Corporations May Want To Pay More Attention To Working-Alone Space In Bringing Employees Back To The Office

Janet Pogue McLaurin with Gensler, one of the nation’s gurus on predicting the future of corporate office layouts, functionality, and many other nuances of the office environment, wrote an article illustrating the key findings of a recent Gensler survey of CoreNet Global end users. ”Respondents rated the space effectiveness for each of the five work modes. The research revealed that the current office environment is working well for collaborating with others in-person, learning, and socializing. The office appeared to be working well to support the work activities that people cannot do remotely — collaborate, coach and mentor, connect, and build relationships with each other. However, the space effectiveness is not working for working alone and working with others virtually. In fact, those scores have declined considerable since pre-pandemic and are now at an all-time low. Working alone was ranked by employees as most critical to their job performance and requiring a high degree of concentration. Working with others virtually has become an important component of distributed work and global teams, with 56% of meetings occurring in the office having both in-person and virtual participants. Providing space to support both working alone and working with others virtually is critical to creating high-performance workplaces.”  Bottom line to me, group work spaces, conference rooms, foosball and collaboration space is all well and good but a sizable percentage of employees also want ‘working alone’ space.