Office Layout Challenges
Your office contains huge swathes of empty desks yet your meeting rooms are always crowded. Except, maybe your meeting rooms aren’t crowded, because your staff don't come into the office at all.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Many professional service firms are grappling with the limitations of a traditional office design. In a world where effective teamwork is paramount and global communication is standard, a traditional office design is obsolete. If your office design hasn’t changed to keep up, you will either have space utilisation issues, or your people won't come into the office because it doesn’t meet their needs.
This is where agile office design comes in. Agile workspace design promises to boost collaboration, maximise productivity, and optimise real estate ROI. But is it really as good as that?
As always, it depends. Agile office design is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The impact agile design could have on your organisation depends on your current design, as well as your culture and the way your people work. Understanding the nuances of agile working is crucial to making it work at your company.
As a leading workspace design & build company, we’ve created numerous agile workspaces in recent years. We’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and what nuances impact the success of agile design. Today, we’ll share our hard-earned expertise on the top benefits and drawbacks of agile office design, why they matter, and how to manage them. By the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of agile working and how to apply it successfully at your company.
Benefits of Agile Office Design
Enhanced Collaboration
Collaboration spaces feature heavily in agile office environments. This promotes communication and teamwork, improving your culture and reducing alignment issues. Research shows that companies with highly collaborative cultures are 500% more likely to be high-performing.
To enhance collaboration in your agile office design, create shared spaces such as huddle areas, informal breakout zones, and hybrid meeting spaces. Rather than look at best practices or your designer’s portfolio, you need to understand how your people work in teams, and then create spaces to support that.
Increased Flexibility
Agile workspaces are designed to be flexible according to the changing needs of your people and company. This enables your workspace to adapt seamlessly depending on team sizes, project needs, and work styles. This will also have the benefit of improving staff engagement. Deloitte reports that 70% of employees value flexibility in their workspace.
For an agile workspace that maximises flexibility, you should make your space as customisable as possible for you people. Common ways to do this include the use of modular furniture, movable partitions, and multi-function spaces.
Better Space Utilisation
With a focus on creating a workspace that matches the way you people work, an effective agile office design can be far more efficient, reducing the amount of office space you need to lease. In traditional office designs, desks are unoccupied 40-60% of the time, creating significant waste. Agile eliminates this.
Agile office design isnt necessarily about introducing hot desking – though a good agile design often does. It’s about analysing your company and your people to understand how they work and then creating spaces that reflects and enhances that – creating a space that works for your people, not against them.
Improved Employee Wellbeing
As part of creating a space bespoke to the needs of your company and staff, agile offices prioritise comfort and promote movement. This leads to improved employee satisfaction. As a result, your people will perform better. Healthier, happier employees are 12% more productive, according to Oxford University research.
To ensure your agile office design improves the wellbeing of your people, make sure you use the available natural light effectively. fresh air and biophilic design elements are also important. To learn more, read 9 Ways to Improve Workplace Wellbeing with Office Design.
Future-Proofing
Even taking into account all the previous factors, it’s not enough for your office to be designed for how your people work today. You also need to consider how they will work 3,5, and 10 years from now. Otherwise, your workspace will become obsolete, leading to reduced staff performance.
The first step to creating a future-ready office design is to consider your company’s overall strategy and the impact it will have on how your staff work in the years to come. You’ll also need to make it as flexible, as it’s not possible to accurately predict the future.
Drawbacks of Agile Office Design
Potential for Distractions
One of the biggest challenges of improved collaboration in workspaces is avoiding an increase in staff distractions. While teamwork is very productive, increased “talk time” can often lead to a loss of focus. Research shows workplace distractions can lower productivity by up to 40%.
However, this doesn’t mean distractions are an inevitable side effect of agile office design. By designing enough focussed working spaces in your office, you can ensure that your people have somewhere to go when they need to be alone. Common examples of quiet spaces include soundproof pods, bookable offices, and quiet lounges.
Lack of Personal Space
As a combined effect of more shared spaces and hot-desking, some staff may feel they lack personal space at work, leading to a lack of ownership and engagement with your office. This will lead to a decrease in job satisfaction and even productivity.
Just because your people may not have their own desk, it doesn’t mean they can’t make the space their own. By implementing a customisable design, you will enable them to shape their environment according to their needs. Lockers and personal storage can also be used to store staff belongings.
Staff Resistance to Change
The final common drawback of agile working that our clients often encounter is that their people are very wary of agile working and the change that it involves. Agile working can be a big change for your staff, and some may take time to adapt. However, low initial adoption could undermine the long-term benefits of agile working.
To ensure that you manage this effectively, you should take a change-management approach to the project. This will help your staff become more positive about and receptive to the change that agile working will involve. To learn more, read 6 Steps to Successful Change Management in Office Fit Out.
Is Agile Office Design Right for You?
An agile workspace can transform your office from an inflexible and stifling traditional environment to a flexible and collaborative environment that drives productivity, staff satisfaction, and company performance. By understanding its benefits, such as improved flexibility and space utilisation, and addressing potential challenges like distractions or resistance to change, you can make informed decisions that align with your business goals. As a result, you can ensure that agile design is a success at your company.
Ready to take the next step? Then download the only guide you’ll ever need to office design. There, you’ll learn everything you need to know about office design before you reach out to an office designer. Download your Definitive Office Design Guide here. To learn more about agile design, read Breaking Down Agile Working: Definitions, Principles, and Practices.
