We’ve been talking about inclusive workplaces and universal design for some time at Workplace Trends, even as far back as 2014 with Steve Maslin, and more recently with Kay Sargent and many others. So we’re grateful to see it being discussed more widely now.

The BCO have recently produced their Designing for Neurodiversity publication, authored by Josh Artus of The Centric Lab. We’re delighted that Josh will be speaking at Workplace Trends this October 18th.

In the session following Josh we’ll also hear from Tree Hall, CEO of Charity IT Leaders, who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 47. She’ll be exploring what autism means to her, and how it has shaped the way and places she can best work.

Josh has recently been featured on the Workplace Geeks podcast with Chris Moriarty and Ian Ellison. Have a listen to the episode here.

Tree has also been active in the media with a recent interview with the Starts At The Top podcast and you can listen to her being interviewed here.

You can listen to and meet them both in person at Workplace Trends: The Office as a Desired Destination on 18th October. Limited numbers of early bird tickets are currently available now on our website. Or to go direct to our ticket link click here.

Click the photos to listen to Josh and Tree.

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Featured Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

How does the office fit into the new ecosystem of work? How can we build sustainable office spaces that meet new expectations? What is the wider implication of hybrid working on our cities?

Join our session at the Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023, where Kasia Maynard of the Gensler Research Institute reports on recent research and the ripple effect of hybrid working.

The latest research from the Gensler Research Institute explores how to best enable hybrid working, optimise the office environment, meet goals of NET zero, whilst also maximising employee experience and engagement. The research highlights innovative case studies for sustainable design, alongside cutting-edge data on 30 cities across the world, and new survey results from UK workplaces. As hybrid working develops in maturity, there is a greater opportunity to design workspaces that are sustainable, customisable, and effective.

The acceleration of hybrid working since the global pandemic has prompted a paradigm shift in the way we work. Professional workers have more autonomy and flexibility to choose where and how they conduct their work. As a result, a new scenario for work is emerging in the aftermath of the global pandemic that will change the way office buildings are used in the future.

Gensler has studied the UK workplace since 2005. We have mapped the trajectory of how employees work, the relationship they have with their office, and the effectiveness of space. Since the pandemic, we have seen a sudden shift. While the office remains a critical component, it is now part of a wider network of channels in which employees can access work. This has prompted a wide-scale re-evaluation of the role of the office to compete as a desirable place to work.

For the first time, the office has been challenged to rethink its approach to curating experiences amid a new context where employees expect more from their workplace. As hybrid working patterns become more established, employees will seek to customise their work experiences. They will choose workspaces based on their ability to facilitate the type of work they need to do.

Therefore, the office needs to be prepared for all eventualities. There is increasing pressure to create offices that cater for every need of the modern worker, whilst also being conscious about space and energy efficiency. Gensler’s research demonstrates practical case studies and applied research to indicate where the future workplace is heading based on more than 15 years of longitudinal data.

The shift to more flexible working has revealed a potential to make more sustainable decisions about the office. As an industry, we are witnessing universal momentum around addressing the urgent issue of climate change. This year will be marked by the passing of new legislation with the aim of reducing carbon emissions. This is reflected in the new position of the British Council for Office (BCO) to reduce office occupancy density and eliminate Cat A office fit outs. The momentum is propelled by new expectations of work and the office which has prompted more conscious decisions around how we use office space. The presentation will showcase case studies of Gensler’s pioneering climate action solutions that use creative, innovative design approaches in offices around the world.

This presentation will draw on data from Gensler’s latest research data including Climate Action – a catalogue of innovative sustainable case studies; City Pulse – a survey of urban residents in 30 cities around the world; and the UK 2023 Workplace Survey of 2,000 UK office workers. The research knits together the wider implications flexible working has on our workplaces, cities, and the world.

Find out all the details, the outcomes, recommendations from this research and the related case studies at the Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023 in London and online.

