ENRICHED WORKING
This article provides information on how to design a large office space where all employees love to work, especially in case of hybrid working.
Why now? Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan stated in his book 'Medium Is The Massage' once a new technology becomes mainstream, the old technology becomes art.
The cathedral is the most exemplary precedent of his hypothesis. Cathedrals were designed as multi media experiences where illiterate people could immerse themselves in God's bible by looking at stained glass, feeling enlightened with gothic architecture and feeling humble while looking up to sculptures. Paintings, sculptures and perhaps also architecture became an art when a new technology came in: the press. The ability to copy a book made 'reading' mainstream, making architecture, sculpting and paintings become ‘art’.
With video calls and working in the cloud becoming mainstream, the office space is not a utility anymore. The office building is in transition of becoming ‘art’. This research tells you everything about how to use physical spaces to their maximum ability to perform complementary to working online.
SSS CARE
The Triple S - CARE method is a guideline for setting up the right design requirements for office buildings ensuring maximum employee satisfaction. It is based on solving the two mayor problems at work: stress and sitting. It solves these two problems with satisfaction. For feeling satisfied, you need to experience three values: competence, autonomy and relatedness (2018). To provide physical well-being you need to provide enrichment.
SSS CARE
S OF SITTING
Together with stress, sitting is the largest problem at work. People who have a sedentary lifestyle are 49% more likely to die an unnatural death. The office as it is designed today is a huge part of that problem. Our bodies are evolved to move and our brains grew large because our bodies are able to execute very refined movements like playing a music instrument and writing by hand. The past decades we are designing our work to be digital, resulting into the ability to do almost everything without using our bodies. Sitting longer than 3 hours a day is already unhealthy, whereas people with a regular office job sit around 11,3 hours a day including time spend off from work (2013). Work (computers, desks and chairs) should be designed to keep people static for a maximum of 3 hours a day and for the majority of time light-active or active.
SSS CARE
ACTIVE SITTING
Before corona, the office building was a place that made people sit longer a day compared to sedentary hours at schools and universities. One of the most common complains of starters after working at the office for half a year was they were gaining weight. The office job made people need to be active with their lifestyle to make sure they remained in shape. During corona, we didn't leave the house and worked from home, making us gain even more weight and feeling more unhealthy. Compared to working from home, the office building made you commute, walk to different meeting rooms, have chats at the hallway and feel you changed environments.
If people work 50% of their time from home and for 50% of their time at the office, they will have half of the days a week a less active and unhealthier working day compared to working from the office 100% of the time. The office building should be designed to be more active and healthier compared to what it used to be, before corona.
SSS CARE
LIVING LAB
The more hours a day we use computers as working tools, the larger the design assignment for all office suppliers to match 'work' with our biological needs. The amount of static sitting hours should be brought back from 11,3 to 3 hours a day to make our current digital work environment suit the amount of movement our bodies evolved to be equipped for. That is a huge change that will not likely be a success directly. Instead, it is good to embed the transition in the design of the office itself. The entire office could be a living lab to figure out what type of physical designs suit what type of person best. Furniture can go through a workshop to get modified and adjusted based on employee feedback.
SSS CARE
S OF STRESS
The past years the costs of companies on stress related sick leave rises (TNO). When you predominantly communicate with digital means, you are twice as likely to get sick from stress compared to jobs you don't need to communicate digitally with. Working from home often includes more video calls, Whatsapp messages and emails making it more likely people get sick from stress. Also, the border between private lives and work blurs, making more difficult for people to stop working during their leisure time. Working from home results into more burnout cases and a longer burnout recovery per case.
There are groups of people who have a higher risk of getting a burnout. People who are single or separated, people who are in their early careers or who have a high specialization are more likely to get a burnout (2020). It would be good to pay extra attention to these target groups to make them feel at ease when they work at the office. For example: employees from a single household might benefit more with working from the office compared to employees who live with their families.
SSS CARE
PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT
People are less likely to suffer a burnout when they feel they achieved a personal accomplishment compared to when they didn't. The office design should anticipate on this.
A burnout happens when people experience emotional exhaust, depersonalization and lack of personal accomplishment (2008).
Personalization:
By designing the office with a lot of variety of working spaces, employees are able to choose depending on what they need for that moment and task. It is also important to give people the ability to appropriate the office to themselves. When they are able to make it into a place they belong to, it might lower their feeling of alienation; lowering the risk of burnout.
People are more likely to get a burnout when there is nothing done with their work after having given a lot to it. By exhibiting projects and giving high exposure to everyone who worked on such projects - even more important for projects which get discontinued - exhibiting could contribute to experiencing personal accomplishment. Using the office building as an exhibition space could prevent emotionally exhausted employees to get a burn out from it.
SSS CARE
S OF SATISFACTION
There are three psychological values an employee needs to experience to feel satisfied: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Autonomy is naturally facilitated with the home office.
Relatedness can be found in private life but also at co-working spaces.
The third element: competence, is not facilitated naturally at home nor at a co-working space. If you want employees to be satisfied at the office you must make employees feel competent. You feel competent when your skills, talent and insights are required from your environment. But how do you translate this into an office building?
SSS CARE
C OF COMPETENCE
Today, most trend forecasters tell you the office building will become a clubhouse (Relatedness). Meeting others as part of 'relatedness' covers only one-third of feeling satisfied. Relatedness is important and needs to be facilitated, but competence is the only characteristic an office building can truly facilitate, because at the office, colleagues approach each other to request their expertise. Something that is less likely to happen at home or in a coworking space.
When you design the office as a clubhouse, you miss the most important element only an office building can provide: the ability to make employees feel competent. Instead, you can design the office space that displays employee expertise in or with the building, showing what everyone is working on.
SSS CARE
HOUSE OF COMPETENCE
Competence is the single psychological component of feeling satisfied which is naturally provided with the office building. Being at work makes you feel competent, especially with office-type of jobs. To make people feel they are experts, it is important the office building expresses the knowledge of teams and individuals to enable people to send out and receive know-how from fellow colleagues. Therefor the post-corona office building will need to become a beacon of communication. Not only a digital beacon with professional broadcasting facilities, video conferencing and representative interiors for social media, but even more important it needs to be designed as a physical beacon of communication. For a knowledge-driven company the office building should do what a flagshipstore does for clients. The office building should communicate the company. And not to convince people to buy, but to extract the competence embodied by the people who are the company. But how do you do that?