flaw, it’s common for organizations to identify opportunities for improvement days, weeks or even months into using their new workplace. While workstations and loose furniture can be easily shifted to improve a live floor plan, the permanency of fixed rooms makes them expensive and difficult to amend. A huge benefit of modular rooms is that they can be treated as a furniture item — simple to move and cost effective to modify if the need arises. This facilitates huge cost savings on floor plan adjustments, expansions, relocations and at ‘make good’ at the end of a lease.

Legalities and Compliance: You want a room designed from the outset to meet and exceed all regulations, rather than something that’s been reverse engineered to comply.

Compliance and accreditation often pose significant challenges for a project, given the complex and differing regulations across sectors and markets. Schiavello’s design approach takes into account a broad range of building and environmental standards, with the aim to then arm clients with the knowledge to make informed decisions for their specific project.

Alongside these regulatory requirements, best practice accessibility has never been more of a priority, with organizations rightly emphasizing design that caters to all abilities within the workplace. Modular rooms and fixed rooms must adhere to similar standards but there are several considerations that put modular rooms ahead.

With a large focus and investment in research, product testing and customer support, Schiavello prides itself on its ability to assist clients in achieving product-specific compliance objectives. This includes not only investing in leading global product certifications (such as Declare and GECA), but also the supply of relevant test data where required.

As businesses work to keep up with changing needs and evolving workplace trends, modular rooms provide a stronger alternative to traditionally constructed fixed rooms in seven overarching ways: better sustainability, hybrid work suitability, guaranteed acoustic performance, streamlined service integration, adherence to timelines, cost savings and ease of compliance.

With that said, it’s important to note that not all modular rooms are created equal. Selecting a supplier with a solid reputation, good service offering and quality product is key.