Kasia Maynard, Gensler Research Institute

Kasia Maynard is a researcher and writer with a background in the future of work and urban design. She holds an MA in Urban Design and Planning and has more than six years’ experience forecasting trends on the future of work. Kasia works across the global workplace surveys published by the Gensler Research Institute. Prior to this, she worked as an editor with the WORKTECH Academy – a global platform focusing exclusively on the future of work and workplace. She has presented research and insights on the future of work internationally, delivered workshops, and facilitated panels with prominent thought leaders across the industry.

Join our session at the Workplace Trends Research Summit where we deep dive into the key insights from the Future Forum quarterly survey of 10,000+ global knowledge workers. We’ll be discussing the latest data around hybrid working, workplace management and office design to help you prepare for the future of work.

Laptops and Wi-Fi untethered workers from the office years ago, but it took a global pandemic to spark a widespread acceptance of distributed work. Lessons learned over the last two years point to a historic opportunity to reimagine the role of the modern workplace.

To help you prepare for what’s next, we have delivered actionable insights along with practical solutions that offer immediate and long-term support for the future.

We’ve gathered some eye-opening data and created some probing thought-starters to help you evaluate where you are on the path to the future of work—and what needs to be done get you where you need to be.

Here’s some of this quarter’s data that we’ll discuss in detail:

• The percentage of employees surveyed who want flexibility in where they work
• The percentage of employees surveyed who want flexibility in when they work
• The productivity rates that are being reported by workers who have full schedule flexibility
• What percentage of employees surveyed want to be full-time in the office (an all-time low)
• The percentage of employees surveyed who want to be fully remote
• Among executives, how many believe they are being “very transparent regarding post-pandemic remote working policies,” but how many of their employees agree
• How organisational transparency affects employee churn.

Uncertainty is likely to increase in the future. Adopting a hybrid workplace strategy allows organisations to adapt to unforeseen circumstances because people are already working more flexibly. It’s a way for organisations to be more resilient.

But it’s not enough for organisations simply to support the choice of where people might work on a given day.

They also must ensure the quality of those choices—whether working at home, in a co-located office, or elsewhere—with resources and support to ensure equitable experiences for all of their people.

We’ll go on to provide the 3 major reasons for “What motivates people to come into the office today?”

We looked at the types of interactions that largely went under-supported while people work from home. We reimagined the modern workplace as an on-demand destination for employees who are seeking out specific experiences that are difficult to replicate at home or elsewhere.

Previously, many of the best workplaces were designed for activity-based work. That’s still a useful approach, but we’re seeing a subtle shift with increased focus on the value of relationships and experiences at work.

With that evolution in mind, we’ve developed a new typology of spaces to streamline the process of identifying desired experiences and to help visualise options for real support. The space types are grouped by the primary level of personal interaction to be supported—individual, group, or community—and by the predominant nature of interactions to be supported, whether people are seeking to produce a tangible outcome or exchanging information and reflecting upon the results of that work.

Find out all the details, the outcomes and recommendations from this research at the Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023 in London and online.

Bertie van Wyk, Insight Programme Manager, MillerKnoll Insight Group

I am a critical thinking Workplace Specialist with a quick grasp of emerging trends and changing business processes. Through my understanding of human-centric design and workplace strategy, I can effectively equip organisations and individuals with the knowledge and skills to become more productive, healthy and connected in work.

The work environment has undergone significant change in recent years. Individuals and organisations have experienced the benefits of fully remote working, causing many people to shift to partly working from home as a definite. So exactly what is the relationship between hybrid working and employee engagement?

This major evolution in the way we work causes ambiguity in organisational policymaking. Unfortunately, academic literature on hybrid working about the organisational phenomenon is not readily available. Yet it is evident to say that hybrid working is here to stay and will have an enormous effect on organisations in the following years.

This study focused on analysing the perceived impact of hybrid working on affective commitment and employee engagement. This relationship was further explored by concentrating on the moderation effect of the high amount of introverted employees in the organisation.

The research was completed with a large set of respondents from the Eindhoven University of Technology, NL. The outcomes of the study were determinants for the policy on hybrid working for the university, more specifically the supporting staff and workplace conditions.

