The Future of the Modern Workplace

Written by Holtby Turner

Charlotte Murdoch, Director of York Street, explores how modern workplace design impacts employee loyalty during a round-table discussion with our panel of experts: Jeremy Myerson, leading academic and Founder of The WORKTECH Academy, Liz Close of Generate Studio who is responsible for some of London’s most innovative workspace designs, and SKY’s Neil Usher who has recently unveiled Sky Central.

Charlotte Murdoch: By general consensus it seems that the tech world is largely responsible for our modern fascination with workplace design. Can the same creative principles be applied to every industry and sector?

Liz Close: The modern workplaces that we design at Generate Studio are more and more about the spaces that aren’t the desk; so it’s about the places that you offer which are outside your traditional working model. The principles are common, but the application and design can vary enormously – whether that’s a young tech startup who want a ball pit, or someone like our partners Workspace Group, who opted for libraries and quiet zones.

“When designing it’s about being sure that you’re listening to exactly what your customer wants, because you can’t force everyone into the same model: it doesn’t work” – Liz Close, Generate Studio

Jeremy Myerson: This relationship between loyalty and workplace design is very interesting because if you look historically, offices were not a reward for employees, they were functional places of administration. What’s happened in the last 15 years is the evolution of the networked office, where the clerical work has been largely eliminated or computerised and replaced with digital knowledge work. You don’t necessarily need to be in the office for digital knowledge work, so the workplace has become much more of a destination: a social landscape, incorporating the different elements you’d expect from a social landscape, with more emphasis on cafes and public areas, shared work spaces, team rooms and break out areas.

“I think the relationship between office design and loyalty is quite a strong one, as the perks of modern office design can be used to generate loyalty.” – Jeremy Myerson, The WORKTECH Academy 

Charlotte Murdoch: In his recent opinion piece on Forbes.com, entitled ‘Why Are Millennials So Hard To Manage?’ millennial and startup founder Chris Myers of BodeTree suggested that modern workplace design encourages narcissism and entitlement among millennials. Do you agree with this sentiment?

Neil Usher: There’s something very important going on here that nobody’s talking about, which is that these days you’re productive the moment you walk in the door. If you think about the jobs people did many years ago, it took them quite a while to get to know systems and processes. But with the technology we have today, it’s actually much easier to move between jobs, because you can be productive pretty much the day you arrive … and we’re seeing the benefits of that already at Sky Central when people walk through the door.

“People and their skills are much more portable, and it seems misplaced to blame the workplace for that. Modern workplace design is a tool for attraction and retention.” – Neil Usher, SKY 

Jeremy Myerson: I don’t think modern workplace design is responsible for undermining loyalty in the workplace. It’s part of a bigger cultural ecosystem which has all kinds of factors and fault lines. Employees today define themselves by their knowledge and expertise, whereas forty years ago they would have identified themselves with the brand of whichever company they worked for. People don’t do that anymore – they talk about their knowledge, and that’s portable.

“It’s a very 20th century thing to have loyalty to one employer: these days your loyalty is to yourself and to your own expertise. You’ll go wherever you can get the best training and mentoring experience – not simply the best coffee.” – Jeremy Myerson, The WORKTECH Academy 

Charlotte Murdoch: Looking to the future, what is the next significant change with regard to workplace design which might help employers engender this loyalty that they’re after?

Jeremy Myerson: I envision there will be more sophisticated co-design processes. Participatory design is well-evolved in things like community development, consumer goods development, and other forms of interiors, but it’s not been well-evolved in workplace. With new tools and techniques, gathering information and feedback, I believe the soft sciences are going to become really important in workplace design over the next few years.

Neil Usher: We used to think of particular spaces performing particular functions, whether that was retail or leisure or residential. But what I see beginning to happen now is that we view space more as a whole – so in the future if you’re asked to design a boutique hotel one week and someone’s house the next, you won’t work from a different model, you’ll just approach it as space. I think those boundaries will continue to erode, until we just think of workplace in flexible terms and can perform multiple functions in that space.

Liz Close: My hope for the future is less waste in design and more thought put into the longevity of what we’re creating. I agree with Neil’s point about thinking about the whole space, but it’s thinking about the whole lifetime of it, too. That requires real awareness of the impact your designs have on the planet. It’s something I hope future designers and employees will be seriously mindful about.

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