Is your office hybrid ready?

There seems to be a lot of hype and misunderstanding as to how create a workplace that is supportive of more flexible, or hybrid ways of working.

Having been involved in designing these spaces since 1998 I wanted to cut through what some people have been hyping as new design principles.

There are three basic areas that need to be aligned, the rest can fall into place over time.

It also doesn’t mean you have to completely renovate your offices either, many can be modified to support hybrid working through some carefully selected and cost effective interventions.

The benefits of a properly designed workplace not only helps your employees be productive through a configuration of work settings aligned to activities, but it also helps knowledge exchange, collaboration, culture alignment and in attracting and retaining your employees.

I’ve written previously about how and why hybrid working changes the design of the traditional office: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hybrid-working-how-why-changes-your-office-design-david-george/

Our experience has shown that organizations are most successful in adapting to more flexible operating models when their approach is tailored to their business, and their workplace configured to suit.

Some of the largest architect firms have wandered into the field of workplace consulting recently, where I've seen them deploy 'cookie cutter' solutions; these may look great, and indeed many do, but they're not aligned to work processes, therefore they won't enable productivity (and the other benefits I mentioned above) and after an initial interest in the new finishes, occupancy will not be optimized over the longer term as the space just doesn't 'work'. I've see this too many times.

Just because software company A, or finance company B have created funky new workplaces that look like a furniture dealers showroom, doesn't mean that it is successful in use for flexible working. And even if their design does work for them, it is highly unlikely it will work for another company as it will be based of different work processes, services, desired outcomes, technology, team sizes and collaborations needs, demographics and culture etc.

So, to cut through all of this nonsense we’ve created a free workplace assessment scorecard that will score your existing office design to see how well suited it is for hybrid working.

It'll also identify areas for improvement.

You’ll get your results instantly, and a more comprehensive PDF will be emailed to you as well.

You can find it here: https://isyourofficehybridready.scoreapp.com/