Statements from the original Meyer and Allen self-administered questionnaire were used to measure individual levels of affective commitment. To address personality traits, the original Big Five Inventory extraversion scale of John et al. (1991) was used. Hybrid working was measured by using a validated scale on flexible work and a self-developed vignette scale.

Find out the outcomes and recommendations from this project at the Workplace Trends Research Summit #WTRS23 on 19 April 2023 in London and online.

#EmployeeEngagement #HybridWorking #OrganisationalCommitment

Esmeé Bechtold, Policy maker, Eindhoven University of Technology

My name is Esmeé. Most people know me as always positive and creative in coming up with solutions. I get energy from challenges and function best when I am surrounded by many inspiring people and processes. Everywhere I go I try to see the bigger picture, challenging myself to find the improvements.

My greatest strength? That’s my high sensitivity. As a result, I always have an eye for detail, I am more than motivated to learn, and empathy is ensured. 😉

Do you feel that I have inspired you? Do not hesitate to contact me!

Four Day Work Week Pilot 2022: UK Workplace Results and Learnings, with Kyle Lewis, Autonomy Research Limited

The world’s largest national four day work week pilot took place in the United Kingdom for six months during 2022, with over 60 companies taking part.

We’re delighted that Kyle Lewis of Autonomy, the pilot’s research coordinator, will present the results and key learnings in this session at our Workplace Trends Research Summit, with a focus on its implications for the workplace. This presentation will provide valuable insight on the impact a four-day week can have in making teams and workspaces positive places to be. The four-day week is a rising trend across many sectors, and understanding its strengths, practical requirements and risks is vital for all workplace professionals.

An overview of the trials:

Between June and December 2022, around 3000 workers based throughout the UK and representing more than thirty sectors, received 100 per cent of their pay for 80 per cent of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least 100 per cent productivity.

The pilot has been coordinated by 4 Day Week Global, in partnership with us – leading think tank Autonomy – the UK’s 4 Day Week Campaign, and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.

This experiment has gained national and international media coverage, drawing interest from the Economist, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Times, the BBC and many others. It led to a bill on the four-day week being tabled in parliament, and enquiries for our workplace consultancy services have risen dramatically.

The pilot has collected qualitative and quantitative data on the impact of a four-day week on the participating organisations. This has covered (though not been limited to):

• Employee wellbeing and stress
• Employee work satisfaction and experience
• Recruitment and retention
• Productivity and output
• Family and personal life
• Energy use

The UK programme has run alongside similar pilots in Ireland, the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Israel, and is accompanied by many firms commencing trials or implementing a shorter working week independently. What stands out in particular about the UK programme concerns its size and scope.

This presentation will provide an exclusive in depth exploration of the data collected over the course of the programme and provide expert analysis on what the research indicates about the future of working time and its reduction within the UK and beyond.

One of the key learnings the presentation will focus on concerns the growing interest in the four-day week shown from non desk-based sectors. Switching to a four-day week is evidently a growing trend, particularly among desk-based work settings. However, the UK pilot programme demonstrated that the take up of the idea is starting to be implemented within sectors typically thought of as being ‘non-compatible’ with four-day week practices (manufacturing, logistics and hospitality). The presentation will focus on these particular case studies from the pilot in order to provide new learnings on what the data reveals about the non-typical four-day week work environments.

Find out the outcomes and recommendations from this project at the Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023 in London and online.

Kyle Lewis, Director and Head of Consultancy, Autonomy Research Limited

Kyle co-founded Autonomy and leads on our shorter working week consultancy and research. With Will Stronge, he is the co-author of Overtime (Verso, 2021) and managed the research branch of the UK’s four-day week pilot in 2022.

Kyle has project managed the majority of our consultancy projects, leading client interaction, drafting reports and guiding our interview, workshop and survey processes. He is currently completing a PhD in Political Theory and Sociology at the University of West London.

We know people sit too much, particularly while at work. But how do you encourage an active workplace and people to ‘sit less and move more’ and is there a link between the lack of movement and the office itself? Indoor Positioning Systems (GPS for inside buildings) may be a useful tool to investigate the relationship between peoples’ movement and the physical environment of the office. However, there are questions around the accuracy of these systems, how much data is needed, and whether the data can be combined with other workplace data.

