The Workplace of the Future: Flexible spaces, egalitarian culture among predictions of professionals

Picture the workplace of the future.

It’s an exercise that’s more than academic. It’s what companies today have to do if they aim to continue being companies tomorrow.

Imagining the future of business includes envisioning the physical workplace as well as the employees and culture a company wishes to cultivate.

When Brad Erwin, principal architect with Paragon Architecture LLC, considers what companies might look like a decade into the future, he knows technology will be a large part of it.

“Tech everywhere might be a way to describe it,” he says. “The ability to plug in and share information and collaborate with others inside and outside of the room that you’re in is increasingly important.”

Businesses need to consider how they want collaboration to happen, he says.

“Are you coming into a room and one person is plugging into a screen and presenting, or is the goal for it to be a more collaborative environment where everyone has the same rights to present and share information?” he says. “That shapes how the room is designed – which furniture you’re selecting, how it’s set up, how you’re supplying tech needs to support the task at hand.”

Erwin’s vision of a roundtable approach to information sharing in the workplace dovetails with that of Patrick Carpenter, president of GRITT Business Coaching LLC, who sees a future of increased transparency in the workplace.

“It’s no longer ‘shut up and do your job,’” Carpenter says.

In the past, team members may have been given just enough transparency to complete the project they are working on within their segmented department. Carpenter envisions a future where information is shared, moving past the need-to-know basis.

“A lot of people think that when you do that, you’re going to lose control,” he says. “In actuality, when you tell people the truth, they tend to do the right thing.”

Where we work
When respondents to Springfield Business Journal’s 2023 Economic Growth Survey were asked about plans for their office space over the next five years, 55% said they expect it to stay the same, but more than a third expect to expand their physical footprint. Only 4% intend to downsize, and for 6%, plans were up in the air.

Some 62% of respondents said they own their business office location.

Erwin says the physical workplace matters.

“It’s important to create a space where people actually want to come to work,” he says.

People like to work from home, he notes – and that preference is being met, according to the survey results, which find 66% of companies allowing occasional work from home and 13% allowing it all the time. Only 21% never allow a WFH option.

Erwin says one of the benefits of working from home is that the worker has complete control over the environment – furnishings, light, heat, privacy and sound.

“Those are the benefits of working from home that are attractive to people,” Erwin says. “If you can create more control for each individual employee, there’s a higher likelihood you’re going to see them in the office, rather than working from home.”

Allowing employee control also allows space for neurodiversity and other differing work styles and abilities, according to Erwin.

An October Gallup Workplace survey found eight in 10 remote-capable employees expect to work hybrid or fully remotely from now on. The survey found half of all U.S. workers have jobs that can be done at least partly from home.

The study notes 40% of remote-capable workers have shifted from working entirely on-site to working hybrid or exclusively remotely, and only a fifth of remote-capable workers are functioning entirely on-site. Notably, eight in 10 chief human resources officers from Fortune 500 companies now say they have no plans of decreasing remote work flexibility in the next year.

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey published in June found 71% of builders and 68% of architects are receiving more frequent requests to convert existing office space for a different use than they did a year ago. In the study, commercial real estate professionals identified influential workplace trends over the next year as improving air quality (58%), accommodating social distancing (52%) and allowing for co-working (52%).

Flexible spaces
Jonathan Garard, co-owner of Grooms Office Environments, says technology used to dictate work environments. Workers had big desktop computers that were tethered to power and internet sources, and so they were stuck in one place for the duration of the workday.

“As technology changes, they realize, ‘Wait a minute – I don’t have to sit here to accomplish that. I can sit there or with somebody in a place that is convenient and comfortable,’” he says.

Having a vision of a company’s projected need is important in considering furnishings.

“We can’t begin to address what a company needs and how to support them if we’re not envisioning what the project will look like,” he says.

The process of designing for and fulfilling a company’s environment needs might take up to two years if building from scratch, he adds – and everything might look very different by the end of that time.

Grooms provides furniture – not just desks and workstations, but ancillary items, like privacy walls that double as bookshelves with sound-barrier qualities.

“A good firm does not come in and tell you how to work,” he says. “Our job is to actually help support how you work.”

And how people work changes over time, which means the key to meeting needs is flexible workspaces, Garard says – high-traffic spaces with the capacity to change.

“There are factors the world will press in that will force a company to shift right or shift left,” he says. “If a company doesn’t have flexibility, somebody else will, and you are suddenly not relevant.”

Cultural crystal ball
Carpenter says the savvy workplace of the future will harness the wisdom of its workforce.

“A lot of people create strategy at the top and try to push it down,” he says. “Employees never really get involved.”

Carpenter’s firm, GRITT, is part of wholesale food and equipment company PFSbrands, which he says is a $120 million conglomerate with 200 employees.

“The way we get employees involved is goal setting,” he says.

He notes Harvard University research finds only 17% of people set goals, and fewer than half of them write their goals down.

“The workplace of the future is going to have to address that,” he says, adding that continually educating the workforce on things they need to know – like financial literacy – also must be a focus.

Additionally, the workplace must foster the ability for workers to be authentically themselves.

“The workplace of the future is kind to what we do outside the company,” he says.

The youngest generation of workers comes to the workplace expecting it to allow them a rich personal life, he says.

“They want a nontoxic workplace where they can be who they are,” he says.

An early 2023 study from LinkedIn found 70% of Generation Z and millennial workers intended to leave their jobs in a year’s time.

“If they don’t feel good in your company, they’re out,” Carpenter says. “You can see the cultural scramble of companies trying to make the workplace a good place for people, and those are the ones who are going to win the war for talent.”