What Is A Flexible Workplace?
A flexible office layout provides office workers with a variety of choices regarding where and how they get their work done. Whether you need to work privately, require group collaboration, need a formal or informal meeting, flexible workspaces can adapt to your requirements. Rather than permanent desks, people can reserve a hot desk and come into the office and plug in when they need to.
A concurrent trend of the “hotelisation” of office spaces—where more home comforts like soft furnishing and real planting have been imported into the interior design to make spaces feel more comfortable and homely—is helpful in a post-pandemic world. Interior fittings such as suspended room dividers, desk dividers, shelving and other furniture subtly creates a physical separation between people.
What Are The Benefits Of A Flexible Workspace?
An Opportunity To Increase Productivity
A shocking statistic from McKinsey’s in its recent research showed that 45% of employees reported working more productively when working remotely during the pandemic than when in the office. There will be many reasons for this, but we know for a fact that excessive noise in an open plan office is one of them. Excessive noise increases stress levels by 27% and decreases employee focus by 48%. Alongside controlled lighting and temperature, a flexible workplace has controlled noise levels and privacy to optimise the atmosphere for comfort and productivity.
A Way To Facilitate Hybrid Working
For many companies, hybrid working is here to stay. At the beginning of 2020, only 5% of work hours in America were spent at home. By spring 2020 this had risen to 60% and as at October 2021, that figure was still at 40%. A study across six countries shows that whilst 44% of senior executives want to get back to the office full time, only 17% of their staff wanted to. It is clear that companies are going to have do more to entice their workers back in.
Fostering A Culture of Sustainability
Companies who adopt flexible offices and accommodate hybrid working are provided with an opportunity to downsize, saving money with a smaller real estate footprint and requiring less energy for lighting, heating, and cooling.
‘Today’s multipurpose building interiors are vibrant, fluid spaces designed to change their form and function to suit the occupants — one minute a zone for focus, the next an open space for collaboration. With this kind of fluidity in mind, Rockfon set out to design solutions for today’s multipurpose interiors. Taking a holistic design approach, we wanted to incorporate future flexibility so that our solutions could be continually updated to address new trends, functionality or occupant needs,’ said Jesper Wolff, Product Design Manager at Rockfon.