This session at the upcoming Workplace Trends Research Summit with Dr Brett Pollard of Hassell, presents the results of a 4-year research project, undertaken in a real-world office, that investigated whether Indoor Positioning Systems can be used to capture office workers’ movement behaviour and if there is a relationship between these behaviours and features of their office. Brett will show best practice techniques for using high resolution data streams to evaluate workplaces and promising opportunities to help people move more at work and be part of an active workplace.

Many people, especially office workers, sit for much of the day, with potentially serious consequences for their heath. This lack of movement was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially amongst those working from home and continues even after returning to the office. In response, the message from health authorities around the world is clear; ‘sit less and move more’. However, the effects of many interventions aimed at helping office workers to move more and sit less, quickly fade, or result in sitting being replaced with prolonged standing, which also has serious health impacts. A crucial step in the development of more effective, longer tasting interventions could be to locate where in the office movement behaviours occur and investigate the influence the office environment has on these behaviours. However, commonly used devices such as accelerometers provide limited, if any, location information, while surveys and observations only provide brief glimpses of location and are open to recall, observer and other biases.

In cities across the world, Global Positioning System (GPS), Wi-Fi and mobile phone data are increasing being used to study utilisation, travel patterns, movement behaviour and their relationship with the urban environment. However, GPS doesn’t work well inside buildings, Wi-Fi lacks the required accuracy and people don’t always carry their mobile phones while in the office.

Research from various disciplines suggests that Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) may be useful for investigating movement behaviours in the office environment. Yet little is known about the use of IPS in offices, including their accuracy, how they compare to accelerometers, data collection periods, and whether IPS data can be combined with spatial and environmental data.

Using data collected in a real-world office, this 4-year research project sought to answer two interrelated research questions: 1) Can IPS data be used to measure, analyse, and describe the movement behaviours of office workers in an open-plan office? and 2) Is there a relationship between these behaviours and the physical environment of the office?

The methods and results of this project provide much needed guidance for those considering the use of IPS and other high-resolution data to evaluate office workplaces and other indoor environments. The findings also show some unexpected links between office workers’ movement and features of their office. Links that could be harnessed to create offices that help people to move more while at work, creating an active workplace.

In this research project, six studies were conducted in a 1,220 m2 open-plan floor of a commercial office tower using multiple sources of high-resolution participant and environmental data. Data was collected from multiple groups of participants using an Indoor Positioning System and accelerometers while the environmental data were collected using Indoor Environment Quality sensors and a Spatial Metrics Calculator. The millions of individual data points were processed, analysed, and visualised using R, the Tidyverse and other R packages.

Find out the outcomes and recommendations from this project at the Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023 in London and online.

Dr Brett Pollard, Senior Researcher, Hassell

Brett Pollard is a Senior Researcher at the multidisciplinary design practice, Hassell. He is passionate about creating healthy places that have a positive impact for people and the planet. Brett also believes in the power of research and collaboration to create innovative solutions for complex problems.

He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Medicine and Heath at the University of Sydney, a Master of Design Science and is a registered Architect and Landscape Architect. Brett also promotes the social and environmental benefits of cycling, and has clocked up over 30,000km riding to and from work.

This innovative research, which will be presented at our upcoming Workplace Trends Research Summit on 19 April 2023, is based on a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) study of the Bristol Business School building – a flagship, largely open plan, space that aims to attract students, facilitate links with businesses and foster a collaborative space for staff to work together. The strategic aim of the building was that it should be ‘generative’ and was designed to link with the strategic vision: a building to support a community that is professionally engaged, vocationally relevant, internationally connected and academically strong.

Both core funders of this POE research project, ISG plc (construction) and Stride Treglown (architects) identified a need to undertake an original POE of the building in order to explore the user experience and use of the new space using a creative and innovative approach. Whilst more traditional POE approaches focus predominantly on the technical and functional performance of a building, they rarely gather detailed, subjective, in-depth data based on the user experience of the building. This POE research project fills this gap.

