Is the Traditional Office Layout Making a Comeback?
It's all about office design and layout regarding productivity, collaboration, and employee satisfaction- and not quite every workspace should look exactly alike.
Though traditional office layout has fallen out of favor in most offices, some spaces are making a comeback. Find out how combining both traditional and modern features can promote an inclusive workplace culture.
1. Open Spaces
Open workspace is meant as a desirable design among most businesses due to flexibility and the bonding nature it brings. People are not divided by walls, partitions or individual rooms but instead have large spaces with minimal barriers and rows of desks arranged neatly-providing avenues for ease of communication and team working opportunities in industries like these which thrive on creativity, innovation and collaboration.
But this have its downside; lack of boundaries can sometimes result in a very uncomfortable venue; constant interaction would make employees disengage from the task and lose their focus on it; such an open layout office also includes having some specific areas for quiet work, group activity and socialization.
The offices of Bond Collective in New York and Philadelphia have open spaces, private offices and conference rooms to allow your team to truly enjoy the best of both worlds - come and see for yourself!
2. Sunlight
Conventional office layouts present a relatively definite setting conducive to thinking, thus engendering orderliness and stability. Such offices tend to house private spaces for individual thinking and formal meeting events as well as any other spaces that can create a working environment more professional than a common area.
Most workers moving from the pandemic said that it was not just a work-related destination but a cultural and social interaction with peers. They had even added far more cafe-like seating areas, open collaborative workspaces, and recreational or lounge spaces than before.
Exposure to natural light is known not to decrease sight stress and uplift mood but has been proven to enhance productivity and wellbeing at the workplace space. Employees should prioritize sunlight by placing desks next to windows or creating open space with glass walls such that light comes into every corner of their workplaces.
Desk booking software smart technology assists facility managers in accurately determining their buildings' occupancy so that they could have better insight while making design decisions. This sets ground for decision making concerning the number and placement of desks as well as any extra space that can be occupied for non-desk activities.
3. Collaboration
Collaboration is at the heart of workplace experience especially now where working from home and hybrid models have become really popular. Collaborative areas include individual workstations, meeting rooms, and areas where spontaneous breakouts take place; although commercially they end up being used far more than a desk in the office.
With collaborative spaces, productivity can improve, as this setup allows employees to mingle and discuss ideas, so morale will also improve, and time searching for equipment or resources diminishes.
There is also a need for writable surfaces and movable furniture to maximize the delivery offered by the collaborative spaces. Furthermore, encouraging employee involvement in selecting collaborative spaces ensures they align with company values while meeting the needs of the workers - for example, some roles such as client confidentiality may require privacy while others can work well in teams - is a sure way of ensuring that your favorite office layout meets employee demands. Finally, integrate data analytics into the planning process to avoid scheduling conflicts and optimize space usage.
4. Privacy
Under-recording the workers, a traditional office layout enables workers to feel at home and cozy in what was once a very remote-place shift in employee paradigms and that same shift has made a lot of the workplace feel safe and not judgmental for new hires, returning workers after time away, and really for everyone who works there. Different design and furniture solutions from multifunction desks that can turn into conference rooms to clever wall storage for furniture and resources could easily achieve this goal.
An office with this layout also provides employees with a private work area to use, ideal for jobs that demand heavy concentration. The many different functions also define the boundary lines between managers and their subordinates and define the boundaries between teams. On the contrary, this arrangement also hampers spontaneous collaboration and communication by having physical barriers.
A hybrid open-end office-in combining open space with private offices for different work styles and needs within an organization- can also be part of its hybrid work policy, allowing an employee to work at home but at the same time have an opportunity to meet with his or her team on site when required.
5. Flexibility
Flexible workspaces offer freedom in dividing up the different environments that employees move between during their working day-something that static workstations and offices do not encourage-but promotes spontaneous interaction across departments and encourages team collaboration and creativity.