What If We
Shared an Office?
A Case Study for a New Hybrid Option
August 2024
Let’s be honest, the American workplace is overdue for a major overhaul. And while the real estate and design industries have known this, they’ve been slow to implement. We’re here to say, it’s time. With the surge in hybrid working and a new generation of workers demanding better environments to work in, we must address those issues and provide spaces where employees want to be.
The question then becomes, what is needed to create spaces where employees want to be? If we look at human behavior, we know that comfort and connection to a space comes from a person's ability to impact or control that space. Current open office design, especially one that relies on shared desking or “hot desking”, does not create an environment that allows for this control. A person cannot control the noise, light, smell, temperature, or in many cases even personalize their own desk. So how do we provide space for this control and personalization without taking up a massive footprint? Can we give everyone offices and what if they were shared?
The program for the workplace below has a mix of in-office and remote employees, where in-office employees work from home at least two days a week and remote employees are not required to be in the workplace save for special instances. We thought it would make sense if the in-office employees were the driver for the desking / office types provided. And with that, create a hierarchy not based on your level of employment, but on how often you are in the office. As you can see in the plan below, those employees that were in the office 4-5 days have an unshared office, employees in the office 2-3 days a week share an office with a like employee, and those in the office 1-2 days a week not only share an office with a like employee but their office doubles as a meeting space. In this example, we were then able to create 15 single person offices, eight shared offices, and three shared with meeting space offices for a total of 37 employees with dedicated desks.
Additionally in many hybrid offices, an employee’s choice of work space is a major part of the design for individualization. In this example, we still wanted to provide these spaces but not at the detriment of offices, which they frequently are. We also wanted to make sure that there was variety in the levels of quiet provided in other spaces. By angling the office walls, we were able to keep the square footage of the shared office to 125 SF, the size of most first or second level offices in a level of employment hierarchy. While the spaces opposite the shared offices could be enclosed, we instead created a sense of enclosure without fully separating the space. With the addition of acoustic treatments inside the space, it becomes a quiet and distinct space that can accommodate up to three employees. These spaces provide another eight to 20 focused spots for employees to work. For a more communal experience, this workplace also incorporates an additional 58 seats in the lounge and break areas. In total, this workplace provides 103 to 115 seats for employees in approximately 10,000 SF, allowing for 85 to 95 SF per employee, significantly under the 100 to 200 SF typically used in the first pass of workspace planning.
Competing with each employee's individual work from home space requires businesses and designers to look at the modern hybrid workplace from a more individualized perspective. We need to design for human nature. Spaces must allow people to personalize and impact their space. Hybrid offices have to move away from “hot desking” workstations, requesting employees leave their personal effects at home, and forcing people listen to the buzz of the open office while trying to concentrate. It’s time to think about bringing the qualities of WFH space back into the workplace, through the reintroduction of the office and rethinking the office assignment hierarchy. Additionally, what this workplace design proves is that these offices also become a design opportunity for creatively integrating a wide variety of working spaces, giving employees individualized spaces without exploding the square footage a business needs to lease…a new hybrid option.
