Regardless of the enduring reputation of distant and hybrid work, many companies have embraced plans for brand new workplace headquarters, campuses, and buildings, remaining satisfied that workers have to return to the workplace to maintain excessive ranges of productiveness and really feel linked to their firm tradition (or simply to manage their workforce, relying on who you ask).
The primary section of Amazon’s second headquarters is scheduled to open in Arlington, Virginia, within the third quarter of this yr (although building of the second half has been indefinitely delayed). Apple continues to be planning a brand new campus in Durham, North Carolina. And whereas Google is planning to surrender some leased workplace house, it nonetheless intends to interrupt floor this yr on an enormous San Jose workplace and residential mission.
However with workers properly conscious of—and sometimes in love with—their newfound capability to earn a living from home, initiatives like these now have to fulfill new standards: find out how to make the workplace a spot that folks—such as you, in your hypothetical Bethesda existence—truly wish to go to, even once they don’t must.
The reply, to date, includes including design options and perks that attempt to be extra significant than these of the prepandemic latest previous. Open ground plans full of a sea of desks are out. Non-public assembly areas and versatile one-person workplaces are in. Planners like to speak about “amenity-rich environments,” which means not simply pool tables and workplace snacks however extra sensible choices akin to considerable personal workplaces and assembly areas, gyms, dentists, retail, and childcare.
They’re all wrapped inside buildings that extra usually function pure mild and out of doors house, sit at a central city location, welcome the encompassing neighborhood on at the least the bottom ground, present providers exterior the standard remit of employer advantages, and supply versatile methods of working fairly than an array of desks. The general bundle, architects say, ought to produce a sense of consolation—even luxurious—within the workplace that competes with that of staying at residence.
“Going to the office needs to be extra handy than it’s to earn a living from home, in order that the office earns its commute,” says Grant Kanik, a associate and office marketing consultant for architects Foster and Companions, which led the design for Apple’s headquarters, Apple Park. “I name it corporate-to-comfy,” says Brian Parker, principal of the Interiors Studio at Cooper Carry, a agency that designed the State Farm workplace campus in Georgia and had been tapped to work on Microsoft’s potential Atlanta headquarters earlier than the plan was paused.
Earlier than the pandemic, workplace buildings and campuses had been usually constructed nearly to a method, Parker says. The variety of workers, share of various kinds of jobs, and predictions about future headcount development went in a single finish; out the opposite got here the variety of desks and sq. ft required. Operate dominated over type. The design work might even be boring.
Underneath that mannequin, most workplaces had been structured with about 80 p.c of usable, useful ground house for desks and 20 p.c for assembly rooms. Designers spent most of their time drawing ground plans with completely different iterations of desks and workplaces and tucking convention rooms into the corners. Even earlier than the pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon for a 3rd and even half of all desk house to go unused throughout components of the day, Kanik says. Corporations that did handle to closely use their house usually did so on the expense of creating staff really feel packed into the open ground plan.