The project provides a nuanced, personal, emotional and sensory exploration of a flagship building, using modern visual methods: through the use of Instagram and participant-led photography.

The findings in this presentation emerge from an in-depth, user-centred, qualitative, sensory post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of a flagship building – Bristol Business School. The aim of the research was to investigate how the ethos of the building has impacted on user experiences of working, studying, and visiting it. Architecturally, the building provides considerable open, shared space not formally designated for particular activities. Walls and partitions are largely glass, with space arranged around a full height atrium, and central staircase affording expansive views through the building and the activities going on within it. This led us to question: How does a transparent, collaborative, flexible and open building affect working and studying practices? What influence does it have on users’ and is the building operating as predicted? (for example, has it been differently understood and/or experienced by users?). Traditional POE instruments do not gather this kind of information and so a secondary aim of the research was to experiment with visual and qualitative methodologies as effective vehicles for POE: What can we learn from this research that can help us develop and design buildings in the future? Only about 10% of our findings replicate areas covered by traditional POE, suggesting there is great utility in employing more qualitative approaches to POE guides.

Using innovative visual methods including Instagram, participant-led and participant-directed photography, alongside image-led discussion groups, data was collected over a full year cycle with over 250 participants contributing to the study; 30% staff, 60% students and 10% visitors. Building users were asked to submit photographs and captions of their spatial experiences in the building that addressed two simple questions:

• How are you using the building?
• How do you feel about the building?

The majority of users submitted their photographs and captions to the project team individually. Over 740 photographs were received in total.

In this presentation, I will be exploring how visual methods can tell us more about users’ lived experiences of a largely open plan workplace and will focus on findings from this research that centre, specifically, around visibility and transparency. Key findings highlight how open and expansive views afforded by glass are sometimes welcomed, but there is a need to balance visibility against individuals’ privacy when designing buildings of this kind. There are unintended effects of making work visible, and psychological and cultural implications arise from having bodies on display.

In order to unpack these findings, I will draw on research that examines the ‘glass cages and glass palaces’ of work (Gabriel, 2005), where open plan buildings such as these are so representative of present-day workplaces. The wider design narrative here is that openness and glass facades and huge atria speak of collaboration and togetherness and celebrating all that we do by putting it on display. Indeed, in the post-covid era, spaces for collaboration in the office are now considered by many a ‘must have’.  Yet, the findings in this research suggest a different experience for users, where continuous visibility and transparency can evoke feelings of exposure and insecurity.

So, what is the response to this unforgiving gaze and continuous exposure? What do people do in response to these open spaces? Here, our data highlights how users feel, but what happens next? Interestingly in our data, we see subtle forms of resistance in the face of all this. Our findings point towards matters concerning power, privacy, and personalisation, and specifically how users of the building seek refuge in corners, nooks, and crannies, and how these rather unorthodox hiding places take on a den-like quality, providing important sites for learning, reflection, and seclusion.

I explore this idea of seeking refuge and hiding places using previous research on privacy at work (Shortt, 2015), as well as Sobel’s work on den-making behaviour (2020), as a way of understanding users’ response to continuous exposure in open plan and the ongoing intimate relations that organisations insist on encouraging though their narratives of collaboration and transparency. This is presented through three key themes; secrecy, placemaking, and security, and questions – is den-making part of contemporary workplace spatial practice? and what does this mean for creating inclusive workplaces for the future?

Dr Harriet Shortt
Associate Professor in Organisation Studies, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England and
Head of Visual Engagement, Bibo Studios

Harriet is an academic, researcher, and workplace consultant in the field of spatial change and user experience. She has 17 years’ experience in researching and working with organisations exploring space, place, and the material world of work. She has expertise in qualitative research methods including visual, arts-based approaches to understanding user experiences of placemaking. She is often invited to comment on spatial change and working practices in the media and her research has been published in international journals and won awards for research excellence.

Harriet is passionate about user experiences of buildings, places, and facilities and believes that successful placemaking encompasses an awareness of cultural shifts, diverse needs, innovative communications, and a sympathetic understanding of people and their everyday lives.